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 defeats 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Margoulith -- 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.

Before the beginning

Can there be any before with respect to the beginning? 

The problem is time. Who understands it? 

I will not attempt to explain time dilation, or time as an emergent property of matter in motion. It has been over 60 years since I studied special relativity, and the dilation of time made those classes light up the world for me week after week. (Pun intended). I then wrote for my Literature class a paper on Time and Space in Paradise Lost. I still have that somewhere, lost in storage. It was the longest essay I had ever written up to that point, filled with images. Milton writes:

The cosmic microwave background
(NASA image – a map of the universe).

"This pendant world, in bigness as a star," hanging by a chain from heaven (an idea that Milton borrowed from Homer perhaps mediated by his conversations with Galileo), not unlike the image of the microwave background we see today from cosmic sources. I combined these with graphs showing asymptotic curves that seemed to go off to the infinite in one axis and return by another. I imagined them meeting on the other side of somewhere. (You can find lots of videos explaining asymptotes in gory detail.)

At the base of all this, I have been curious and remain curious about what we take for granted with time-based words as we read Hebrew and Christian Scripture, especially in translation. For instance, past, present, and future, pre- and post- prefixes, before and after, everlasting, eternal. What is the nature of time ... ? AI will give you a good summary of this if you persist. 

Whatever the nature of time, Biblical Hebrew does not have past, present, and future tenses. Every tongue that uses these linear sounding tenses may be misleading us. Over 50 years ago, before I knew anything about Hebrew, (And I still 'know' very little -- we must return to the little word 'know' later or sooner), someone told me that the Hebrew verbal forms have aspect and they were right. It got me thinking, but I didn't have much to apply it to 'yet'.

The idea of aspect in verbs, e.g. incomplete and continuing, versus complete and over with, got me to change my view of time as linear. All we have is the present and that is very brief -- approaching the infinitesimal. We have to 'face' what we have, yet the emergent property seems real to us even though we express it with imaginary numbers! Experience, memory, music, sense, sight, sound, touch, taste, rhythm, agogic all integrate these infinitesimals into what amounts to us. (Our soul, if you like.)

Here as I write, I sit listening to the cello suites of J.S. Bach. The whole is present all at once. Each dance form and harmonic movement contributes to a unity. It is a unity that requires and subtends duration -- and I do not need to be aware of the satellites, adjusting themselves to their slightly slower clocks than mine, that carried this streaming content to me, or the transistors running on quantum technology that mediate it for me into my speakers and fill the room with sound.

In the Scripture, there are two stark uses of time and tense that jump to my mind -- one from the Old and one from the New: Proverbs 8 - Wisdom at play before the foundation of the world, and Jesus statement in the gospel of John, Before Abraham was, I am.

That's enough to raise the question for now. That was the prequel to in the beginning. Next stop, last things. I have no shadow to run away from...

In the beginning

In the beginning is a famous trio of words in the English tongue. What do I 'know' about it?

Can I begin to say?

Sing the beginning:

Genesis 1:1 begins with a major triad.

Genesis 1:1 begins with a major triad resolving onto the subdominant. 458 other verses in the Hebrew Bible begin with this motif. Harmonically, the triad leads naturally to the subdominant, a note that signifies rest. It marks a caesura in 93% of the verses in the first testament.

The subdominant corresponds to the accent called atnah derived from the Hebrew word to rest נוח. If you are familiar with the Hebrew accent names, the score above is (silluq) tifha munach atnah, merkha tifha mercha silluq. The accents below the text define the recitation pitches on a one to one basis, always predictable, can be read in the original like any music score.

א בראש֖ית בר֣א אלה֑ים

א֥ת השמ֖ים וא֥ת האֽרץ

So there's the first beginning. But my question above is really a question about time, not about words or music. I have no choice but to use words and music as tools even if I am working for myself alone. This essay is the beginning of my journey to bring the first testament into my knowledge of the second. I have one or two ideas in the background: light as the first fiat and its impact on time, the power that is inherent in the words, mediated or not by the music to restore the tone of voice, and unfortunately, the abuse of power, the lust to dominate, and therefore, the primal (before the beginning) requirement for libation.

