Hebrews 1:5

This is the second post sourced from the translation of the NT into Hebrew in the mid-19th century cantillated by Ezekiel Margoliouth. You can find it here.

Hebrews 1:5 

For to whom among the messengers did he ever say, My son you are. I today have given birth to you.
And further, I will be to him a father, and he will be to me a son.

The NT has no embedded music in the Greek. Many cantillations have been used of course for gospel readings, but it is uncommon in the churches. The Psalm that the text quotes here is expressed with music in the Hebrew of the Tanach. In the Tanach, it uses the poetic te'amim. Margoliouth of course uses the prose accents as he reports verse 7 of the poem. I expect that he never uses the poetic accents at all. Here is the tri-colon from the Psalter:

Psalm 2:7

The use of this verse raises a lot of questions. When it was written, the world worked the same way it works today - rich and poor, coercion of empires, excessive taxation, and so on. Whether the time of the exile or earlier, or the time of Jesus, or today, the human condition, for all the generosity of God, is a mess. The king of psalm 2 is part of the mess. His throne was not a cross. So: Hebrews quotes Psalm 2 not to import its old royal ideology into Christology, but to expose how that ideology collapses in the face of the incarnation, and what remains is the pure divine address to the Son who suffered as the world suffers under the turmoil of competing kingdoms. But that's to get ahead of the homily.

By the way, it seems to me that the whole question of pre-existence must be reframed, time being what it is, that fourth dimension of reality in which we are caught by the second law of thermodynamics. The eternal Son is clearly outside of time, present to our faces as creator, as much as present to any other era before or to come. Did they know, were they known, do we know, are we known? Of course. How else could they (the ancients who wrote Tanach) write of their love on our behalf who now inhabit the globe? 

In Proverbs 8 before the foundation of the world, Wisdom says: In the establishing of the heavens, there am I, when he engraved the ambit on the face of the abyss. And a few verses later, the same voice presents itself present לפניו (lpniv). This is a word whose root we have already encountered in the first few words of this epistle.

Proverbs 8:30-31 Wisdom gamboling with the children of humanity

God is present to us today, yesterday, and forever.

In this step I evoke Proverbs 8, a chapter I arranged to its music which you may be able to process more directly, though mechanically, in my oratorio, Unleashing Leviathan, here.

To repeat, 'before the foundation of the world' (this is not my translation -- discordant with respect to glossing, but not inaccurate as to intent or paraphrase), 

Proverbs 8:22

Wisdom says:

Proverbs 8:27

And a few verses later, the same voice presents itself as present לפניו (lpniv) a word whose root we have already encountered in the first few words of this epistle. Wisdom - face to face with God, without giving a timeline is gamboling in the world of his earth, reveling with the children of humanity.

This Christ who is our Wisdom -- according to Paul somewhere (1 Corinthians -- must read this someday) -- Yes, I identify Christ with the Wisdom of Proverbs 8. Christ and Wisdom share function and identity: creative agency, presence, delight, engagement with humanity, there they are before the ordering or foundation of the world.

You will note I write Christ and not Jesus. In these two words I separate the human lifetime, bound by entropy, from the divine unbound presence. Remember God is spirit, the One who is, who was, and who is to come. It's not a matter of counting three coins in a fountain. The same Spirit still broods over the turmoil of the waters. And we have this treasure in clay vessels.

Full circle

It is the same me from 20 years ago when this now octogenarian programmer attended a conference on Christian Theology and the Epistle to the Hebrews in St Andrews Scotland. I was full of structuralism seen by recurring words and their patterns of chiasm and so on. I had diagrammed Hebrews in multiple colours -- so proud, and a tad more or less ignorant than I am now. 

Oh I had diagrams!

My top level diagram of Hebrew from 2005 or so

Each part with a diagram symbol points to a subdiagram (not implemented in this static image). I used a proprietary diagramming tool for translation of the psalms one word at a time. Pretty, but slow self-teaching on many fronts.

I don't yet know what words I will use to express this homily today. It is probably wise for me to use slow consideration of the theology in the use of words to convey the creator and sustainer of our life.

