Yet in the 18th century something changed that would forever alter this path: the people of God were once again exiled; only this time they didn’t recognize it.

The 18th century brought about what has come to be called “The Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason.” This elevation of reason and science over faith was, in the words of Abraham Kuyper, “the expulsion of God from practical and theoretical life.”^[1]

The position that the Church had enjoyed as the dominant influence over all of culture was over. Reason was now in control.

What this meant for worship forms is that active cultivation virtually stopped. The Church still had the hymns that had been nurtured for thousands of years, but now talented poets and musicians stopped writing for the Church and began writing for money. They continued writing in the noble musical forms that had been handed down to them, but with high culture broken off from any moral direction, it eventually all but died away. Whatever high culture now exists is devoid of any Christian values.

Faulker summarizes Elightenment views of music that are diametrically opposed to the Judeo- Christian tradition and that affected all of Western culture:^[2]

• The goal of music is to excite human passions rather than to calm them.
• Music provides entertainment and diversion rather than the shaping of content.
• The best kind of music is characterized by constant variety rather than order and modesty.
• Individuality and originality are virtues in musical composition and performance rather than cultivating a noble tradition.
• The gauge of music’s excellence is popular acclaim rather than its ability to shape content in an appropriate manner.
• The best kind of music is “natural” and unlearned rather than skilled and ordered.
• Music is purely scientific without any ethical dimension.
• Music is unimportant rather than that which orders men’s souls.

Faulkner concludes,

Music (for that matter, all the arts) had become a theological orphan. In fact, no important theological movement, either in the nineteenth or twentieth century, has concerned itself in any profound way with the significance of harmony, order, or beauty in Christian life or [worship]^[3]

With the creation of mass media as a result of the Industrial Revolution, savvy businessmen soon saw the potential of taking advantage of the power of music composed within this new tradition in order to make money. Certain music, for instance, because it created immediate excitement and was intrinsically addictive, provided the perfect medium for making a considerable amount of money. They found that it was not difficult to hook the masses on passionate forms of music. Then, when the masses inevitably desensitized themselves to the immediate affects of such music, the entrepreneurs were always ready with more novelty and more stimulating forms. Such was the birth of pop culture.

Pop culture is essentially a sanitized version of paganism. It is an impostor that borrows liberally from Judeo-Christian tradition, Classical high art, and folk culture to create hybrid forms that slip in the back door and impose pagan values upon the listener without them recognizing them as such.

What was the Church to do with this new tradition? The answer to that question must wait until our next essay.

1. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1931), p. 23—24.
2. Faulkner, pp. 171ff.
3. Ibid., p. 190.

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The most significant change Luther made for hymnody was in insisting that singing be brought back to the congregation in their language—he wanted the hymns to be text-driven. So Luther advocated the writing of new texts in the vernacular and tunes that fit those texts, composed using the Church’s traditional musical forms. This lead Luther to write and encourage rich doctrinal hymnody like his classic work, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”:

A mighty fortress is our God,
a bulwark never failing;
Our helper He, amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing:
For still our ancient foe
doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and power are great,
and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.

Even Luther’s tune to this text was written in the Judeo-Christian tradition, “woven out of Gregorian reminiscences.”^[1]

The second characteristic of hymnody in the Judeo-Christian tradition was also prominent during the Reformation: Reformation hymnody was modest. Those who wrote hymn tunes wanted their music to be ordered and refined. Consider this example from Michael Praetorius (1571-1621):

Equality of measure is indeed to be preserved, lest the harmony be impaired or confused; for to sing without rule and measure is to offend God himself, who arranged all things by number, weight and measure.^[2]

John Calvin (1509-1564) especially insisted that hymnody be modest in character. Calvin understood the danger of music to stir the passions so well that he prohibited the use of instruments in worship. A musician himself, Calvin was not against using instruments per se— he even allowed that they be used in homes for example; but he so wanted to guard against immoderate music in worship that he took the safe way and banned instruments in corporate worship altogether.

