There
are some writers who purport that the word psallo,
or psalmos for that matter, does not
necessarily denote singing with the use of musical instruments. Some authors say that the words psalmos and
psallo are taken from Koine or Biblical Greek (instead of classical Greek) and
that in Biblical Greek the words are generic names for singing. These authors often ask, “why did the
scholars who translated the K.J.V. render psallo
as ‘singing’ and ‘making melody’?” To
this question I would ask “why did the K.J.V. translators render the kinnor as
a harp and the nebel as a psaltery instead of properly identifying the kinnor
as a hand-held lyre and the nebel as a hollow bodied harp?”
Those
who do not believe in the use of instruments in the church further complicate
the argument by stating that the Greek writers new the significance of the
Greek verb psallo and therefore would
never have used it to implicate instrumental music. Their reasoning is that the ancient Eastern
Greek Church did not use instruments in public worship. The reader should be reminded that these New
Testament references to music do not involve the ancient Greek or the Hellenistic
Greek Church but instead the ancient Hebrew tradition of singing the psalms
accompanied by musical instruments. Not
only did the writers know of the "Greek" traditions they also no
doubt knew that the Hebrews had always used instruments in conjunction with
their psalm singing.
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