Biblical instruments revisited

Abstract

This book gets off to an unfortunate start. The opening sentence of the Introduction—‘The present publication is the first compendium of musical instruments and instrumental terminology in the Bible’—is quite simply untrue. The book was published initially in Russian in 2003, and in London in 2009, and the English translation largely prepared, according to the Introduction, in 2006, whereas my own book (Musical instruments of the Bible) was published in 2002, Joachim Braun's Music in ancient Israel/Palestine in English in that same year and his original German text in 1999 (the latter is cited in her bibliography, which makes the statement even odder), and Shlomo Hofman's invaluable Miqra’ey musica, which lists every single biblical reference to music or instruments, as long ago as 1974, and his Music in the Talmud in 1989. However, this is a book of major scholarship and the most important contribution to its field for many a long year. Its coverage of translations of the Bible into pretty well all European, and a number of non-European, languages will be of particular importance to readers of Early Music who may be dealing with iconography or with the performance of musical settings of biblical texts, for it will clarify just what the artists thought they were illustrating and what the composers, each in their own time, may have thought that their biblical authors were writing about.