M. C. Escher

I hope to get through the 19th century text of Hebrews as typed by the vine of David and available here.  Having already seen errors in the typing of qadma and pashta, I will have to check the photocopies of the original at times of doubt. The first four verses are in the previous post together with the music that has been composed with the text by Margoliouth using the prose te'amim of the Tanach. I had never heard of the music 20 years ago even though I remember a conversation about variable recitation notes in the '70s or '80s.

I still have to work to read these tongues that are so foreign to my ear. Have fun reading as we try to see how the 19th century Hebrew mind reads the Greek of the New Testament through my 21st century failing eyes.

Perhaps we are all an inside-outside Escher print made of one spinning electron everywhere and everywhen at once creating our own simulation of an imaginary reality in which we become flesh. (Is this an argument for letting children play video games? In the 19th century we were machines, in the 20th programmed machines, in the 21st, quantum decision makers composed of heavy wave-forms called particles, weighing down the universe together.)

I am having quite a time running my translations through first my own concordant data base (remembering how to bootstrap a new chapter) and then discussing the theological implications of translation with ChatGPT. It summarized my opinions and the difficulty for concordance quite accurately. Some words are unchanged over 3000 years, others not so simple. I have found all my notes and essays going back to the 1990s and leading up to the Hebrews conference in 2006. I wonder how I would read them today. Perhaps I will put the odd one on the blog.

And perhaps not. It was the beginning of the path and I don't discount it: In 2005 I worked directly from the Greek text using traditional commentaries like Vanhoye (above diagram) as my interpretive frame. Today I begin to read from a very different stance, having translated the Tanach and written books on the music and particularly the psalms. At the conference, I heard a voice saying -- how can you speak of me when you do not know my language? So today, a Hebrew philology underpins my considerations. I must now read Hebrews as a reader of the Hebrew Bible.

In 2006, I heard the theologians and Biblical Studies folks arguing tooth and nail in the classroom, voices raised but not in music, and I enjoyed the £1 Oban scotches in the University pub. What will be the bias in my approach today?

Hebrews 1:1-4 from the Hebrew of Ezekiel Margoliouth

You might not have been expecting this. In the mid-1800s, Ezekiel Margoliouth revised an earlier Hebrew New Testament and added cantillation (See here for the information on Hebrew translations of the New Testament).

In this post I have put the first four verses of the Epistle to the Hebrews into my database as an experiment in translating from the Hebrew into English. I have conformed the translation to the concordance rules I used for my translation of Tanach. I am curious as to how the Hebrew works for me, and how the cantillation patterns compare with those of Tanach.

(Please see earlier posts like this one if you are not aware of the deciphering key I am using. Basically, the accents under the text map consistently and unambiguously to a diatonic scale. Each one defines the recitation pitch until the next one is seen. The accents over the text define ornamentation relative to the current recitation pitch. The entire Hebrew Bible is a love song.)

         Hebrews 1:1 In diverse modes and in several ways, spoke God present to our ancestors through the prophets,

Cantillation: The music in the first verse has no atnah. There is a breath invited, but no mid-verse cadence on the subdominant, A. The composer immediately goes beyond pure announcement to a heightened emotion on the C. The remainder of the phrase leading to the tonic seems typical but it isn't. Only two verses in Tanach end with e c d e g# e (silluq-darga-tevir-silluq-tifha-silluq). 

If we eliminate the tonic (silluq), 361 verses end with c d g# e. The same additional metegs (a mark identical to the tonic silluq but applying to pronunciation and not to the music) interfere with the melodic line as I have pointed out before. There is of course no earlier or later version to compare with, so I suggest that the metegs be ignored (if you can tell the difference between silluq and meteg -- difficult since they are the same mark). Just continue on the preceding recitation note. So the tonic, e, in bar 4 is likely not needed and should continue on the B until the last syllable of elohim. 

Translation: Curious that pnh (bold words are in SimHebrew - a transcription that is reversible between square text and Roman characters) in the form lpnim (bar 5-6) glossed above as present is also the word for face, and the preposition before. Hebrew like English can use this word in both a spatial and a temporal sense. I'm told the Greek πάλαι is purely temporal. 