Benjamin Cremer in his weekly letter that I received this morning as I was struggling with this beginning essay, captures our predicament well as "... the perennial human sin of using religion to dominate rather than liberate." He goes on to say "the faithful way to read all of scripture is to ask: how are we, today [in any belief system], tempted by the same illusions of control, the same captivity to violence, the same inability to see [and hear] what mentality holds us captive?"

Some time later in Torah the heavens and the earth are called to witness. They are witnesses for the prosecution.

Deuteronomy 31:28 in the final words of the witness against the people, ends with a musical phrase mirroring the music of the opening of Genesis.

Deuteronomy 31:28 ends with a major triad.

1,552 other verses in the prose books also end with a major triad. It's not sufficient evidence to establish a direct allusion, but combined with the same phrase and triad in reverse as Genesis 1, perhaps it isn't too far-fetched. The phrase אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ (at hwmiim vat harx) as sung is unique. I would have to remove the cantillation to compare the words alone. There's no substitute for slowing down and hearing what is in our ears.

The words are sung 6 times in Torah: Exodus twice (20:11, 31:17), and Deuteronomy 3 times (31:28 above, and 4:26, and 30:19), each one directly invoking the words of Genesis 1:1. Also in Hezekiah's prayer (2 Kings 19:15 and parallel in Isaiah), three times in Jeremiah -- a prophet who frequently recalls creation (23:24, 27:5, 32:17) and its destruction through the exile, and 2 Chronicles 2:11.

Jeremiah 4: Exile as the undoing of creation

The New Testament has a gospel that begins with Greek words rendered in English as 'In the beginning'. These words of the prologue to St John's Gospel are music to many just for their poetic quality and cadence that English readers hear with consequent pleasure. 

Margoliouth's 19th century translation of John 1:1

There is no textual score for the Greek Testament. (See this archive for the Margoliouth Hebrew version of John.) 

Score for the text of Margoliouth's 19th century Hebrew of John 1:1

This recitation, after a lightly ornamented (pashta) and short recitative on the tonic, moves via the second degree of the scale to the proclamation pitch on the third syllable of brawit (/w/ is sounded as sh sometimes just s, /a/ sounds as ai in bait in this case. See the same word in the lyrics above of this word  that begins the Bible with more traditional phonetics). The proclamation pitch is a fifth above the tonic. The phrase then pauses with a zaqef-qaton on the third syllable of hadabar. So it does not imitate Genesis musically. 

We have a verbal connection between Genesis and John but no music. It's not surprising that the connection is lacking. The cantillation tradition that Margoliouth is following would never have heard of the deciphering of the te'amim that I have been working with since it was not inferred until a hundred years later. We have much stronger connections within the Tanach to the foundational creative act of the heavens and the earth.

My overall thesis is that the music is required to balance our reading of the words alone. It is not understanding that we should seek, but rather imitation of the compassion that we will hear and receive. I have little to say about how to read the New Testament, but it is dangerous as Benjamin notes in his letter this morning. Read it.

The Canon as Musical Memory: Thematic Recollection in the Teʿamim

 Now here's an idea I hadn't yet thought about exactly. The key will be finding the right set of differences in the use of the te'amim across the books of the canon.

Abstract:

This paper will propose that the teʿamim—the cantillation signs of the Hebrew Bible—encode an intentional network of musical memory that links the canonical books through recurrent motifs and tonal gestures. Statistical analysis of verse openings across all biblical books shows that passages beginning on a pitch different from the default tonic e, or with an ornament on the initial syllable, show differences in patterns in Deuteronomy, the Latter Prophets, and parts of the Writings e.g. Qohelet, that differ significantly from earlier and later narrative prose. These sections of the 21 prose books written in and around the years of exile use this technique as frequently as it is used in the three poetry books. Selected case studies will reveal some deliberate musical echoes forming a chain of tonal recollection across the canon. These findings will suggest that the composers who applied the accentual system acted as musical exegetes, using melody to preserve theological continuity and to invite interpretive listening. The Hebrew Bible thus emerges as a polyphonic composition. Its books converse not only through words but through remembered sound.

