I.THE MATERIAL AND ITS PUZZLE
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.-
For a review of the main extant Tiberian manuscripts, see Yeivin, 1973, pp.9-27.
For introductions to the Masorah, see Dotan, 1972, pp. 1418-1428; Breuer, 1976, pp.193-283.
1.3 A second reason for the stability of the te'amim system is that all the Diaspora communities, East and West, accepted the Tiberian punctuation as binding, often shortly after the Masoretes completed the bulk of their activity (about 10th century C.E.).3 Ultimately, this system superseded all others, such as the so-called Babylonian, Palestinian, or Tiberian non- conventional systems.4 Consequently, the transmission of the Tiberian system became an integral part of the general commitment by Jews everywhere to preserve the correct reading of their canonic literature.5
1.4 Paradoxically, the graphemes fostered so devotedly by the Diaspora communities meant little to the majority of their custodians in the precise concrete sense.6 Synchronic studies of present performance of the accents in biblical cantillation, following various Jewish traditions, reveals a mosaic of different interpretations of the signs.7 There are many factors of variation: the cultural origin of the informant, the biblical passage read, and the traditional occasion of reading, to name only three. One could state that the only rule that emerges clearly in the rendering of the written system, irrespective of any given practice, is one of incompleteness and inconsistency (Herzog 1963, 1972, p. 1100).8 The performance traditions of the ta'amei Emet subsystem of accents, when extant, are even more vague than the prose set (Flender, 1992, pp.71, 137).
For a discussion of this phenomenon see Harviainen, 1977 pp. 218-228, and ref. therein.
For an introduction to these systems, see Dotan, 1972, pp 1433- 1447.
For some early illustrations, consider the place of the te'amim in the eleventh-century commentary of Rashi (Shereshevsky, 1971), and the pedagogical homily to the te'amim composed by his grandson, Rabbenu Tam (Weinfeld, 1972, pp.43-59) 6 On the parallel situation for vocalization signs, see Morag, 1972; 1963, p.289.
An overview of the multiple traditions of reading is given in Herzog, 1972.
8 Alternately, one could search for an overriding principle outside the pure musical realm in the "faithfulness to correct phrasing" (Shiloah, 1992, p.103) i.e. in the divisional function of the te'amim (see Section 1.4
1.5 Diachrortic studies, when available, provide substantial evidence complementary to that arising from synchronic studies that the exact meanings of at least some of the graphemes were unknown not only in modern times but even in the very period in which these signs were adopted (Avenary 1976). Thus these studies gave ethnomusicologists some reason to be evasive or even to harbor doubts as to whether the Masoretic accents ever conveyed any precise systematic musical meaning (Avenary, 1972, p.585; Herzog, 1972, pp.1100, 1109).
1.6 Such skeptical views could muster additional support from a fact of cardinal importance: the so-called divisional function of the te'amim. This is the remarkable property, discovered by seventeenth-century scholars and thoroughly studied since then, of systematic correspondence between the series of accents and the syntactic structures of any given verse.9 This established the te'amim (especially those referred to as disjunctive) as a powerful system of punctuation marks that delimit different syntactic units. In view of this abstract logical regularity, some accentologists did not hesitate to deny any musical concreteness to the original meaning of these signs (Bohlius, 1636). Others came to accord it only a very secondary rank, far behind its main function. This function was perceived either as hermeneutic - to clarify the exegetical division of the text (Ackermann, 1893) or rhetoric - to express the correct reading of the spoken sentence (Spannier, 1927). In such a context, it does not seem farfetched to interpret the results of field observations and historical musicology in a similar vein.
1.7 Yet these doubts about the fundamental musical character of the Masoretic accents clash with other observations, no less central, in the field of Masoretic studies. Even though any rules of te'amim occurrence can be linked to the syntactic function, detailed examination shows that this in itself cannot account for the richness and complexity of the total system of rules. If the te'amim were just a system of punctuation marks, it would be just as effective with one-sixth the number of accents (Breuer, 1982, pp.14, 20) and could do without a great many rules that depend on minute word-morphological details (ibid., pp.22, 26).
9 For a historical review, see Dotan 1970
1.8 One could propose that the set of accents has undergone some process of hypertrophy similar to that which befell the Byzantine or Syriac accentuation Systems; if so, the complexity of the te'amim would reflect nothing but abstract ramifications in mental analysis (Avenary, 1963, p. 10).
1.9 However, this possibility seems quite unlikely in view of the broader perspective, introduced by modem Masoretic studies, on our understanding of the nature of the Masoretes' activity. Contemporary scholars have stepped back10 from Kahie's (1959) theory which, briefly put, asserted that the Tiberian Bible actually expresses "no true tradition at all" (Coshen-Cottstein, 1963, p. 20), and admit today that the essence of the Masoretes' endeavor was the transmission of a pre-existing tradition specifically, an oral tradition - of reading. According to the modern paradigm, "[T]he Masoretes were convinced, rightly in their way, that they were keeping up an ancient tradition, and interfering with it purposely would have been for them the worst thing possible" (ibid., 1963, p. 96).11 It is no wonder, then, that the basic attitude shared by most modern Masoretic scholars is that the accentuation system had an actual oral counterpart. In their eyes, the system is essentially musical, and its other functions, such as the logico-syntactic function and the localization of stress, are subordinate (Yeivin, 1973, p.178; Breuer, 1982, pp. 3-9; Medan, 1965, p.395).
