The Serugin, Te’amim, and Meturgeman in Christian Perspective-part 2

The Serugin, Te’amim, and Meturgeman in Christian Perspective-part 2

            As I mentioned in the introduction to this blog series, I will be including some background and explanations about the serugin, te’amim and the ancient worship leader called the meturgeman in this series of blog posts for the readers who are not familiar with these terms.  I apologize in advance for all my explanations which are placed in brackets to those who have taken my college classes and others who have much knowledge of this topic. Part of the reason that I have prepared this series of posts is that so many millennials who are Christian musicians have been erroneously taught that, when it comes to sacred musicing, the music part of a Christian’s musicing is benign, amoral, without cause and effect, so therefore it is incapable of transmitting any understandable meaning to the listener.

            I want to make it clear at the outset that some of the beliefs of the various authors concerning the history of the serugin and the te’amim that I have included in this series are far from proven fact.  The reason for the plethora of conjectures, notions, opinions and hypotheses is simply that there are many gaps and a lack of exact knowledge of the dates and how the serugin, which contained the te’amim, were utilized as a part of worship in ancient Israel.  This series of posts will not include much about the many oral traditions of intoning Scripture.  Let me simply say that the many opinions of authors about which tradition(s) should be considered accurate are many and varied.  They are in fact too varied to be considered unified or accurate.