“True Truth” Not Exhaustive Truth Part 5

“True Truth” Not Exhaustive Truth  Part 5 

      The musician must understand that many of the precepts taught in the Bible which do not concern music, are just as difficult to understand as those that concern music.  However, that fact has not deterred biblical historians, exegetes and commentators from writing multiplied thousands of volumes on other things that are taught in the Bible.  It is unfortunate that so few Christian musicians have written about the music of the Bible in the last two hundred years.  Instead they have concentrated on the problems we have with our musicing rather than with the cure.

Brown explains that although St. Paul uses the imagery of seeing through a mirror dimly when he writes about knowing, “He does not mean that our knowledge is inadequate but that it is limited when compared to what we will know in the future.”  The Broadman Bible Commentary, Vol. X, I Corinthians by Raymond Brown, p. 374.  When we get to heaven and are ushered into God’s presence we will have perfect knowledge, but that does not mean that we cannot trust the knowledge that we have in this life.  Some of the things we read in the Bible about ancient music and musicing have now, centuries later, become somewhat esoteric and are to us, because of our lack of knowledge, only indications or hints of what actually happened in ancient Israel.  They are mere intimations to us because we read the Old and New Testaments through Western eyes and Western understandings.

 For instance, we understand hepatonic scales with half steps between three and four and seven and eighth in light of the music of the Oxidant.  When we study an ancient musical scale that seems to be a major or minor scale because of its construction, we expect that scale to follow the rules of music theory of Western Europe.   This is possibly why so many musicologists before Susanne Haik-Vantoura were not able to successfully decipher the te’amim of the Old Testament.  One of the main impediments to European theorists deciphering the te’amim was also the fact that in the music of the Occident the tonic is always the first note of the musical scale.  In the music of the Bible the tonic is medial i.e. the third note of the scale rather than the first note.