Well, phew, that's generated and edited after 'months of effort' in my spare time of course, training my LLM assistant with multiple props, prompts, and examples. The excessively flowery outline of the paper is too much to share and a bit more effusive than my style allows. However, I am looking for bridges from the te'amim to textual criticism, musicology, and theology in ways that could change how we traditionally view the accentual tradition — not as a punctuation and syntactic system, but as a living musical architecture of memory. I know that we need to change on many fronts.

The outline, of course, has to address all the possible objections to such a study -- but here's some raw data that seems to me to support the effort required to do this. (Not that this particular swan could have the time to do it... but we'll see -- I just night restart some blogging.)

I have finished my 18 volumes. None of them is available for purchase yet. Perhaps they will only be available as gifts. But my initial essays briefly describing the music of each volume have led me to the conclusion that if I could show that the techniques as they have been transmitted to us in the 10th century contain variations in usage that point to different composers and different times, then we could theorize that they are more ancient than an imposition onto the Masoretic text.

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Nice chart generated by my assistant.
At least it lets you know a breakdown of early, transitional, and late texts in the canon.

I have used a breakdown of early compared to late books largely on canonical order, but as can be seen in the following analysis of contours (shape based on the sequence of accents under the text), my categorization does not collect together the compositional techniques used in the different books. On this one measure, they are strikingly different.

Ezekiel and other books from the exilic period with notes beginning a verse that are not the default tonic (e) are below compared to the percentages in other books. What emerges may define a division in the usage of the accent system within the 21 books, one that is conservative and the other that is more like the musical techniques used in the poetry.

What stands out in the first group is the book of Deuteronomy. Clearly, this was written by a different composer from the earlier books of Torah. What if new compositional techniques were developed during the exile? Perhaps Deuteronomy, only found at this time used these new techniques of recitation. Deuteronomy is certainly an outlier in the first 11 books. It is clear that the later prophets use a different technique also, even if their language has fewer Aramaic influences.

Books dated to before the exile Torah
Book	Total Verses	Starting pitch<>e	%
GENESIS	1533	78	5.1
EXODUS	1213	81	6.7
LEVITICUS	859	87	10.1
NUMBERS	1289	140	10.9
DEUTERONOMY	959	140	14.6
Books dated to before the exile Former Prophets
JOSHUA	658	65	9.9
JUDGES	618	17	2.8
1 SAMUEL	810	19	2.3
2 SAMUEL	695	30	4.3
1 KINGS	817	45	5.5
2 KINGS	719	47	6.5
Books dated to before the exile Later Prophets
ISAIAH 1-39	766	126	16.4
JEREMIAH	1364	210	15.4
HOSEA	197	32	16.2
AMOS	146	26	17.8
OBADIAH	21	1	4.8
MICAH	105	17	16.2
NAHUM	47	12	25.5
HABAKKUK	56	12	21.4
ZEPHANIAH	53	8	15.1

For books dated to the transitional period between early and late Biblical Hebrew, the average number of verses with a starting pitch different from the tonic is 12%. Drop Ezekiel from this list and the average becomes 18%. Some averages without the outliers are called for. If we confine ourselves to three periods, and group the books by the characteristic of allowing a different starting pitch from the default tonic, we can ask additional questions related to composition style. The questions are tempered by other considerations like the setting of larger thoughts in groups of verses. These are expressed in stanzas in the poetry and their equivalent, sections and paragraphs, in the prose of the later prophetic books.

Books dated to the years of the exile
ISAIAH 40-66	525	100	19.0
EZEKIEL	1273	104	8.2
JOEL	73	10	13.7
JOB (Prose Sections)	72	12	16.7
LAMENTATIONS	154	26	16.9

A scan of the following table shows a few of these books are outliers, particularly Qohelet on the high side.

