Books With Their Own Accents

Three of these books are chanted differently from the rest of the Bible. Psalms, Proverbs and Job carry a separate system of cantillation accents, with its own signs and its own rules of division, used nowhere else. The system marks them out as poetry of a particular kind and is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that the Masoretes recognised genre and treated it as affecting how a text should be delivered. The five scrolls have a different kind of life. Each is attached to an occasion in the year, so that one is read at Passover, one at the festival of weeks, one on the fast commemorating the destruction, one at the autumn festival of booths, and one at Purim. That attachment keeps short books in annual public use that might otherwise be read only by scholars, and it links them to a mood rather than to a subject. The effect across the division is very uneven.

Psalms is probably the most read book in the entire Bible and supplies the bulk of the daily liturgy, while several of the historical books at the end are consulted mainly in the study house and are unfamiliar even to regular readers. The atlas records this division as a category of canon rather than as a body of related material, because the evidence of its unsettled order, its mixed contents and its wildly varying use all point the same way.