Learning to Read the Masoretic Accents: A Guide to the Prosodic Phrase Structure of the Hebrew Bible

The Masoretic accents of the Hebrew Bible, commonly known as cantillation accents, constitute a system of notation that encodes the prosodic phrase structure of Biblical Hebrew (Pitcher 2020, 2023; see also Dresher 1994). The traditional scholarly framework for analyzing these notations almost entirely ignores their melodies, relegating their “music” to the practice of cantillation, and instead treats the disjunctive accents as a series of graded pauses that segment the text. This paper presents an integrated, linguistic analysis of the common features that the graphemes are acknowledged to represent: melody, segmentation, stress, and meaning. Particularly, the graphemes of conjunctive and disjunctive accents are described as representations of pitch accents (i.e., pitch fluctuations on the stressed syllables of words), while disjunctive graphemes additionally represent boundary tones (i.e., pitch fluctuations at the edges of words) (Pitcher 2020; 2023). In other words, the graphemes constitute a prosodic orthography, representing key features of the prosodic phonology of Tiberian Hebrew and the prosodic phrase structure of the orally performed biblical text. Biblical Hebrew texts that exhibit the two different systems of notation—one for the Twenty-one Books and the other for the Three Books—will be reviewed, and participants will learn how to recognize the prosodic phrase structure of the Hebrew Bible through the iconic features of the graphemes. Further, recommendations will be proposed for how to pursue research into the accentual system in relation to exegesis.