Books dated to after the exile
JONAH	48	2	4.2
HAGGAI	38	8	21.1
ZECHARIAH	211	34	16.1
MALACHI	55	5	9.1
SONG	117	19	16.2
RUTH	85	3	3.5
QOHELET	222	66	29.7
ESTHER	167	14	8.4
DANIEL	357	25	7
EZRA	280	16	5.7
NEHEMIAH	405	17	4.2
1 CHRONICLES	928	59	6.4
2 CHRONICLES	822	50	6.1

It is very clear that the poetry stands apart with respect to the use of the opening pitch of a verse differing from the tonic. Most of the later prophets and some of the writings share this technique.

PSALMS	2527	680	26.9
PROVERBS	915	316	34.5
JOB (Poetry)	998	292	29.3

Continuing on

 I have decided not to pursue any further sales of my current 18 volumes of the Bible. I am working on each of the volumes and have discovered things I want to put in the general introduction so if you’re interested, let me know but nothing is available at the moment apart from what is mentioned in the previous post. 

A gift to anyone who asks

I have all 929 mscz files available individually in directories for anyone who would like them. If you would like them please let me know: drobertmacd at gmail dot com or message me on Twitter @drmacdonald or threads @bob.macdonald.9063. Let me know why you are interested and any questions you may have.

To use them you need to have MuseScore 4 (download here). When you have these scores, you can see a final product for cantillation in Hebrew, and the raw material for arranging the music in other languages or for other translations than mine, for many instruments, and with chorus, and cantor etc. 

They are a part of the results of 15 years of study and an elapsed year of creation and revision. Each score is derived from the text of the Bible (an eclectic text initially based on the Westminster Leningrad codex with corrections from earlier sources) using a fixed deciphering key as inferred by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura in the last century for the accents in the text called te'amim. It's a brilliant deciphering. Controversial maybe, but don't take my word for it. Try them out. Biblical Hebrew has never seemed so easy to learn. The scores are verse by verse. You can change that by altering the page length.

There is also a set of batch files. These are used only if you want to update the book with changes to the music. The batch file renames the exported individual SVG files to match the image tags in the html for the books. But if you don't have the books, no matter, because the music files are self-explanatory (if you know how to read them). And if you have the books, you may not want to update them anyway. 

I have also included some xlsx files which show patterns of ornament usage by reciting note among other graphs and data tables.

I will have my books available soon somewhere or other place or two. Some people have the generic link already so that it will be unlikely to be lost, even if I never get around to listing them all.

A review of a new Sherlock Holmes Mystery

 It's not every day you get to read a new Sherlock Holmes mystery. The book Sherlock Holmes and the Mistress of History is a delightful tale set in the retirement years of Watson and Sherlock in England,  Egypt, and the Sinai. It is a read that made me smile and laugh out loud. The tension and the denouement is delightfully handled. It is thoroughly realistic in the style of Conan Doyle and plausibly historical.

Jonathan Orr-Stav, author of Alef through the Looking Glass has a deep expertise on the the origins of alphabets. This little story -- 100 to 150 pages depending on your choice of type size -- makes excellent use of his familiarity with alphabets and Middle East languages. The result is a well written tale of suspense and a real respite for those of us who like a good mystery and some positive news about the human beast. 

The swan is still singing

 My computer lives for another 12 months. I have paid. It was easy and free to sign up. I am a Microsoft customer. I tried Windows 11 and was appalled at the conversion process. Microsoft wants me to use its communications tools. It doesn't respect the apps that are not MS. So I ended up with Skype and Teams in startup and ancient conversations that were inactive years ago and no easy way to eliminate them -- three clicks per conversation or dig into the file structure. I returned the new PC. I also tried unsuccessfully to reset the computer. Apple is easy to install and resets for transfer to another owner without any trouble.

Enough said. I don't have time to learn Windows 11 and neither does anyone else in my family.

Cover for Ezekiel

This swan is singing a dirge. Stop.

On the positive side, my project has reached a stability point. All volumes have complete music and text (including legarmeh). The covers are all complete. 18 sketches with my prompts to chatgpt. Ezekiel to the left.