Calvin also banned hymns of human composure in favor of singing the Psalms, but again, this had nothing to do with musical form. Calvin was simply trying to direct the Church back to the Scriptures for its direction instead of the damaging doctrines of the Roman Church. Therefore, Psalmody thrived in the Calvinist churches for years to follow.

Because the Church had eradicated any significant pagan influences in the West, the Reformation Church no longer had to worry about being distinct from pagan culture in the same way as in previous times. The musical forms cultivated in the Church were passed down and used with the secular music of the day as well. Remember, by this time in Western history virtually all musical forms, whether in high culture or folk culture, had been cultivated from within the Judeo-Christian tradition. This meant that, similar to the situation of Old Testament Hebrews, the tunes used for folk love songs were of the same noble character as hymn tunes. As Peter Lutkin explains, “Even the love song of Luther’s time was a serious and weighty affair.”^[3]  So-called “secular” culture was secular only in the subject matter of the text, not in the musical forms used.

I’ll use this opportunity to dispel one popular myth about Martin Luther. People often argue that since Luther used “bar tunes,” we should be able to use the kind of music played in bars today. However, these people confuse the common medieval “bar form” that Luther used in many of his hymns with tavern songs. “Bar form” was a common musical form that was nurtured in the Church. It is a form consisting of two identical musical lines followed by a contrasting section: AAB. Many of Luther’s hymns, like “A Might Fortress,” are written in this form, which has nothing to do with taverns.

Yet even though no prominently pagan culture existed in the West during this time, Reformation hymnody was still distinct from segments of secular culture that expressed values contrary to the scriptures. Sometimes, because of distracting associations, Reformation church leaders stayed away from some folk tunes even though the musical form itself was compatible with Christian affections.

A prominent example of this is Martin Luther’s use of a secular folk tune for one of his hymns. Contrary to popular belief, this was the only example of Luther using a secular tune, and even in this case, he eventually changed the tune because he “was embarrassed to hear the tune of his Christmas hymn sung in inns and dance halls.”^[4]

Luther was also careful to avoid what he called “carnal” music—music that stimulated the base passions. He argued that good music could actually “wean [young people] way from carnal and lascivious songs, and interest them in what is good and wholesome.”^[5]

The great English hymn writers, Isaac Watts (1674—1748) and Charles Wesley (1707—1788) fall loosely into this period of Judeo-Christian hymnody as well. Watts is often cited as a great innovator in that he was among the first in England to advocate the singing of hymns of human composure rather than just Psalms. While this is true (English Christians had followed Calvin’s example of singing only inspired Psalms), Watts’ “innovations” were nothing new— Christians had been singing hymns of human composure for centuries, and his work had nothing to do with musical form—all of his hymns were sung to the same tunes his church had always sung. Watts was working well within established Judeo-Christian tradition.

Most of the hymns we sing today from the Judeo-Christian tradition come from this period. No other period in church history has produced such a wealth of word-driven, modest hymnody, both in text and tune, that best express Christian affections distinct from the value systems of pagan culture.

1. Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach (1908), trans by Ernest Newman, 2 vols (Neptune City, NJ: Paganiniana, 1980), 1:16.
2. Syntagma musicum III, 1619 in Faulkner, p. 107.
3. Peter Christian Lutkin, Music in the Church (New York: AMS, 1970), p. 14.
4. Paul Nettl, Luther and Music (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), p. 48.
5. Forell, Luther and Culture, 167.

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I have suggested elsewhere that the civilization of the medieval West was imbued with Christian ideals, and that those ideals were abandoned after the Enlightenment. This assertion provokes several challenges in the popular mind, two of which are particularly significant. The first is that the civilization of medieval Europe was Roman Catholic and, therefore, from a biblical perspective it was not truly Christian at all. The second objection is that the thought of medieval Europe was so influenced by pagan philosophers that the Christian elements were greatly diluted.

To take the second objection first, the primary non-Christian philosopher who influenced medieval theology was Aristotle. His thought was mediated through the theology of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote some 800 years after the beginning of the Middle Ages. Even Thomas did not appropriate Aristotle uncritically, and others (Bonaventure, for example) sharply opposed the use of Aristotelian categories. To be sure, Aristotle did exert an influence, especially during the late medieval period. People who study medieval philosophy, theology, or culture, however, rarely claim that the most influential categories in the medieval West came from pagan philosophers.