Theological-scientific-aside: The Hebrew language can sense the wholeness of space-time. Corner is also a gloss for pnh. Remember that song -- 'you in your small corner' -- a place in space-time where we face things.

Hebrews 1:2 and in these last days he has spoken to us through the son whom he set to possess the whole,
by means of whom he made also the aeons,

they look like qadma

C: The music is typical except for the typing of the accents in bar 3 which should, I think, be pashta rather than qadma, so slurred C-D-C-D rather than D-C-D-C as is written above. A double qadma occurs only twice in Tanach - Deuteronomy 12:30 and Esther 3:13. The closing contour, A, B, g#, f, e is used over 800 times in the prose sections of Tanach. The last three notes (g, f, e) are used over 8,000 times in the prose, only twice in the poetry. Margoliouth will not have used poetic te'amim at all in the NT.

T: This son is without an article in the Greek, so the word seems indefinite but the role of the son is clarified. In Greek the lack of an article says: pay attention, you do not know of whom you are hearing yet. In the Hebrew, the translator has included the article (בַּבֵּ֔ן). So the English from the Hebrew reads the son. You may capitalize son if you like. Jesus is our peer. Will we become his?

What is Hebrew teaching about the nature of that word aeon (הָעוֹלָמִים) that is derived from what is hidden or obscure, (one of several senses of עלם)? English aeon is directly derived from the Greek of this verse τοὺς αἰῶνας (tous aiōnas). I am reminded of Qohelet 3:11.

The whole he has made beautiful in its time, even the obscurity (עלם )he has given in their heart without which the human would not find out the doings that this God has done from beginning and to conclusion.

I find this verse from Qohelet positive, even foundational for science. The human is motivated to find out. And we can do it -- see the Webb telescope for instance. As a colleague in conversation put it: "The verse affirms a God-given impulse to investigate, to probe creation in reverence. The Webb telescope is, in that sense, a part of Qohelet’s fulfillment -- humanity gazing further into the aeons, haʿolamim (the hidden ages)."

Aside: So it is that we now can look back in time ourselves. This is a concept we could not have understood without special relativity.

Returning to the third and fourth verses of Hebrews 1. 

Hebrews 1:3 in that he is the brilliance of his glory and the image of his being, lifting up the whole by his prevailing word,
as he achieved in himself the acquittal from our sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Greatness of the heights; 

C: Tarsin (the shake in bar1) is followed by munach, high C (as in bar 2), 608 times in the Hebrew canon. Eighteen verses begin with telisha-gedola followed by tarsin with the tonic as reciting pitch followed by the dominant as reciting pitch (munach).

These are the first four verses I have looked at with cantillation in the NT, so I have no idea how often this particular composer uses this motif. Of course, he would not recognize the trope that I use. And I do not understand the thought process underpinning the music of the trope in ancient times. All I know is that the deciphering key that I use -- developed in the last century by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura -- makes the trope much more transparent to me as a musician than any other rendition I have heard.

T: Brilliance (zhr) is a late word used rarely in Tanach, twice in Daniel and once in Ezekiel. In himself is the word for bones. This is another flexible Hebrew stem with several senses and uses. (The link is to the concordance where you can find all my translation choices, Hebrew roots and glosses.) Hebrew commonly uses עֶצֶם (yxm) metaphorically for essence or selfhood.

Hebrews 1:4 and thus he became a goodness beyond that of the messengers,
in proportion to how he came to possess a name surpassing above theirs.

C: The contour of the music of verse 4 to the atnah (bar 5) is shared by 811 verses. The contour is unique from the atnah to the final e. 14 verses (in Tanach) share the last 6 bars in shape. 75 verses share the last 5 bars. 284 verses share the shape of the last 4 bars. 

T: In Hebrews 1:4, I want to recall the good of Genesis 1. Genesis 1 never says the word better. I tend to follow the French Proverb: Le meilleure est l'ennemie du bon. The sentence in these four verses is a concise statement of how God in Christ bears the good of creation. 