The 'brief notes on the music' will have a table of ornament frequency by reciting note for each book, an example where the music points out shape in prose or stanzas in poetry, and a few examples of rare phrases in the music.

I think I will finish some day and retire to the garden finally. I think I can guarantee that it will undermine a reader's assumptions and reveal some of mine.

Status report on the Swan Song

 Still alive and kicking, said the Swan.

Here's the current status on all fronts:

All volumes complete verse by verse with the music -- like this. 

This image contains: 

• 5 syllables (middle of last line)  in the score 
• over three words (top line Hebrew) of the first verse of 1 Chronicles
• a transcription (lyrics) based on a simple mapping of consonants and vowels
• a translation with verse number and harmonic progression in parentheses
• the Hebrew accents from which the score is derived
• the SimHebrew equivalent with verse number (bottom right).

There are about 34,400 separate images for the 23,196 verses. Their production and merge with the html was controlled by several procedures from my database. So they are an accurate representation of my translation and the automated music process, but of course open to textual and linguistic criticism.

Here's a more complex example. See if the syllable counts agree with the column of numbers in the bottom centre of the image. There is an occasional discrepancy +/- 1 difference between the syllable count and the notes in the score. I have found it impossible to find this bug. I'm not the only software developer with this problem. I suspect there are other bugs that I have not noticed.

Tasks to do: 

• for 7 volumes, update the html to include legarmeh (routine process, takes maybe a few hours of interrupted work to do -- probably unimportant).
• 10 more covers to design -- really fun to do. 10 days (not contiguous) and it will be done.
• 17 more ISBN's to get. Routine.
• 10 + brief introductions to the music of the volume. Very challenging. In this area my work has converged with another student of cantillation history. My data formats may be very useful to him and I have to think carefully to get good query design from my database to see the potential patterns.

Future work: to anyone who is interested, the data that is generally available now online in various places in Unicode can be coded for the questions we want to ask. It's a very large undertaking to consider the relationships in the Scripture itself and to reconcile the history of cantillation with the theoretical discovery that has been demonstrated by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura. By the way, a large number of video recordings of her work done by John Wheeler are now available (again) here. (Very slow start but they are there.)

My computer apparently has only a few months till its expiry date. The folks who make Windows do not consider it worthy to support. I have routinely 30 to 35 windows active on it. It is very fast and has adequate memory. This sin from Microsoft is duly noted for the heavenly assizes. I can certainly buy another computer but whether I can still install Oracle and the last working copy of my complex software and all the other things I need for this unique environment is moot. Maybe I will just maintain it off the web and go back to sneaker net to get any words out. But my expiry date is also approaching -- who knows when!

The Mysterious Decalogue

I have examined an alternate solution to the many te-amim in the two decalogues. The data is taken from here. It's been a good exercise not without difficulty. 

בטעם העליון

אָֽנֹכִ֖י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ אֲשֶׁ֧ר הוֹצֵאתִ֛יךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם מִבֵּ֥ית עֲבָדִֽים׃
לֹ֣א יִהְיֶֽה־לְךָ֩ אֱלֹהִ֨ים אֲחֵרִ֜ים עַל־פָּנַ֗י לֹ֣א תַעֲשֶֽׂה־לְךָ֣ פֶ֣סֶל ׀ וְכׇל־תְּמוּנָ֡ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר בַּשָּׁמַ֣יִם ׀ מִמַּ֡עַל וַֽאֲשֶׁר֩ בָּאָ֨רֶץ מִתַּ֜חַת וַאֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּמַּ֣יִם ׀ מִתַּ֣חַת לָאָ֗רֶץ לֹֽא־תִשְׁתַּחֲוֶ֣ה לָהֶם֮ וְלֹ֣א תׇעׇבְדֵם֒ כִּ֣י אָֽנֹכִ֞י יְהֹוָ֤ה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ אֵ֣ל קַנָּ֔א פֹּ֠קֵ֠ד עֲוֺ֨ן אָבֹ֧ת עַל־בָּנִ֛ים עַל־שִׁלֵּשִׁ֥ים וְעַל־רִבֵּעִ֖ים לְשֹׂנְאָ֑י וְעֹ֤שֶׂה חֶ֙סֶד֙ לַאֲלָפִ֔ים לְאֹהֲבַ֖י וּלְשֹׁמְרֵ֥י מִצְוֺתָֽי׃