What about medieval Catholicism? Two considerations are worth pointing out. First, Catholicism during the Middle Ages was actually a mishmash of competing influences and ideas. Some critics of Romanism habitually confuse medieval Catholicism with Tridentine Catholicism, but this is a significant historical mistake. The trends that the Catholic church canonized at Trent did develop during the Middle Ages. Most of the time, however, those trends had to compete with other perspectives and influences within broad Catholicism. The strength of those competing influences can be illustrated by the success of the evangelical protest movements such as the Arnoldists, Waldenses, and Lollards. Unlike the truly heretical movements (the Cathari and Bogomils, for example), the evangelical groups were launched by emphases that they found within institutional Catholicism. There was a fine line between those who ended up outside the Catholic church and some of those who stayed in. Writers like Groote, Tauler, and Thomas à Kempis managed to preserve several evangelical emphases inside the medieval Catholic church. These evangelical influences ultimately led to the Reformation, a movement that began within the medieval Catholic church. So strong were the evangelical influences within medieval Catholicism that even the Counter-Reformation could not extirpate them. Remnants of the older, evangelical influences survived in people like Fenelon and Guyon.

In any event, the term Christian is used in more than one sense. In the strict and proper sense, it applies only to those who affirm all the fundamentals of the Faith, including the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and justification through faith alone. In this sense, the Roman church of today is not a Christian church and most medieval Catholics were probably not Christian either. In a less technical sense, however, the word Christian can be used to distinguish those who affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy from infidels, pagans, and cultists. In that sense Catholicism can be called Christian, and that is the sense in which the Middle Ages were influenced by Christian categories.

To claim that medieval Western culture was shaped by Christian ideals is simply to assert that the categories in which people thought reflected certain ideals that came from Christianity. Almost no one doubts that the civilization of the medieval West was profoundly influenced by Christianity. Even where some superstition from the ancient paganisms remained, Christian categories came to dominate. The result was a synthesis of ideas that could rightly be called a Christian consensus. This consensus was shared by all classes: by clergy and laity, by statesmen, merchants, artists, and peasants.

The medieval consensus affirmed the existence of a personal-infinite God. This God, acknowledged as the Creator of the world, was both transcendent and immanent. He took a continuing interest in His creation. He ruled over and intervened in the course of history, either by miracle or by Providence.

Medievals saw the universe as an ordered place. This order was thought to be transcendently imposed from the mind of the Creator. The universe was also governed by moral categories, because God’s order included His moral law. Since God is just, violation of His law was thought to bring retribution.

Medievals viewed human beings as sinful, finite, and contingent. They understood that they needed divine help and forgiveness. Their recognition of human limitation and flaw, however, was balanced by a vision of human dignity based upon the imago dei.

Westerners during the Middle Ages believed that Jesus Christ was the God-man. They confessed Him to be the unique revealer of the Father: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.” They worshiped Him as the unique redeemer of humankind Whose death on the cross and resurrection from the dead make salvation possible. Central to the medieval consensus was the necessity of faith and religion. To the medieval mind, faith was the primary avenue for the acquisition of knowledge. Medievals thought that all of reality was so penetrated by mystery that mere observation of facts would never reveal truth. The Scriptures and the church held a privileged position as repositories of truth.

This medieval consensus produced a social order that was thought to reflect divine order and authority. This order developed slowly over the centuries. Early feudalism brought stability out of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. To the feudal system were gradually added other elements, the most important of which were the divine right of kings and the rule of law.

In the medieval social order, the church (in the sense of institutional Christianity) stood above culture. It not only communicated Christian content, it also perpetuated forms that helped people to grasp the significance of that content. High culture embodied the ideals of Christian theology and tradition: philosophy, music, art, architecture, politics, and jurisprudence were profoundly influenced by Christian categories. The folk cultures also came to be permeated with Christian ideals, which manifested themselves in everyday arrangements such as work, home life, crafts, and folk art. To participate in these folk cultures was to gain a practical knowledge of several key Christian categories.