1.10 Thus, conflicting conclusions emerge from the two parallel fields of academic study that concern themselves with the two complementary aspects of the te'amim: actual performance, and their rules of occurrence in the written material. To find a practical solution to the resulting dilemma is no simple task for serious methodological reasons. and consequently very characteristically modern scholars, when discussing the dating of the system, draw a clear distinction between the invention of the written signs and the origin of the oral tradition that these signs are meant to notate. Conventional hypotheses speak of dating the written signs to the sixth or seventh century C.F., although the possibility of dating them several centuries earlier is not ruled out Dotan, 1981). As for the origin of the oral tradition, the matter is generally discussed within the broader perspective of the Masorah in its totality: there is earlier evidence in diverse Talmudic sources and the most ancient elements of the transmission are considered to be as old as that of the Bible itself (Alony, 1975 p.232; Dotan 1972, p.1404).
~ For a review, see Drori, 1988, pp.153-154 and references therein.
1.11 One might attempt to "reconcile" the obvious diversities in present practice in order to fashion a more uniform correspondence with the written signs. Such an attempt was made in the early 1900s by A.Z. Idelsohn. Performing a pioneering comparative analysis of different performances from an extensive range of traditions, and in particular through comparative tables of motives, Idelsohn suggested several basic common patterns genuinely shared by all performance traditions. Essentially, these concerned the underlying modes and structures of the melodic motives by which the various accents are articulated; these, he believed, could be traced to the pre-exilic period (Idelsohn, 1922, Vol.1, pp.18-23; 1924, pp. 95-117; 1929, pp.35-71). Modern musicologists were quite critical of his analysis and conclusions (Herzog, 1972, p.1108; Shiloah, 1981, pp.122-123; 1986, Vol.1, pp., 31-33, 1992, p.108; Avenary 1976, p.75).
1.12 The basic methodological problem associated with Idelsohn's approach in the context of our discussion can be stated as follows: Assuming that a specific Masoretic musical performance did exist, there is strong reason to expect that only some of the present performance traditions are derived from it; we have no way of knowing which. Moreover, these hypothetical descendants of the "Ur-Masoretic" performance would probably have undergone complex evolutionary phases, each in its own way, with different possible factors of evolution - degeneration or systematic internal development within a given tradition, cross-exchanges between parallel traditions, acculturation to the surrounding environment, and so on. These evolutionary processes are so non-deterministic, and contain so many variables, that any attempt to work backwards from any given modern practice to earlier phases seems altogether hopeless.
1.13 Alternatively, one may focus on the written material in an attempt to decipher the system of signs a priori, ignoring the present practice. Several such attempts have been made in the past few centuries,12 the best-known in recent years being that 12
To the best of my knowledge, the first attempt to fashion a partial reconstruction of the performance from the written material appears in Abraham Ben-David Portal eone's Shiltey Hagiborim (Mantua, 1612) [see critical edition in Sandlar 1980)]. For additional approaches to the problem, with various degrees of explicitness see review in Sendre 1951, items 2482-2489; 1969, pp.204-207. He cites' Speidel (1740), Anton of Mrs. Haik-Vantoura. Using the names and shapes of the graphemes as her point of departure, she produced a deciphering key composed essentially of scale-tone values for the infra-li near signs, and various ornamental values relative to them for the supra-linear ones. Her main argument in defense of the result was that the application of this key invariably yielded aesthetic results (Haik-Vantoura, 1978). On these terms, scholars in the field were highly critical. Not only was the invoked notion of "musicality" overly subjective and uncertain, but her results clashed too violently with what one was entitled to expect from a putative realization of the te'amim, both within the specific context of the observed practices and in the larger context of the modern understanding of Oriental oral musical traditions and their notational systems (e.g. Ringer, 1981).
1.14 A major methodological problem inherent to this a priori kind of reconstruction, exemplified by Haik-Vantoura's attempts, irrespective of the outcome, is the danger of equipping oneself with genuine constraints that are too lax. If one ignores both Masoretic grammar and modern practice, the only source of data left - the names and shapes of the graphemes - is too ambiguous to provide any definite clue. As for the invoked constraint of having to obtain "musical" results for all biblical verses, this may be deceiving at first glance, in view of the multiplicity of verses and, hence, of apparent constraints. However, closer observation and alternative trials show that the flaws of such a general notion of "musicality" exceed the evident and aforementioned drawback of subjectivity. The notion is too vague operationally, and too susceptible to after- the-fact ad hoc readjustments, to offer any serious basis for the evaluation of any solution proposed.
1.15 In summary, both types of inquiries present substantial methodological barriers, those based on the studies of practice, as well as those based on the written te'amim. The information on which these inquiries are based is too copious and diffuse on the one hand, and too scanty and speculative on the other. Should one conclude that progress cannot be made and that the riddle of the original performance of the accents will remain (1790), Haupt (1854) [summarized in Mayer, 1855], Arends 1867), Berl (1923), Glaser 1932), and Yasser (1946). See also Flender, 1992, p.38, who refers to Wohlenberg 1967). forever unsolved? The present study aims to show that an alternative path does exist and provides a definite solution.
II.SPECIFICATION OF THE GOAL
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.