What did the Psalms sound like in the Temple?

[rakovsky]

The Psalms were played with accompaniment in Jerusalem's Temple, and so the subtitles for several Psalms apparently refer to musical instruments for playing with the Psalms. For example, Psalm 4 says that it is to be played on a stringed instrument, Psalm 5 says that it is to be played on a "nehiloth", a wind instrument or flute, and Psalm 22 says that it is to be played on "Ayeleth Hashahar" (The star/doe/strength/dawn of the morning), which some have interpreted to be perhaps a musical instrument.

May I ask two questions:
Did 1st-2nd Century AD synagogues lack musical instrument accompaniment for their hymns, so that when the Temple was destroyed, the melodies for the songs and their accompaniment were lost?

Are there recordings of Psalms in Hebrew that legitimately resemble the sounds of the ancient Psalm singing with accompaniment?

It seems to me that at the least, the singers would be singing them in Hebrew with a Middle Eastern accent (instead of an Ashkenazi one), the melodies would be Middle Eastern, and the instruments used would available in ancient times.

Let me share with you some Psalms that could meet the description.

This is a Playlist for Psalms 1-28 sung by Simon bar Moshe with stringed accompaniment:
Psaumes chantés en hébreu - YouTube

Psalm 1 (I think that this might be on a modern organ)

Psalm 3 with a Yemenite melody (I can't tell what the accompaniment is. One instrument is stringed):

Psalms 16, 32, 41, 42, 59, 77, 90, 105, 137. It has a drum and a stringed instrument (Psalm 16 starts at 2:35):

Psalm 30 (with accompaniment on strings, and a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern melody)

Psalm 95 (with a drum and another instrument):

This performance of Psalm 95 (below) is based on a modern system that a modern musician, Suzanne Haik Vantoura, created when she imagined that she was "rediscovering" the original "lost melodies" by perceiving them as being contained in the words of the Psalms themselves. I didn't find the method very convincing though when I read about it. I think that this performance uses organ music too, which is not very historical, I think:
Lost Melodies - Hebrew Chanting - Psalm 95

Psalm 104 by Yamma Ensemble. They aim to make it with a traditional Babylonian Jewish melody. But it looks like they are using a klezmer or clarinet too:
Psalms 104 sung in ancient Hebrew | ברכי נפשי את ה' - תהלים ק"ד

Psalm 121 (I am not sure what instruments are used. A violin?):
Psalm 121 sung in Hebrew with English Translation

Psalm 147
Psalm 147 in Hebrew

The following performance of Psalm 148 (below) uses Haik-Vantoura's method of supposedly reconstructing the Psalms' original melodies:
The Original 3000 Year Old Melody of Psalm 148 - Revealed?

Do any of these performances sound like something that you could have heard in the Temple?

 

[Rachel Rachel]

I can't answer your question but thank you for the links. I've often longed to hear the Psalms sung the way they would have been sung in the Temple.

 

[rakovsky]

I am pretty skeptical of Suzanne Haik Vantoura's modern "rediscovery" and "decipherment" of the musical melodies of the Psalms, but I didn't find alot of criticisms of it other than what I read on Wikipedia.

 

[dzheremi]

Why would you go to some European lady's reconstruction when traditional Hebrew (and Aramaic) psalm chanting is available from outside of the European musical systems by Jews from the Middle East? That's a little silly. It's like 'discovering' Assyrian melodies without including any actual Assyrian/Syriac people in it to show how they actually do things. (I know the post also included a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean melody; I mean specifically the "reconstructed" one...that chanting felt very Europeanized.)

While it is without accompaniment, here is the Shema sung according to the Jews of Yemen, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. I think the Aramaic is important, as the Jews had switched to that language several centuries before the birth of Christ (c. 6th century BC, if I remember correctly, which I may not be; I haven't touched Aramaic even slightly since I was in college, over a decade ago by now). So this is probably closer to how things would have sounded:

You can probably imagine how some instruments would have accompanied that.

 

[rakovsky]

Why would you go to some European lady's reconstruction when traditional Hebrew (and Aramaic) psalm chanting is available from outside of the European musical systems by Jews from the Middle East? That's a little silly. It's like 'discovering' Assyrian melodies without including any actual Assyrian/Syriac people in it to show how they actually do things.

I agree with your criticism, which I put in bold, and it is one of the main criticisms that Skeptics of her system make. Like you said, it comes out sounding European.

The answer to your question of why she would try to "discover" the Psalms with some direct method instead of basing her solution on known Middle Eastern melodies is twofold. On one hand, the original melodies have been lost or are uncertain. At least some scholars claim that the Jewish priests ceased handing down the Temple melodies when the Temple was destroyed, and that this was a deliberate decision. As a result, when synagogues later used melodies in their singing, one theory goes, they based their later melodies on the local musical styles. As a result, in this theory, Yemeni Jewish religious music sounds rather Yemeni, Ashkenazi religious music sounds European. This would be analogous to how Yiddish is mostly Germanic with Hebrew and Aramaic mixed in.
And on the other hand, the composer imagined that she was able to directly discover the Psalms' melodies based on some kind of inner logic in the Psalms themselves, as well as in cantillation marks passed down for the Psalms. This would be somewhat analogous to how Reformed Protestants would say that they can find the meaning of Biblical passages and teachings based directly and solely on the Bible itself without reference to Traditions handed down. Their idea is that the Bible is so logical clear and unambiguous that you can go by the Bible alone to interpret it.

Anyway, good response by you. For me the best answer is that the Psalms performed with Middle Eastern melodies and old fashioned wind or stringed accompaniment give approximations.

 

[Dave-W]

May I ask two questions:
Did 1st-2nd Century AD synagogues lack musical instrument accompaniment for their hymns, so that when the Temple was destroyed, the melodies for the songs and their accompaniment were lost?

Synagogues had instruments prior to 70 ad. They got rid of them following the destruction of the Temple as a sign of mourning.

Are there recordings of Psalms in Hebrew that legitimately resemble the sounds of the ancient Psalm singing with accompaniment?

That is nothing but guess work.

King David invented several instruments for Temple worship including a 10 string harp and a 22 string harp. Kinnor and Nevel respectively. The Nevel had the same number of strings as the Hebrew alphabet had letters, and the respective string was played for each letter. If we knew how it was tuned, we would have somewhat of an idea of the melodies of the Psalms. We would have a sequence of pitches, but not the rhythm or tempo.