This medieval consensus began to break apart as Nominalism triumphed over Realism in late medieval philosophy. Nominalism led to Baconianism, then to the Enlightenment itself. By the time of Descartes, the “Ages of Faith” had ended and the Christian consensus rapidly unraveled.

With the arrival of the Enlightenment, the medieval world gave way to modernity. An entire conception of reality was rendered obsolete. The process of secularization began to erode even the vestigial authority of Christian values. The secular consensus of the modern world displaced the older medieval consensus almost point by point.

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1. I am certainly not implying that everything about the Church during the Middle Ages was good; it certainly was not. However, we must allow some leeway considering that many of the major doctrines were still being clarified during this time.
2. We find our roots in this Church, no matter how you cut it.
3. The Roman Catholic Church did not full become what it is today until the Counsel of Trent (1554-1563). It wasn’t until this counsel that the deuterocanonical books were confirmed to be on par with Scripture, church tradition was established as a rule of faith, justification was officially declared to be offered upon the basis of faith and works, the seven sacraments were reaffirmed and the Eucharist was pronounced as a true propitiatory sacrifice, the practice of withholding the cup from the laity was confirmed, and other doctrines such as purgatory and the invocation of saints were reaffirmed.
4. Church leaders and theologians prior to Trent were a mixture of truth and error. And while some of their errors were certainly gross, their overall values and worldview was biblical. This is what would have influenced musical forms. Veneration of Mary, the papal system, and other gross errors would not have affected musical form in any way. Values affect form.
5. Our ability to discern their errors today is a result of the struggles they endured to define and systematize biblical doctrine.
6. The Reformers retained from the Roman Church that which was biblical, including their musical forms and liturgical structure.

I plan to post more on this issue tomorrow.

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First, Medieval Hymns were text-driven. Hebrew plain chants now developed into more refined Ambrosian and Gregorian chant; yet these melodies retained an attention to the natural rise and fall of the doctrinally-rich hymn text. During this time, hymns were used to combat heresy and promote sound doctrine, as seen in this Christological example by Ambrose of Milan (ca. 337—397), the “Father of Christian Hymnody”:

O splendor of God’s glory bright,
Who bringest forth the light from Light;
O Light of light, light’s Fountain-spring;
O Day, our days enlightening:

Second, Medieval Hymns were modest. Church leaders were against what they called “passionate” music. Stapert explains:

Many musical references deal with passion. For example, Isidor of Pelusium warned against misusing music “to arouse passion,” and Basil warned against being “brought down to the passions of the flesh by the pleasure of song.” Such statements sound very strange in a culture such as ours, which places such a high premium on passion, which values intense emotion and the music that stimulates it, and which prizes excitement and the music that provides a “high” or a “rush.”^[1]

These Church leaders were not against expressions of affection to God. On the contrary, good hymns express our hearts to God as Augustine (354—430) articulates:

Sing to him in jubilation. This is what acceptable singing to God means: to sing jubilantly. But what is that? It is to grasp the fact that what is sung in the heart cannot be articulated in words. . . . To whom, then is this jubilation more fittingly offered than to God who surpasses all utterance? You cannot speak of him because he transcends our speech; and if you cannot speak of him, yet may not remain silent, what else can you do but cry out in jubilation, so that your heart may tell its joy without words, and the unbounded rush of gladness not be cramped by syllables? Sing skillfully to him in jubilation.^[2]

Yet as I argued in a previous essay, the music should not elicit some kind of emotion; it is the expression of emotion that have already been elicited by an encounter with God in his Word. This is the kind of thing that these Church leaders were warning against—music that stirs up base passions.

Third, Medieval hymns were distinct from pagan forms. Again, like their fathers before them, medieval church leaders spoke out against the pagan music of their day. Consider this indictment of pagan music by John Chrysostom (347—407):

What can one say of the songs themselves, crammed as they are with all uncleanness, introducing monstrous amours, and unlawful connections, and subversions of houses, and tragic scenes without end . . . ? And, what is still more grievous, that young women are present at these things . . . and in the midst of wanton young men acting a shameless part with their disorderly songs, with their foul words, with their devilish harmony. Tell me then: do you still inquire, “Whence come adulteries? Whence fornications? Whence violations of marriage?”^[3]

Again, notice that the argument against pagan music was more than merely associations, although it certainly included that, but an argument based in the fact that the music itself communicated evil messages.

