The Riddle of the Original Meaning of the Te 'amim
1.1 The material on which this work focuses, the Tiberian Masoretic accents (te'amim), is exceptional among the traditional written Jewish sources for the mildness of the variations between the form known to the general public, that of the ta'amei hamiqra' in modern printed editions of the Bible, and its most ancient known form, that of the manuscripts of the so-called conventional Tiberian School, produced a millennium ago.1 Their degree of uniformity is conspicuously high when they are compared with the heterogeneity typically observed, say, in Talmudic or Midrashic materials (Yeivin, 1968, p.376). This is true for both aspects of this corpus: the signs themselves - thirty or so for each of the two subsystems of accents (that of the 21 so-called prose books, and that of Psalms, Proverbs and Job - ta'amei Emet) and their actual occurrence along the biblical text.
1.2 One immediate reason for the remarkable stability of this material stems from the very essence of the Masoretes' tremendous enterprise, i.e., the elaboration of a system that could keep time from eroding the transmission of the biblical corpus. This included not only an exceedingly precise presentation of the textual punctuation - the accentuation and vocalization signs (Coshen-Cottstein, 1963, p.89) but also a most extensive expansion of this presentation in the form of remarks and enumerative lists - the Masorah in its strict sense.-
1.16 In general terms, the central aim of this study is to provide a reconstruction of the original performance of the te'amirn with a high degree of accuracy, using a novel approach that we call "deductive". This approach, to be specified below, takes the results of Masoretic accentology as its essential starting point and those of Jewish ethnomusicology as its ultimate end-point, so that neither of the two main bodies of knowledge concerning the te'amim is neglected. The reconstruction will be explicated for the so-called prose subsystem of the 21 biblical books, in terms of a global musical system of organization as well as detailed melodic formulas for the individual accents.
1.17 Secondary aims, subordinate to the central goal and essentially meant to strengthen its results, are to clarify the structure of the written grammatical sign system, which seems so complicated, as well as to unravel some unifying principles of organization in observed practice, which seems so disparate. The integration of these results will allow us to deal with an important historical question: By whom was the reconstructed performance actually practiced, and when? The ultimate objective is therefore to reach a more organic picture of the te'amim in their written and their performed aspects, and in both their synchronic and diachronic dimensions.
