Musical Instruments of the Bible by Jeremy Montagu

Author:Jeremy Montagu [Montagu, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781461669944
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2002-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES, AND THE SONG OF SONGS

With these, despite the name of the third, shīr hashīrīm, we enter a musically barren area. There are occasional references to singing, for example that to singing men and women in Ecclesiastes 2:8 which we have already mentioned. In the same verse, where the author “gat me ... musical instruments”, the AV translators were simply guessing what “the delights [or luxuries] of the sons of men” might include. The two words shiddāh υəshiddōt, which are translated as “musical instruments, and that of all sorts”, are actually the same word singular and plural, and are of unknown meaning—they appear nowhere else in the Bible. The LXX guessed a butler and female cupbearers, though both words appear to be feminine. The Vulgate opted for wine cups and jars. I suppose it is just a matter of what seems to the translator the height of luxury and the peak of delights. Perhaps the choice of “musical instruments” tells us more about the AV translators, or the availability or quality of wine in early seventeenth-century England, than it does about the Preacher. The Preacher does not tell us what he did with them, save that all was vanity and vexation. He does, in 3:4, mention “a time to dance”, and here the AV has reduced the contrast with “a time to mourn”, for rəkōd is no ordinary dancing, but leaping and skipping. On the other hand, when Jeremiah says (Lamentations, 5:15) that “our dance is turned into mourning,” it is the more normal māchōl that he uses.

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