Because the Medieval Church was so much against pagan culture, and since it progressively gained more and more influence and control over all aspects of Western culture, the Church eventually eliminated all pagan influence in the West for all practical purposes.^[4]  In other words, the Christian Church nurtured the cultural forms, and those forms trickled down and influenced the non-sacred music of high culture and folk culture as well. Unfortunately, as the Roman Church began to err in its doctrine and practice, congregational singing began to wane until it was all but non-existent. Yet even while congregations were not singing, musical forms were still being cultivated consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition. This cultivation provided rich musical forms that spread throughout Western culture and created an environment ripe for ordinate expression of Christian affections.

There are many hymn texts and tunes from this period in the tradition that we still sing today.

• “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” by Aurelius Prudentius is from the 5 th century, and its tune, DIVINUM MYSTERIUM is from the 11th century.
• “All Glory Laud and Honor” by Theodulph of Orleans was written around 820.
• “All Creatures of our God and King” by Francis of Assisi was written in 1225.
• “Be Thou My Vision” is an Irish hymn from the 8th century.
• “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” was written by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1153.
• The tune we sing to “When I Survey” (HAMBURG) is based on a Gregorian chant.

1. Stapert, p. 86.
2. Expositions of the Psalms 8, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000-2004), p. 401 in Stapert, p. 91.
3. Homilies on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians , trans. Talbot W. Chambers in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , Vol. 12, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), p. 70.
4. Faulkner, p. 71.

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Like Synagogue worship, New Testament worship had no instrumental accompaniment at all, a practice that would have certainly continued as persecution heightened and churches were forced underground.

As the Church spread after the closing of the New Testament Canon, churches continued to nurture the hymn forms that had been handed down to them. And as Christians continued writing new hymn texts and cultivating poetic and musical forms, the three characteristics of Hebrew hymnody remained.

First, early Church hymns were text-driven. Church leaders continued to praise the use of Psalms in corporate worship, and the new texts they wrote were filled with robust doctrinal truth. Here, for example, is an example of an early hymn written by Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 35 —ca. 107):

Very flesh, yet Spirit too;
Uncreated, and yet born;
God-and-Man in One agreed
Very-Life-in-Death indeed,
Fruit of God and Mary’s seed;
At once impassable and torn
By pain and suffering here below:
Jesus Christ, whom as our Lord we know.^[3]

Their musical forms were borrowed from Hebrew forms and thus continued the tradition of melodies following the natural rise and fall of the text. Known as plain chant, this early form of singing was just a step above natural human vocal inflection. The forms would have developed little during this time however since the church was under considerable persecution.

Second, early Church hymns were modest. Church leaders were unanimous in their warnings against what they called “extravagant” music in worship. Consider this statement by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150—ca. 215), for instance:

But we must abominate extravagant music, which enervates men’s souls, and leads to changefulness—now mournful, and then licentious and voluptuous, and then frenzied and frantic.^[4]

Rather, Clement argued that the church’s hymnody should employ “temperate harmonies.”^[5]

This emphasis was in stark contrast to the culture in which the Church lived, and thus, early Church hymns were distinct from the pagan culture around them. Greek and Roman culture of the first few centuries was far from benign. Stapert describes the character of Greek and Roman culture:

But most of them featured ecstatic, even frenzied and orgiastic, rites. Ecstatic rituals were not uncommon in Greek and Roman societies, going back centuries before the Christian era. The rituals associated with the worship of Dionysus or his Roman equivalent, Bacchus, are the classic examples of this type. Drunken revelry, wild music, frenzied dancing, and flagellation and mutilation were their hallmarks.^[6]

Play an example of early Greek music

So like their Hebrew fathers before them, early church leaders soundly condemned the pagan musical forms of the culture in which they lived. This rejection of pagan musical forms also led most church leaders to renounce any instrumental accompaniment as well. Consider Clement:

