Singing in Hebrew

One of the choirs I sing in is rehearsing Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, which is one of the few pieces in the standard choral repertoire in Hebrew. Unlike singing in Latin, in which most of the words have identifiable English equivalents, or German, which is a strange mixture of the familiar (the function words, some of the content words and the word order) and the unfamiliar (most of the content words), singing in Hebrew offers very little familiarity. 

The first section of the first movement is:

Urah, hanevel, v’chinor!
A-irah shaḥar 

which could be absolutely anything, and I wouldn’t possibly be able to guess. (The score uses transliterations rather than Hebrew script. Very few people can read Hebrew, and it’s written right-to-left, which would be almost impossible to fit under standard music notation. (I have seen a Christian hymn in Arabic, and the music is written right-to-left.)) 

The Latin is more familiar, and I would possibly be able to guess:

exsurge, psalterium et cithara; exsurgam diluculo

It’s ‘Awake, psaltery and harp: I will rouse the dawn!’ (108:2) in the King James Version – Hebrew numbering is different.

The rest of the first movement is Psalm 100, including

Hari’u l’Adonai kol ha’arets. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands.
and
D’u ki Adonai Hu Elohim. Know that the Lord, He is God.

Adonai and Elohim are found in any discussion of the Tanakh/Old Testament. They are both used to refer to and address God. Elohim means ‘gods/Gods’ and Adonai ‘my lords/Lords’. Both are in the plural, which would go beyond the scope of this post to discuss (see the Wikipedia article). 

ha’arets means ‘the people of the land’. Exactly which people(s) and land(s) has changed over time.  (Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haaretz

The second movement mixes psalm 23 (boy or counter-tenor solo and women) and part of psalm 2 (men). Apart from Adonai again, there are no familiar words. From Adonai ro-i I could guess that ro-i is ‘shepherd’ or ‘my shepherd’ or ‘is shepherd’ or ‘is my shepherd’. (Hebrew seems to have no equivalent to English function words.) 

The first words of psalm 2 are Lamah rag’shu goyim, ‘Why do the nations rage?’. I first overlooked lamah until I remembered the words of Jesus on the cross: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani (Mark) or Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani (Matthew) My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? (I am typing this on Good Friday – our gospel reading today was from John, which doesn’t include these words.) A Hebrew dictionary confirms that lamah is ‘why’. (The Hebrew of Psalm 22 has azavtani. Sabachthani is a transliteration from Aramaic to Greek.)

Goyim was sometimes used to refer to Israelites, but later came to mean ‘other nations/people/heathen’ (your attitude will influence your translation and vice versa see 1, 2, 3).

Because I don’t sing the word m’shiḥo, I almost overlooked it. Al Adonai v’al m’shiḥo is ‘Against the Lord and his anointed/chosen one/messiah/Messiah’.

The third movement is Psalm 131, which includes Yis’rael, obviously ‘Israel’. It concludes with Psalm 133 verse 1: Hineh mah tov, ‘behold how good’. Tov also occurs in Mazel tov, ‘good fortune, congratulations’. [PS 3 April: I also spotted, also not sung by my part, Ach tov vahesed in Psalm 23 – ‘goodness and mercy’. Hesed is found in some discussions of the Tanakh/Old Testament.

Hebrew is phonetically and there’s generally little problem pronouncing shorter words like most of the above, but there are long single words, or two or three in a row Shiv’t’cha umishan’techa (‘thy rod and thy staff’) (sung slowly by the sopranos and altos) and V’nashlichah mimenu avoteimu (‘and cast away their cords from us’) (sung very fast by the tenors and basses). 

There’s also a lot to say about the music, but the focus here is on the words and the language.]

I hadn’t thought that I knew many Hebrew words apart from names and extensively Christianised words like hallelujah, hosanna, amen, cherubim, seraphim and messiah/Messiah, but this article shows many more I wouldn’t have thought of. Many of these have come through Greek, Latin or Yiddish. I suspect that more of these have entered US English than Australian. (This raises the question of what an ‘English word’ is.)

Apart from all these church words, probably my second encounter with Hebrew was the modern secular song Havah nagila, which we learned in year 7 and which I can still remember most of, though I don’t know what any of them mean. I might just have known that hava nagila means ‘Let us rejoice’. Reading through the word just now I noticed that slow section towards the end has the words Uru, aḥim! Awake, awake, brothers! I assume uru is the same word as the biblical urah (above, if you’ve forgotten).

Probably my third encounter with Hebrew was James Michener’s novel The source, which uses an archeological dig in Israel to frame a social and religious history of the area, mixing historical and fictional people and events. 

Note: I am not an expert on Hebrew. This is my personal reflections arising from one choral work.

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