Theological reflection: As the Son, Jesus speaks to us of the will of God to mercy and compassion towards others. Modern physics reminds us that we inhabit a reality marked by openness rather than mechanical certainty, a kind of cloud of unknowing in which choices matter. Yet this indeterminate world is upheld, lifted up, by the prevailing (gbr) word, the valiant child who gave himself for the life of the world (ylm). (cf. Job 3 -- Perish! day when I was born, and the night promising pregnancy of a valiant (gbr) child.) The phrase (hrh gbr) in Job is unique in Tanach.

If so, the question is whether we grow into the responsibility that belongs to the ages (ylmim) to come. Participation rather than domination seems to be the mode of this rule. And you will remember that 'only sign', Jonah. His story asks whether we are willing to share in that mercy, or whether we resist the generosity by which God keeps the world alive.

AI and blogging

 AI is useful but there are caveats -- not just because LLMs run on probabilities. The caveats are in the prompts that the user generates. The engine running the AI seems to want to captivate the user by reflecting their knowledge. I have turned off the 'would you like me to do this further step' with the explicit prompt that it is failing to give me time to absorb the answer to the prior question. I have also turned off the complimentary beginnings with an explicit prompt. I know my own questions whether they are smart or dumb -- I'm looking for information not affirmation. It's useful to have the extensive spell checking and occasionally the structural criticism, but the affirmation and invitation to more defeat the refinement of questioning. We must refine our own questions to whet our wit if we have any left.

ChatGPT knows nothing, but it has memory of my theoretical and practical framework for the work of analysing the music of Tanach. Its memory is not particularly well grounded. It cannot search the database for me but it can critique bad and incomplete reasoning if it is instructed to. 

Here is its critique of how to approach my thesis - that the music is important for understanding.

1. Starting Point — Framing the Problem

Your real subject isn’t fear and punishment; it’s the misreading of biblical and theological language that arises when music, syntax, and emotion are divorced from one another. “Fear” and “punishment” are only symptoms of that rupture.

• Suggestion: Begin instead from a musical or philological observation — for example:

  “In the music of the Hebrew Bible, correction and mercy share a tonal space that translation has too often flattened into punishment and fear.”
  This kind of opening signals that you’re doing a reconstruction of meaning through sound, not a moral or pastoral reflection.

---

2. Analytical Rigor

Your writing is rich and intuitive, but at times it reads as associative rather than deductive. For scholarly framing:

• Distinguish between philological claims (e.g., the range of Hebrew y-s-r and its te’amic setting) and theological interpretation (e.g., what that reveals about divine pedagogy).

• Make sure every interpretive statement follows from data: a musical phrase, a Hebrew semantic field, a codical variation, etc.

---

3. Use of Evidence

When you critique translation or inherited theology, give concrete examples:

• Show how musar or yissurim are rendered musically in one verse versus another.

• Compare this to English versions that erase nuance.

• This moves your argument from assertion to demonstration.

---

4. Emotional Register

You have a gift for affective language — “libation of love,” “Playful Wisdom,” etc. It works beautifully when used sparingly, but when it leads the argument it can seem like devotion rather than scholarship.

• Consider balancing poetic intuition with analytical scaffolding: let the music “speak” the emotion, and your prose interpret why it does so.

---

5. Reframed Core Question

Here’s how I might restate your underlying thesis in academic form:

How have translation and theological tradition obscured the pedagogical, musical, and affective coherence of the Hebrew Bible’s language of correction, and how might its original tonal and modal contexts reveal a different theology of formation rather than punishment?

That keeps your insight intact but grounds it in method and evidence.

When we next spoke about NT passages reflecting creation, I pointed out the Hebrews passages about fear and about discipline. Here's its response as a framework. 

1. Start with creation language and motifs — places where the NT deliberately re-echoes Genesis or new-creation imagery:

   • John 1:1–5 — In the beginning; the Logos as creative word and light.

   • Colossians 1:15–20 — Christ as firstborn of creation and firstborn from the dead, holding all things together (your tonal metaphor fits this perfectly).

   • 2 Corinthians 4:6 — “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts…”

   • Revelation 21–22 — the re-creation of heaven and earth, the harmony of all things renewed.