When a man occupies his time with flutes, stringed instruments, choirs, dancing, Egyptian krotala and other such improper frivolities, he will find that indecency and rudeness are the consequences.^[7]

They rejected instruments altogether for two reasons: First, they did not want to associate themselves at all with pagan worship practices. But even more importantly, they believed that the particular instruments used in pagan worship, for the most part, shaped the content in evil ways. Notice that Clement bases his argument not merely in associations, but in the fact that the sounds of such instruments intrinsically lead to “indecency and rudeness.” Remember, what Clement meant by “flutes” and other instruments should not be interpreted by our modern instruments or even the instruments of the Old Testament. These were instruments whose sounds, evidently, were incompatible with Christian affections. Nevertheless, these leaders did perhaps go a little bit too far in their rejection of all instruments whatsoever; yet we can understand why they did so with their pagan cultural conditions.

1. Richard Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), p. 30.
2. Examples include Philippians 2:6—11, 1 Timothy 3:16, 2 Timothy 2:11—13, John 1:1—18, Ephesians 1:1—11 and 2:14—16, Colossians 1:15—20, and Hebrews 1:3.See Wesley W. Isenberg, “New Testament Hymnody” in Carl Schalk, ed., Key Words in Church Music: Definition Essays on Concepts, Practices, and Movements of Thought in Church Music (St. Louis: Concordia, 1978) p. 184.
3. Epistle to the Ephesians, trans. Maxwell Staniforth; revised by Andrew Louth, Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 63.
4. Stromateis VI 11, 89:4—90:2, trans. In Skeris, Croma Qeon, p. 78 in Quentin Faulkner, Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church (Westport,CT:Greenwood,1996),p.69.
5. Paidagogos 2, 4 (GCS Clem. I 184 Stählin) in Johannes Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983), p. 68.
6. Stapert, p. 135.
7. Paidagogos in Quasten, p. 61.

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The first mention of music in the Bible is in Genesis 4. Verses 17—22 list Cain’s descendants, and specifically those who began the development of various cultural and social skills. Jabal was “the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock,” Tubal-cain was “the forger of all instruments of bronze and silver,” and Jubal was “the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.”

There is an important truth in this revelation: man creates music; man nurtures cultural forms. Now it is true that music existed before man did. We read in Job 38:7 that “the morning stars sang together” when God created the earth.^[1] So music, in and of itself, is something that God created and gave to man as a gift. But songs are not created by God; people write songs. And ever since the Fall of mankind, anything that people create is potentially an expression of sin. In fact, just after we read that Jubal was the father of music in Genesis 4, we find the first recorded song in Scripture. This song was not an expression of praise to God or even a wholesome folk song; it was a song of vengeance by Jubal’s father, Lamech:

Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold,
then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.

This only goes to demonstrate why we must evaluate all music—music is human expression and can therefore be expression of good or evil.

Old Testament Hebrew Hymns

We cannot consider the development of the Church’s hymnody without first considering the music of the Old Testament Hebrews. Christianity began, of course, as an offshoot of faithful Judaism, especially in its worship forms. Understanding the roots of Hebrew music will help us understand the hymnody of the early Church.

In this consideration, we must be careful not to transplant our perception of Hebrew music today and simply assume that David’s music sounded exactly the same. Hebrew music in Old Testament times was very different than what we know as modern Jewish music. Jewish music today is a complex mix of Western influences (because Jews were scattered all over the world until the early 1900s), Arabic traditions, and certainly some traditional folk influences. And our perception of Jewish music is usually filtered through pop culture and Hollywood.

The other important factor in our consideration of Hebrew hymnody that we must remember is that Israel was a Theocracy; that is, their religion, politics, and social life were all intertwined, unlike our separation of church and state today. This is important because not all of the music recorded for us in the Old Testament was intended for corporate worship. Music is used for all sorts of purposes in the Bible: there are work songs,  war songs, love songs, songs for entertainment, and songs of derision, mourning, and lamentation. Since religion and society were intertwined in Hebrew culture, the Old Testament relates many common uses of music in everyday life. So as we evaluate the hymnody of Hebrew worship, we are limiting ourselves to those songs intended to be sung as part of corporate worship.

