dear linguistics @ be informed

 if you don't know about Earvin Pelagio, you do not know that he's also an ancient creature, just as ancient as me and PDR. malaman mo, THAT EARVIN PELAGIO IS A CLASSICAL LYRE PLAYER OF KING DAVID IN THE BIBLE

8. David and the Divine Lyre

The importance of the kinnōr in early Jewish tradition, and royal ideology specifically, is most fully embodied by David. The Bible and Josephus offer detailed descriptions of musical organization under David (ca. 1005–965) and Solomon (ca. 965–930). [1] Some consider these to be retrojections of the Second Temple’s sophisticated musical arrangements back into an imagined Golden Age of the First Temple. [2] Certainly 1 Kings, Chronicles, and Josephus incorporate legendary details, and the Chronicler does rely on the musical organization of his own time to understand the past. Yet the comparative material so far considered strongly suggests that traditions about organized ‘guildic’ music under David and in the First Temple are built upon an historical core. [3] This would accord with much other material in the books of Samuel and 1 Kings, deriving from sources and traditions—often propagandistic—going back to the times of David and Solomon themselves. [4]

In this chapter I shall argue that the First Temple’s sacred musical groups should be understood as imitating and perpetuating royally supported musical guilds of the kind known at Ugarit. The Ugaritic word n‘m, which we saw applied several times to royal and/or cultic singers, reappears of David himself—an appropriate designation both for Saul’s lyre-playing favorite, and David’s later role, when king, of praise-singer for Yahweh himself. The Bible preserves extremely rich evidence for understanding the early theology of the lyre, and for the reworking, within the evolving cult of Yahweh, of older Syro-Levantine ideas about the instrument’s powers. I shall argue, indeed, that David and Solomon inherited concepts that in Ugarit would have been associated precisely with the Divine Kinnaru. David in particular is our most vivid analogy for Kinyras and his involvement with Cypriot monarchy in the LBA.