2. Look for passages where correction or discipline is framed not as punishment but as formative participation in that creative process — the positive harmonic tension:

   • Hebrews 12:5-11 — God’s discipline as education (paideia), not retribution.

   • James 1:2-4, 17-18 — testing as refining, every good gift as from the Father of lights.

   • Ephesians 2:10 — “We are his workmanship (poiēma), created in Christ Jesus…”
     These suggest an ongoing creation, a melodic continuation rather than a break.

3. Then listen for musical equivalents — words or phrases that carry a tonal or rhythmic sense:

   • Harmony, fullness, plērōma (Eph 1:10, Col 1:19).

   • Peace, shalom, eirēnē — the resolution of dissonance (Phil 4:7).

   • Joy, chara — often tied to completion or the recognition of divine order (John 15:11).

You could treat these as tonic–subdominant–dominant–tonic moments in theological thought:

• Creation (tonic) – God’s initiating act.

• Discipline/learning (subdominant) – movement and tension.

• Fulfilment in Christ (dominant) – the leading tone toward resolution.

• New creation (tonic again) – harmony restored on a higher level.

If you read the NT through that lens, the “opening major triad” of Genesis becomes a through-line — the same divine chord heard now through a human instrument.

Ha -- give me another 20 years and I should refine the te'amim of Margoliouth -- now that's a project for a cantillation specialist.

The theological negative

I was a singer for many years, and I was often tense as I held my music in concert. The music would gradually get higher and higher in my hands, until a friendly soprano next to me would push it down slightly and say, "Relax." Well, it's easier said than done, but I do love her and will never forget her gentle correction. I was raised with a stick as a singer. I would be punished by the priest if I sang a wrong note. It's a wonder I ever sang. But the singer in me won out for a good while. I never resolved all the tension.

The priest in question was himself a product of centuries of distortion. Part of his problem was that he had studied the King James translation of the Bible, replete with its notion of punishment. He inherited both the theology of fear and the abuse it perpetuates. His punishments were more deeply wrong than I will describe. And he forgot that he was not supposed to be the one to deliver it, -- whether we call it chastisement, or correction, or tutoring, or mentoring, all of which are glosses that bear a closer sense of the sound of the Hebrew stem.

I have reported before that there is no Hebrew stem that demands punish as a gloss, e.g. here and here and here and over seventy other places. Look at Leviticus 26. Don't imagine that there are no consequences to running off the rails. There are plenty of consequences, but listen: 

  

Leviticus 26:29 imitating the opening of Genesis. 

Genesis begins with the same E-major rising triad -- all this instruction and learning is part of being created.

The whole of Leviticus 26 is a complex of logic, and at every painful step, God walks with the people of this covenant even in their contrariness. To have God walking with you is not punishment, it is the consequence of covenant -- and  of presence. When people translate, they move rapidly from one thought to another, and may well fail, even in committee, to critique the move from cause to consequence, -- or worse, from cause to the supposed cure. 

How well does this fit with the New Testament promises? Perfect love casts out fear. The one who was before Abraham said: I am with you to the end of the age -- not to indulge your foolishness, but to keep you in all things because I cherish you. Well, I am paraphrasing of course -- and from distant memories of the NT.

We watched a live performance of E.T. the other day. (Film + live orchestra.) I heard it from one of the violinists that it is an impossible-to-read score -- no key signature, but every note with accidentals, and often spelled differently. It was a moving performance. The Bible also has no key signature.

Eschaton

Come and play!

I don't feed my dog mud. Sometimes he thinks he's a cow and eats grass.

Up the hill.

The dog really isn't mine, but my son's. This dog is keeping me alive. To keep me alive isn't mine either. That belongs to doG.

When my son is busy, Delta forces me to get out and walk. I didn't have a dog for nearly 70 years. Now he comes into my living room, pushes me out of my chair, and pulls me up the hill to see the beauty and give him some time off leash on the rocks. 

In my country and neighborhood, there are many dogs and owners out every day walking their pets. I can't remember all their names. They are all loved and loving.

Our attitudes to the domestic canis are different from the epithets about them thrown about in ancient literature like the Bible.