Contrary to popular opinion, we do have a fairly accurate idea of what Hebrew hymns would have sounded like. By deciphering markings within the Hebrewsym Scriptures themselves, exploring the kinds of instruments the Bible tells us were used in the Temple, and by investigating various descendants from Hebrew tribes that left Israel prior to the Exile, scholars have been able to reproduce tunes that were used in Hebrew worship.

Play this Psalm

There are several chracteristics to note when we consider the tunes, instruments, and character of Hebrew hymnody. First, Hebrew hymns were text-driven. The fact that the musical notation was part of the accents of the words themselves demonstrates this, along with the fact that the melodies follow the natural rise and fall of the text.

Second, Hebrew hymns were modest. Their melodies are simple and constrained, and the instruments used were of modest character, especially during vocal singing. For example, we know that while louder instruments like trumpets were used to signal various events in Hebrew social life and even occasionally in worship, when the Levites sang in corporate worship, they were accompanied only by softer instruments that would not cover up the words.^[2] Even their percussion was modest: “only one pair of cymbals was permitted,”^[3] and they were small instruments used to conduct the group, similar to a conductor’s baton.^[4] Today’s usage of percussion instruments to mark an even beat would have been impossible in that day since Hebrew music did not have a steady beat like ours does.^[5] Even their singing was modest, contrary to popular belief that their music would have been loud and noisy.^[6]

Many people have assumed that Hebrew music was loud and raucous because they assume that it was similar to other Middle Eastern music. But our final observation of ancient Hebrew hymnody will clear up this misconception: Hebrew hymn forms were distinct from pagan musical forms. The first two features of Hebrew hymnody that we have already discussed stand in stark contrast to the pagan music of the day. Stapert explains:

. . . Jewish psalmody was word-oriented, a characteristic that set it apart from the music of the sacrificial rites of the Israelites’ pagan neighbors. Pagan sacrificial music typically featured the frenzy-inducing sound of the loud double-reed instruments and the rhythms of orgiastic dancing. Words were superfluous. Temple music was different from pagan music in all these respects: words were primary in it, and they governed the rhythms; instrumental accompaniment was by stringed instruments that supported the monophonic vocal line, perhaps with some heterophonic embellishments,^[7] but never covering or distracting attention away from the words; instruments were used independently only for signaling purposes, as when trumpets and cymbals signaled the beginning of the psalm and the places at the end of sections where the worshipers should prostrate themselves.^[8]

Play an example of ancient Egyptian music

The cultural forms nurtured for corporate worship would have influenced the non-worship music of ancient Israel as well. We can observe this by the fact that the poetic forms of worship hymns in the Old Testament and the tunes that accompany them are virtually indistinguishable from their work songs, war songs, and love songs. The difference is only in subject matter.

When Israel was taken captive in 586 BC, active cultivation of musical forms would have slowed considerably, especially with the high art music, but the culture of Israel nevertheless remained distinct from their pagan captors. With no Temple, the Hebrews worshiped in Synagogues, and since instrumental accompaniment was associated with Temple worship, singing in the Synagogue was unaccompanied.

Today, we enjoy singing many Old Testament Psalm texts, although you may not realize it. Many hymns by Isaac Watts, for example, are paraphrases of various Psalms. For example, “O God Our Help in Ages Past” is from Psalm 90, “Jesus Shall Reign” is from Psalm 72, and “Joy to the World” is from Psalm 98.

1. Whether “morning stars” refers to angels or actual stars does not change the fact that music existed before man.
2. James McKinnon, “The Question of Psalmody in the Ancient Synagogue,” Early Music History 6 (1986), pp. 162— 163.
3. Alfred Sendrey, Music in Ancient Israel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1969), p. 256.
4. Ibid., pp. 376—377.
5. Ibid., p. 377.
6. See Ibid., pp. 253—255.
7. In other words, melody was prominent, while there may have been some modest harmony.
8. Calvin R. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 153.

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