ABSTRACT
Terracotta relief depicting a musician playing a vertical harp. Old Babylonian period, ca. 2000-ca. 1550 BCE (Iraq Museum, Baghdad) Of all ancient literary and historical monuments the Bible contains the fullest information about the musical instruments that existed in those remote times. It accumulated the treasure of musical traditions of several great ancient civilizations including the rich store of their instruments. It came into being at the intersection of different cultures, comprising a vast geographical region from Mesopotamia to Egypt and to the border of Asia Minor. Therefore the Bible could without any exaggeration be called the first encyclopaedia of the musical instruments of the ancient Near East. Musical instruments are mentioned in no less than 25 books of the Hebrew Old Testament1 in a total of 146 verses, as counted by E. Kolari. The concrete realities of ordinary life in biblical times (animals, insects, plants, precious stones, etc.) are often little known, and hard to understand, and musical instruments certainly belong in this category. Though at first sight there are relatively few names, and they seem to refer to similar instruments, neverthe-
less when studied in depth they turn out to belong to several different families, and in comparison with other ancient cultures, are rather numerous. They form an integral and valuable part of ancient musical culture, and represent the whole range of ancient instruments. The Tanakh (the list of canonical books according to the Jewish tradition) contains the names of about 20 musical instruments. However, despite a large range of information, with rare exceptions it never gives any explanation or comments on their typology, etymology or technical characteristics. That is why the investigation of these questions entails numerous difficulties, and raises problems which are often impossible to solve by the sole means of historical or theoretical musicology. It is necessary to draw on other disciplines, such as archaeology, source criticism, comparative linguistics, and comparative organology. The complex analysis of the Old Testament instrumental terminology based on the principles and methods of research worked out in these disciplines will help in attaining positive results. Thus the class to which an instrument belongs has been defined by modern Bible scholars with some confidence. The main classes are strings, wind instruments, and percussion. The stringed instruments all involve plucking (rather than bowing) and include kinnor, nevel, ‘asor, qaytros, pesanterin and sabbeka’. The wind instruments are divided into three subclasses: natural horns, metallic horns, and woodwind. Natural horns include the qeren and its varieties shofar, yovel and qarna’. The only metallic horn is the trumpet hatsotserah. The woodwind subclass includes halil, ‘ugav and mashroqita’. Percussion instruments are divided into two subclasses: membranophones and idiophones. The only membranophone is the tof. The idiophone subclass includes mena‘an‘im, tseltselim/metsiltayim, metsillot, and pa‘amonim (see Diagrams 1-3). Suita ble English names for the i nstruments will be come apparent in Chapter 2.
