Let me
reiterate the fact that although we do not have complete exhaustive truth from
what is written in the Bible about music, what is written there is completely accurate. The problem that most always happens is that
Bible translators have not been, for the most part, music scholars and
certainly not students of ancient music.
To prove this point, look at the list of scholars included in most Bible
translation teams and one will see that they most often do not include a music
scholar and certainly not a scholar of ancient music. The problem has not been that there were
errors in the consonantal text. The
problem has been that because the language scholars who have prepared our
modern translations have not understood music of ancient Israel and their neighbors,
they have perpetuated many of the misunderstandings of music found in earlier
translations.
It is therefore every Christian performer’s
and music educator’s responsibility to, “Study to shew thyself approved unto
God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of
truth.” II
Timothy 2:14 We also have the responsibility to study the
many word study sources available to us today. There are more of these teatises
available to us today than there has ever been in the history of Western
civilization. There is also a myriad of great
scholarly writings about the ancient music of Bible times that have been
written by Jewish historians and musicologists.
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