Music according to the deciphering key for the first separation in Exodus 20

Note the verse structure. The first image above has only two verses. The atnah (on the word coloured brown in the Hebrew text) appears only twice and the music comes to a possible end only twice. The Aleppo verses 3 4 and 5 and 6 have the mid-verse rest on לְשֹׂנְאָ֑י, seven words before the end. The second image and text below combines verses 2 and 3 and preserves 4, 5, and 6 as separate verses.

This raises the question, of course, as to what is a verse. It is clear that the te'amim define verses. 

1. They begin on several different notes with frequency varying by book but they always (100% in mgketer.org) end with the tonic, unless there has been a copying error and there are a few in WLC. The big colon is a marker, but not a note. In all the cases above where there is a big colon, a silluq appears in a prior word to bring the music to the tonic.
2. And often, (92.5% of verses) they have an internal cadence on the subdominant (atnah). 

בטעם התחתון

אָֽנֹכִי֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֧ר הוֹצֵאתִ֛יךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם מִבֵּ֣ית עֲבָדִ֑ים לֹֽא־יִהְיֶ֥ה לְךָ֛ אֱלֹהִ֥ים אֲחֵרִ֖ים עַל־פָּנָֽי׃
לֹֽא־תַעֲשֶׂ֨ה לְךָ֥ פֶ֙סֶל֙ וְכׇל־תְּמוּנָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֤ר בַּשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ מִמַּ֔עַל וַֽאֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּאָ֖רֶץ מִתָּ֑חַת וַאֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּמַּ֖יִם מִתַּ֥חַת לָאָֽרֶץ׃
לֹֽא־תִשְׁתַּחֲוֶ֥ה לָהֶ֖ם וְלֹ֣א תׇעׇבְדֵ֑ם כִּ֣י אָֽנֹכִ֞י יְהֹוָ֤ה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ אֵ֣ל קַנָּ֔א פֹּ֠קֵ֠ד עֲוֺ֨ן אָבֹ֧ת עַל־בָּנִ֛ים עַל־שִׁלֵּשִׁ֥ים וְעַל־רִבֵּעִ֖ים לְשֹׂנְאָֽי׃
וְעֹ֥שֶׂה חֶ֖סֶד לַאֲלָפִ֑ים לְאֹהֲבַ֖י וּלְשֹׁמְרֵ֥י מִצְוֺתָֽי׃

Music according to the deciphering key for the second separation in Exodus 20

Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura did her work with the Letteris Edition (19th century). Here is one of her manuscripts from the library collected by Jonathan Wheeler, her American Editor. Jonathan sent me the DVD of this library before he disappeared from the Web. He was a stern taskmaster but I did not interact with him very much. You will find this in the pdfs under articles on page 18 of a file called resume_key_english.pdf. You can see how different the accents are in that edition but the piece is recognizable.

Exodus 20 handwritten by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura

Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key applies (she says) without difficulty to the existing verse structure and the sometimes multiple accents per syllable. There are questions, however. How would one decide what sequence to apply two accents on one syllable? My program probably used the sequence in which the accents are coded if they are below the text. I don't know if such a decision is possible with a manuscript or a font image. Suzanne may have made a musical decision different from the ones I have let stand in my automated work. You can see her decisions if you read the whole PDF. When she speaks of first and second sign on a single syllable, I would assume she is reading right to left. That does not seem to be the case in the examples she gives above.

Automation would not have been possible for her. She died before MusicXML was invented. (And lucky her, she was not trained as a programmer but first as a musician, composer, and performer.) My solution using her approach is below. It is workable but I do admit, the split solution is also workable. I am grateful to have been introduced to it. There are other minor instances of two sublinear te'amim on a single syllable. Suzanne's solution applies there with good effect. It's as if the accent pair are a different sort of rhythmic ornamentation.

