Jane, the reason I don't respond to much of what you write is not that I am ignoring it, but that I simply don't understand a lot of it. NOT because I have a little mind (how un-Christian of you to say that, incidentally), but because when you go off into the Knights of the Templar and all your ravings about the pagans I am simply befuddled, because there does not seem to be much reality to what you are talking about. I must say you sound sort of turned on, excited, or whatever, though!!!
I am starting to get more understanding of where you are coming from with the swastikas and subjects like that, though. That is all biker stuff. I have never been around outlaw motorbike gangs, but Hunter S. Thompson wrote a book about them that I read, and I do know that there is plenty of sex, drugs and drunkenness, and in fact the Hell's Angels require women who want to hang out with them to be initiated by having sex with all the men in the club during a party.
I am not sure how you could say that is all just wonderful and then accuse me of being a witch and a homosexual and satanic when I am a nice heterosexual married woman, but whatever. It does seem a little hypocritical to me, though, to assume that I am a sinister influence when it looks like your past experiences have been VERY colorful, something which I would not hold against you, incidentally, or judge you harshly about, even as you judge me when I have one of the most stable, boring, respectable and monogamous middle-class housewife kind of lives you could ever imagine.
One thing you should know about the way SI works, Jane, is that if you make a statement that sounds totally outlandish--like there being no drums in the Bible--it is your responsibility to prove that, not the responsibility of the person who challenges your information. However, because I knew you were wrong, I did go to the library today to see what the true story was. I read Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Catholic Encyclopedia, and they both simply described how music, and drums, have been with us since the beginning of time, and that in every society, drums have usefulness for communication between villages, but even more importantly, they are SACRED instruments used in religious ceremonies. Nothing negative or satanic was mentioned in either book, however.
The library did not have the religious encyclopedia you mentioned, but they did have a reference book called "Encyclopedia of Bible Life". This is what it had to say about drums in the Bible:
Israel's Percussion Instruments
"In addition to trumpets, timbrels, or framed hand-drums (Hebrew toph), were used in the time of Moses to accompany the song and sacred dance of Miriam and her attendant women (Ex. 15:20) as they chanted antiphonally of how Jehovah had tossed into the sea, riders and horses of their Egyptian enemies. Before 3000 B.C., as we learn from a cylinder-seal of Queen Shub-ad, the eastern neighbors of the Hebrews were accompanying their psalms and enlivening their royal banquets with timbrels, or tambourines. Some of these had single heads and were rectangular, others were round, like the large timbrel carried by a woman in stone at Nippur about 2000 B.C., now shown at the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. (for pictures, see Francis W. Calpin's Music of the Sumerians, plate 111.)
The loud-sounding cymbals of David's sacred orchestra accented the rhythm of Temple worship through the centuries. Josephus thinks these were flat, made of heavy bronze, which, when clashed together by the musical director, led the others. Some Assyrian carvings show cup-shaped cymbals with short handles. A few translators think the cymbals were castanets, but this seems unlikely." (pp. 289-290)
So the drums were timbrels, but timbrels were of varying sizes. Certainly while you are thinking of them as tambourines, some of them were round, some were square, and some were large. One of the things that strikes me is the the Bible is absolutely filled with music. Here, also from "Encyclopedia of Bible Life", is a more general description of their music and musical instruments, once again referring to drums:
"Although the Jewish people excelled in music as in no other art and have continued to do so down to the days of Mendelssohn, Rubenstein, and Menuhin, they have left no unique musical instruments which archaeologists have been able to lay before us to compare with the golden lyres of the Sumerians or the long silver trumpets from the Tomb of Tutankhamum.Mosaic laws against depiction of men prevented their showing us in frieze, or on tablet or durable metal, how they played or what instruments they used. A few instruments appear on Jewish coins of the second century A.D. But we know that Hebrews shared their musical equipment with surrounding nations--nations which have left us pictorial representations of musical instruments. Harps, lyres, pipes, psalteries, horns, trumpets, and drums traveled from country to country in the Mediterranean world."
I am not sure if you deliberately misrepresented what you found in your reference books, Jane, but I looked in pretty much the same ones and found a totally different story. I have no idea what your motive for not telling the truth about drums in the Bible would be, but I must say that at the least, you have a pretty big misunderstanding of their history. You really should be cautious about making things up, because once people at SI find you are not credible on one thing you make a big deal about, they will have trouble believing your statements in general.
Isn't "Thou Shalt Not Lie!" one of the Ten Commandments? |
