By Dale W. Manor
The Old Testament and Classical/Greco/Roman worlds (ca. 2000 BC-400 AD) were replete with instruments of music. They consisted of percussion instruments (membranophones and idiophones), wind instruments (aerophones), and stringed instruments (chordophones). The Bible indicates that musical instruments emerged very early in human history (cf. Gen 4:21), which is corroborated in archaeological settings. While many of these types have been discovered as artifacts, many also appear artistically, whether as rock drawings (petroglyphs), as graffiti on ceramics, or as artwork on vases and bowls. Modern scholarship has not been able to identify or differentiate every musical instrument referred to in the Bible (e.g., for example “bagpipe” [ESV] in Dan 3:5, 10, 15), but scholars have identified at least the categories of the majority of the terms.
Musical instruments of various kinds are described in the Hebrew Bible as associated with devotion, often with the worship context itself. In addition, they often accompanied royal coronations, military engagements and signaling, help to express joy and mourning, as well as occasionally used to allay emotional and/or traumatic crises. We also know from the Greco-Roman world that instrumentation was often a component of revelrous gatherings.
Archaeology has even discovered ancient musical notation! Excavations at the Syrian site of Ugarit (Ras Shamra) dating from ca. 1400 BC discovered a Hurrian cult song written in Akkadian cuneiform. Professors Anne Kilmer, Richard L. Crocker, and Robert R. Brown deciphered the notation and produced an audio of the piece which one may access on-line www.youtube.com › watch?v=7ZatnTPhYWc
Of course, there are variations because of different interpretations of elements of the song.
Another example of musical notation from the Classical Period is on display in the Delphi Museum in Greece.
Given the prevalence of instruments of music in the Old Testament and the world contemporary with the New Testament (i.e, the Greco-Roman culture), although they were part of the Temple in Jerusalem worship, no evidence exists—either literary or archaeologically—to their use in either synagogues or early church settings.
Bibliography:
Joachim Braun. Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine: Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
Theodore W. Burgh. Listening to the Artifacts: Music Culture in Ancient Palestine. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.
Staff. “World’s Oldest Musical Notation Deciphered on Cuneiform Tablet.” Biblical Archaeology Review 6/5 (1980): 14-19, 23-25.
Joan Goodnick Westenholz, ed. Sounds of Ancient Music. Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2007.
Information for 
