“It’s not just a question of what the theatre practices were like at the time… I feel that you can, if you wanted to, reconstruct everything except the audience. And the real exciting thing in the theatre is how you bridge the gap between what’s happening on the stage and what’s happening in the audience - because we only do it for the audience.”

William Christie in a talk accompanying the DVD of the Rameau’s opera - Les Boreades

William Christie made this statement in regard to French Baroque opera, on which he is a leading expert, supporting the use of modern dance techniques to act as a cultural interpreter within his production of Les Boreades. The modern opera-goer has grown up in a society whose values, structures, cultural and linguistic associations and assumptions are totally different from that of the mid-eighteenth century courtiers who were Rameau’s audience. In addition their life experiences, how they are maintained, life expectancies, sanitation and a thousand other factors were very different from the modern audience. Indeed, the use of familiar words, apparently analogous events etc. may be faux amis leading the viewer even further astray. For Baroque Opera, we can compensate for this problem by learning relevant socio-cultural information that would have been in the bones of the original audience but must be studied, as one studies the values and literature of an extinct civilization, by the modern opera-goer. We can do this because scholars have examined and digested masses of official and unofficial documents, historical and philosophical writings, music, paintings, clothing, buildings etc. from the period and social context that produced French Baroque opera. Thus, properly prepped, we can understand, intellectually if not viscerally, cultural allusions, linguistic nuances etc. as they were understood by the original audience.

Even the cultural products much closer to our period require this sort of treatment. For example, the attitudes to women displayed by Verdi and Dickens have more in common with the following famous song from Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) than they have with attitudes in our own society.

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can sooth her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom--is to die.

Unlike the society of eighteenth century France, we have only miniscule sources of information about the societies of ancient Israel and Judah that produced the earlier texts in the Hebrew Bible. Our few sources of information – the biblical text, a handful of inscriptions, archaeology - are not only sparse but ambiguous and reflect the reality or hopes of different groups, in different situations at different periods. In addition, all of the earlier texts underwent a change of script and orthography and possibly some degree of editing in later periods.

It is interesting to consider the interpretations likely placed on the following quotes from the Psalms (adapted from the New Revised Standard Version):

Ø Between the Assyrian siege that failed to capture Jerusalem (c. 701 BCE) and the first Neo-Babylonian conquest of the city (c. 597 BCE). During this period the Kingdom of Judah remained the sole Israelite state under the seemingly divinely guaranteed rule of the ancient Davidic dynasty;

Ø In the 597-586 BCE when a king of the Davidic dynasty, selected by the king of Babylon, was still enthroned in a Jerusalem conquered, controlled and partially depopulated by the Babylonians;

Ø In the Babylonian Exile (c. 586-516 BCE) when longing for a restoration of Zion (see Ps. 126);

Ø In the early Second Temple period (c. 516-400 BCE) when descendents of the Davidic dynasty were still in evidence and there remained hope for their restoration to power;

Ø In the late Second Temple period (c. 200 BCE-70 CE) when it was no longer remembered who was descended from the Davidic dynasty and messianic ideas were rife many of which involved a political liberation from foreign rule under a scion of the House of David and some of which (see War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness) were apocalyptic;

Ø In the early post-Second Temple period (c. 70-200 CE) when messianic ideas were fundamental to Jewish eschatology.

Psalms 48

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within its citadels God has shown himself a sure defense. Then the kings assembled, they came on together. As soon as they saw it, they were astounded; they were in panic, they took to flight, trembling took hold of them there, pains as of a woman in labor …. As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the LORD of hosts, in the city of our God, which God establishes forever….

Psalms 2

Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and his anointed, saying, "Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us." He who sits in the heavens laughs; the LORD has them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, "I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill." I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth….

I The Purpose of this Web Page (detailed explanation below)

To enable advanced students of Biblical Hebrew to recover, as closely as possible, the pronunciation that a scribe in Jerusalem 700-600 BCE would have used in reading poetry to upper class Judeans or members of the king’s court with the aim of better appreciating Biblical Hebrew poetry and wordplay whose effectiveness depends on similarities of sound[1].

