The Serugin, Te’amim, and Meturgeman in Christian Perspective-part 10

The Serugin, Te’amim, and Meturgeman in Christian Perspective-part 10

                The three systems of accentuation signs were developed separately and are called Palestinian, Babylonian, and Tiberian.  The Encyclopedia Judaica asserts that, “The Tiberian system is the most sophisticated and complete in the items it transmits and there is no doubt that, in the state in which it is known, it is the most recent…Most scholars tend to believe that the Palestinian system is older…it is impossible to arrive at a definite decision in this question on the basis of the data available today.” Ibid. P. 1433.  The deciphering work of Suzanne Haik-Vantoura was undertaken from the te’amim found in the Masoretic Texts mentioned in the quote above.  However, she believed from the beginning of her research that, as she later substantiated, the te’amim system was a precise, accurate and historically meaningful musical notation.

             The reason that the Tiberian system is the newest complete system available to scholars is simply that it is the system of graphic signs commonly called the ‘accents’, ‘accentuation signs’ and ‘te’amim’ that the Karaites at the School of Tiberius (slightly before 900 A.D.) entered or re-entered into the OT Masoretic texts called the “Codex of the Prophets”, “Codex Cairensis”, or the “Codex Prophetarum Cairensis” [these all refer to the same manuscripts]. These manuscripts called the MT are the texts from which many of the standard Bible translations have been basically derived [with some exceptions].  This is important because the translators that utilized the MT all had to know that the entire OT was notated musically above and below the texts they utilized.  It is a mystery that this fact was not regarded in any way by these translating teams—this is evident because of a complete lack of reference to this in any of their introductions or explanatory notes.