Haïk-Vantoura's solution. The deciphering key allows for all the existing accents without difficulty.

Doing mercy for thousands is more important for our character development than chasing te'amim. Maybe the music will help us read and act more truly.

A few examples of tsinnor and tsinnorit

Tsinnorit is a new name for an accent to me. I have always found the usage of the accent names inconsistent in all the books I have read (or seen and not read). The name is probably in some of the books I have looked at but I may not have noted it. Nonetheless, confusion or not, there is a pattern here, and it may lead to some insight into the mind of the ancient designer. Definitely the sign  ֮seen above as a sideways s often leads to a particular note. (But its not quite that simple).

Here's a collection of tsinnorit resolving to the supertonic.

Job 20:27 - tsinnorit (on the recitation pitch A) to mercha (f# in the poetry mode -- bars 29-30) preceding the final cadence on the tonic e

Psalms 118:25 - tsinnorit to f# twice: first from the reciting note on the third of the scale (bar 148) and before the subdominant A and again from reciting note f# before the final cadence on e

I see 17 additional examples in the poetry and that's all for the sequence tsinnorit-mercha. Mercha occurs independently also. The ornament preceding the f# may come on the reciting pitch A, g, or f# as seen above, and also on e and even from C (once) as in the following image.

Psalms 72:3 - shalshelet (bar 13) lifts up to tsinnorit on the reciting note C
before the subdominant (bar 15)

The following is an example of tsinnorit joined to the high C. This combination occurs 168 times in my data at present. and the sequence is often tsinnorit followed by C at the beginning of the verse. I had noticed these in previous years (even when I was following Unicode and miscalling it zarqa) because this ornament is often a help to the singer to get to the high note.

Proverbs 8:29 - getting to the high note by way of a tsinnorit.

There are 12 other instances in the poetry of tsinnor (not tsinnorit) preceding f#. There are 180 examples of tsinnor preceding d (galgal), 31 examples preceding e, and 22 preceding C, see Psalms 49:15 below. 

Psalms 49:15 containing both tsinnor and tsinnorit prior to C (mahpakh)

These are clearly different in WLC and its font. Not so clear in mgketer. There are an additional 22 instances of tsinnor with mahpakh following. I don't think the music is significantly different to try to verify these details. Here are the two in copy and paste form -- just highlighting the different placements over the letters.
mgketer.org  שַׁתּוּ֮  וַיִּרְדּ֮וּ 

tanach.us   שַׁתּוּ֮  וַיִּרְדּ֘וּ 

Anyway: I can see that this turn wherever it is placed on the letter often immediately precedes mahpakh which Haïk-Vantoura deciphers as the 6th above the tonic, C in her renderings of the pitches. It makes musical sense no matter which turn is sung. And the similar turn called zarqa and tsinnor may also resolve to d or e in the poetry books.

One more example.

Psalms 16:11 tsinnor preceding C (bar 64)

In the prose, I find 34 tsinnor resolving to e, 563 resolving to B, and 2 resolving to g (both in the 10 words -- special cases). Others may be followed by another ornament. I didn't find any leading to C or f.

It's hard to describe music this way, but one does ask why the designers of this system did not find easier ways to represent these hand signals. Maybe that's the clue -- music notation had not been invented, and the notation we have is limited to what the hands could signify. 

All this sort of detail is not my intent but I am glad I have been forced to pay a little more attention to it. My intent is limited to presentation -- so that the history of the Hebrew Bible that we have may be seen and heard in a musical form that is consistent with what could have been known at the time.

Learning the data - zarqa and legarmeh

The Hebrew Bible is not an easy task to learn for a non-Hebrew speaker who was not raised in the Hebrew tradition. This is not my 'excuse'. But it is important to know. Because there is a tendency that English readers have to think we know what is there in the Bible even in our ignorance, and when you think you know already, it certainly inhibits learning. (The risk is there for everyone.)