Box 1 - Sense and Nonsense from Robert Alter

In his justly influential book The Art of Biblical Poetry, Robert Alter correctly writes -

“…even where there are doubts about the poem's meaning, it may exhibit perfectly perceptible formal patterns that tell us something about the operations of the underlying poetic system.”[2]

Equally the following is justified -

"The actual sound of biblical poetry will remain at least to some extent a matter of conjecture. Certain distinctions among consonants have shifted or blurred over the centuries, and what is worse, we cannot be entirely sure we know where accents originally fell, what the original system of vowels and syllabification was, or whether there were audible changes in these phonetic features during the several hundred years spanned by biblical poetry. (The indications of stress and vocalization of the Masoretic text were codified well over a millennium after the composition of most of the poems and centuries after Hebrew had ceased to be the vernacular.) On the level of meaning, although comparative Semitic philology in a remarkable age of archaeological discovery has done heroic work in restoring the original sense of poorly understood words, it would be foolhardy to imagine that we can always recover the real nuances of biblical terms, or the relation between poetic diction and colloquial diction (of which there is no record) or between poetic diction and other specialized usages of the ancient language." [3]

However, he goes on from there to use a transcription system based on the vowels and some of the consonants (eg. waw transcribed as v ) of current Israeli pronunciation which we have every reason to believe are substantially different from the pronunciation of biblical Hebrew at the time of writing ([EBHP] and [LBHP]. It is as if we were to say: (1) we cannot know exactly how Geoffrey Chaucer would have pronounced his poetry; therefore, (2) we will read it as if it were educated New York English of today!

An example of the result is found at the foot of p. 5 (Gen. 4:23-24)

Robert Alter's transcription -

ʿaˈdah vetziˈlah sheˈmaʿan qoˈli

neˈšei ˈlemekh haʾˈzena ʾimraˈti

ki ˈʾish haˈragti lefitzˈʿi

veˈyeled leḥaburaˈti

ki šivʿaˈtayim ˈyuqam ˈqayin

veˈlemekh shivˈʿim veshivˈʿah

The following would be my attempt to approach much closer to the original pronunciation -

Step 1 */EBHP/^{^[4]}

Step 2 *[EBHP]^{^[5]}

^caˈdâ waṣilˈlâ šˈma^cn qōˈlî

naˌšay ˈlamk haʾˈzinna(ː) ʾimraˈtî

ˌkiː ˈʾiīš haˈragti(ː) lạpiṣˈ^cî

wạˈyald lạḥabbūraˈtî

ˌkiː šib^caˈtaym yuqˈqam ˈqayn

wạˈlamk šibˈ^cīm wɐšibˈ^câ

ʕɐˈdɐː wɐsˁɪlˈlɐː ʃɐ̆ˈmɐʕn kˁoːˈliː

nɐʃˌɛy ˈlɐmk hɐʔˈzɪnnɐˑ ʔɪmɾɐˈtiː

ˌkiː ˈʔiːʃ hɐˈɾɐgtiˑ lɐpɪsˁˈʕiː

wɐˈyɐld lɐħɐbbuːɾɐˈtiː

ˌkiː ʃɪbʕɐˈtɐym yʊkˁˈkˁɐm ˈkˁɐyn

wɐˈlɐmk ʃɪbˈʕiːm wɐʃɪbˈʕɐː

See Short Poems of the Hebrew Bible

You will note that Alter's transcription eliminates vowel and consonant length - a very prominent feature of Ancient Hebrew. It is interesting to hear how the three major reconstructions of this originally oral poem compare.

*[EBHP]	**[TH]*	[*BH_IH*] based on Alter's Transcription
ʕɐˈdɐː wɐsˁɪlˈlɐː ʃɐ̆ˈmɐʕn kˁoːˈliː nɐʃˌɛy ˈlɐmk hɐʔˈzɪnnɐˑ ʔɪmɾɐˈtiː	ʕɔːˈðɔː wəsˁilˈlɔː ʃәˈmɐːʕɐn kˁoːˈliː nәʃˌẹː ˈlɛːmɛx hɐʔˈzẹːnnɔ

Box 1 - Sense and Nonsense from Robert Alter

Box 2 - Wordplay in the Hebrew Bible

Box 3 - The Functions of Puns

A Few Introductory Words