Dogs do more than "eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table". I am past the time of scrambling on the rocks at my age. But I do occasionally descend the steeper slope, though not with the speed that I will take you down my rocky thoughts in this post.

I have been pondering for at least two days a seven-part sequence I dreamt up as I awoke -- on Friday, Halloween, was it? My thoughts were stimulated by the juxtaposition of the Amalek incident noted in 2 Samuel 1 with the Elegy over the death of Saul and Jonathan later in the chapter.

I wondered, remembering first the traditional 'Amalek as the evil inclination', whom David, the not-yet-king, had commanded to be put down like a dog by one of his company. How can I pick my way down this slope from this summary execution to the music of the elegy, one of the most moving performances I have yet heard of the biblical music. From sin to death to the beauty of sorrow. 

(Excuse me, there is a slight whine at my door. It is Saturday morning and Delta is hoping for a fried egg for breakfast, a weekly treat. After a little coaxing, he settled and waited patiently for his "more than crumbs".)

Amalek was a problem to Saul. He failed (see 1 Samuel 15) and was he not one of the prophets, as they say? Did he not know the love of God? The Amalekite soldier who killed Saul was caught with spoil, just as the people and Saul were caught when they had pity on Agag. Neither convenient decision was good.

I doubt frankly whether I would have got on well with David or any other local dogs of the time. I suspect that in David's world, the dog was a local scavenger. The Amalekite is not called a dog, but the giant whom David slew asked -- Am I a dog? Amalek has not become a famous insult like the common use of Philistine today. Amalek is to be entirely wiped out. 

Deuteronomy 25 with the instruction to erase the memorial of Amalek

The raw juxtaposition of the Amalekite with the Elegy is a jarring episode in the exposed character of the human, but the Amalekite while claiming the title of guest, is given away by the loot in his hands, the consecrated thing that was on Saul's head and the armlet. The result is his immediate execution. David himself had refused to touch the Lord's Anointed more than once.

The act that condemns the one who claimed to be a 'guest'

Then follows some of the most touching music in the Scripture all of it as always, embedded in the te'amim, the cantillation accents in the text. You can hear it sung here.

The last few verses of David's elegy over the death of Saul and Jonathan

Amalek is not ignored in the Hebrew tradition nor is the problem of pragmatism with respect to human life. Is the evil inclination necessary for life? I wonder whether we can see such discussions as supporting what the apostle Paul calls in Greek, 'the flesh'. Self-interest and self-service, convenient pragmatism is inside all of us, the archetype of the flesh, the adversary of the brooding Spirit.

The New Testament verse that I hear within this analogue is, as you may have guessed, from Romans 8: If you by the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. I take this as singular even though the tenses are plural. This death is the singularity in the centre of my galaxy. 

What does it do for us? In a word, we are to consider ourselves dead with Christ so that we can be alive with him in the new resurrected life that has already begun. When we discover this, the redemption works backward in time and reveals to us life in ways we would never have imagined. Of course, it is not without cost. As Amalek is to be entirely wiped out, so all our convenience and our desires are to be put to death in the death of Christ. This death is anticipated in Scripture in the word libation, a pouring out of love. The music for the pouring out from before the foundation of the world (Proverbs 8:23), is a slow descending scale to the tonic from the third, g f#, e. Yahweh bought me, the beginning of his way, preceding his work from then. From everlasting I have offered libation from the beginning, out of the precedents of earth. 

 Proverbs 8:22-23 Wisdom purchased, Anticipation of Sacrifice.

Years ago, we had the film Apocalypse Now. My thought shortly after in 1980 was Apocalypse Then. I wrote and wrote under this title in the infancy of the internet, a book I have withdrawn, even illustrating it with art I should not have spent toner on.

As far as I could see in all dimensions, the end of time was in the middle. I don't separate Now and Then -- the self-giving of Christ Jesus, the costly purchase, a libation of love, and Playful Wisdom in the shape of a dog disturbing my complacency: Come and play. Rise up, my love, my fair one -- to the hill.

In the words of George Herbert, Easter:

Can there be any day but this? We count three hundred, but we miss, there is but one and that one ever.