I have checked out all the so-called zarqa accents in the prose books in the Leningrad codex. It turns out that there should not be any. The accent called zarqa does not occur in the prose books in mgketer.org. I corrected all of them to tsinnor. It's a minor change in the melody using Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key but it does reinforce the separation of the two sets of accents a little more. (Alas, if we eliminate zarqa, what becomes of the zarqa table!)

I have also experimented with inserting the legarmeh into the text in Calibre. Hebrew typing has many problems in that environment. I could define three bugs at least -- can't type inline, can't use the onscreen keyboard, and there are some problems with marking the text and pasting when words are connected by a makaf. I have workarounds. But legarmeh is ignored in the SHV deciphering key. I think of it as an editorial suggestion of a pause -- maybe in some cases a pause of a few billion years of imaginary time. I could illustrate this with Genesis.

Legarmeh in Genesis 2.
Let the performer add an editorial tick where there is a dramatic separation.

I may will include the changes in the 2065 verses that contain legarmeh over 700 or more chapters (in the WLC). I am generating the table entries that could be pasted into the html without error. Also I am generating the html files for the chapters affected. (It only takes about an hour to generate them all from the database. Putting them into the EPUB automatically merges them with the SVG images -- so maybe it is worthwhile doing and would not require too much of my spare time.) These are all support files for the EPUB along with the music files. Legarmeh must be considered musical because music includes the space between the notes. That could be the subject of a book-length treatise. I remember learning rhythm, pulse and agogic both as a young performer and as a middle-aged conductor. 

And legarmeh is also seen as contextual for some other accents. I understand that sequences can be contextual, but how much context, how much read-ahead, how many sequences of accents are there that would have such an effect? And why would anyone have developed a musical notation in this way? I don't know. The appeal of the SHV deciphering key is that it is immediately transparent to a musician. It is her thesis that there are no accents that require the reader to change their mind after reading the next accent. Appeals to context are obvious from the musical line. Nonetheless, legarmeh could be a useful sign and I should probably not have omitted it in the section of my tables with consonants and cantillation accents only. [adding it I will as I write a little about each volume -- the more I see it the better I like it -- Legarmeh is like Talmud in a stroke -- I could use some proof readers if anyone is interested... not that I'm expecting much for nothing but love.]

Next steps?

The 18 volumes are complete. Some stats: For the 21,535 verses of the Hebrew Bible, I required 34,442 images or about 1.48 images per verse. A few of these are non-musical images and some others are repeated so one could say that the music of the Bible is about 34 thousand lines of music, where each verse no matter how short it is takes at least one line, but may take up to four. A long verse can take up to 4 lines of 30 or so syllables, give or take a few depending on the ornamentation and frequency of changes of reciting note.  Here's an image of the first verses of Chronicles. This is from the PDF format allowing 6 1-line verses per page and requiring 442 pages! 

Sample page from Chronicles

Here's a page with longer verses from 2 Chronicles 25:

Longer verses on page 434 of the Chronicles PDF

It's curious that Calibre has a report that counts the usage of all characters of all types including the details of the cantillation. The details are not viewable with any degree of ease. The accents are there in a column but are unreadable -- too small in the table and lost in translation when converted to Excel. But if you were interested, there are 2,461 mercha accents in Chronicles... and only one zarqa. 2 Chronicles 19:2.

Only one zarqa!

This should not be surprising since Zarqa is uncommon in the prose, but the similarly shaped tsinnor is more frequent. These sign are similar to the modern musical sign for a turn -- a sideways S over the note to be ornamented. This particular verse has two in a row on one word  חֲנָ֘נִי֮. 

Two consecutive turns - rare example 1/2

One would think that such a combination is unique, but there is another word with two such ornaments on it in 2 Samuel 3:8. I suppose that one good turn deserves another. But to get into this historical rarity technically, musically, linguistically, or theologically, would be a distraction at the moment.

Two consecutive turns - rare example 2/2

Surprising what you discover when you have music in front of you. I would not be able to determine these accents from the Aleppo codex. 

A part of rare example 2/2 from Aleppo

You can see I have allowed myself to be distracted when I should be doing the shopping.