Church Music

by Bob Millard

The Children of Jubal

Many are the ways to approach the Bible. I have twice read it through. Individual books are studied through a Sunday school term. And there are special places I like to go when my heart is weary. And then, there's Bible meandering. Sometimes this leads me someplace, sometimes it doesn"t, but there are worse places to kill an hour.

One night, while meandering in my Bible, I casually wondered: What was the first reference to music in scripture? As you might expect, it's in Genesis.

Genesis 4:21, to be exact. Having found it, I almost logged it away among the thousands of bits of info-flotsam I carry in my head. But dwelling on its context, I realized a deeper kinship between myself and Cain, ‘the bad son" of Adam and Eve, than I ever imagined.

I didn't get there immediately, however. Intrigued, I delved into The Interpreter's Bible and various volumes of The Interpreter's Dictionary of The Bible. (As any scholar can attest, there is no question so simple that the discovery of its answer can"t be postponed almost indefinitely by diligent referral to the appropriate reference books.)

I had though scripture might note early cultic songs or contain a metaphor in which nature, poetically speaking, sang praises to its Creator. I was wrong. It is not hymnody that garners first mention, but what I took to be a prosaic footnote on the invention of musical instruments. But the more I read, reread and thought about it, the more valuable it became as a piece of a formidable whole.

In Adam and Eve's version of "My Three Sons," there was Cain, the farmer, who in anger killed Abel, the shepherd. Later came Seth, a youngest son of no fixed occupation, who arrived after one older brother was dead and the other had hit the road sporting history's all-time baddest tattoo.

Given this set up, you just know God's going to find favor with Seth's bloodline, and he does. Seth's descendants include such luminaries as Enoch, the first man to be ‘taken up to God" without dying. Later comes Methuselah, who was nothing if not old, and who was also the grandfather of Noah. And, when Noah loaded his ark with two of everything worth carrying into the antediluvian era, we hear of no descendants of Cain on the manifest.

This might suggest that Cain's contribution to history was limited to the invention of murder. But while Seth's descendants do the begetting that gets mankind somewhere over the original rainbow, that's really all we are told of them. It's Cain's kids, the black sheep of the first family, who get credit for cobbling together, of all things civilization.

Before going further, I'll warn you that a lot of Seth's and Cain's descendants have the same or similar names. This was before Kroger's stocked baby name books along side Reader's Digest at the check out line. Seth's Lamech, son of Methuselah, fathered Noah the boat builder. Cain's Lamech, son of Methushael, had two wives and from the two of them came Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-cain, three mythical sons the Bible credits with establishing the pillars of early civilization: permanent moveable housing, domesticated cattle, bronze and iron work, and musical instruments.

Jubal was the descendent of Cain of whom scripture says ‘he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe." That music was understood by the ancients as a crucial leg upon which civilization stands. But history shows music to have been an organic part of everyday life in Palestine as far back as anyone knows. It was practical art, linked with myriad bonds to all human concerns, from birth to death.

Back then, there was no Tin Pan Alley: People improvised new songs right off the tops of their heads, for the purpose of social merriment, magic incantation, or worship. Women composed and sang most songs until the establishment of the Hebrew monarchy, when professional musicians emerged within the royal courts and temple. Indicative of the value placed on musical instruments, ancient Midrashic tradition holds that the dowry of Solomon's Egyptian wife, Pharaoh's daughter, included 1,000 foreign instruments, suggesting a large body of trained musicians also accompanied her.

But more theologically significant than my discovery of the central place given to music in ancient civilization was my understanding of the great role God gave Cain in the development of human civilization. I was already somewhat familiar with key figures in Seth's family -- the author of Genesis calls them "the generations of Adam" -- they were the good guys. We occasionally talked about them in the Sunday schools of my youth. But now I was struck by the realization that God left to the sinners the creation of society out of the chaos just East of Eden, after the gates to the garden were closed.

But then, who better to give us music and the instruments to make it with? With due respect to the ‘noble" generations of Adam, even the first authors of the Hebrew scripture knew that sinners had better stories to tell, more burdens to alleviate, greater need to enhance their appeals to God, and music, then as now, answers all those purposes.