RABBI SAMSON RAPHAEL HIRSCH’S USE OF BIBLICAL ACCENTUATION IN HIS COMMENTARY ON PSALMS

The impact on biblical interpretation of the biblical accents’ role as punctuation marks has long been acknowledged. Graphical signsin the Bible serve the purpose of denoting the verse’s primary and secondary divisions. While the biblical accents clearly indicate a specific way of understanding the verse, the interpretive stance implied by them requires further explanation and analysis. Indeed, much can be learned through examining the consonance between the interpretation suggested by the biblical accents’ division of the verse,and other interpretations of the Bible through out different historical periods. In this paper, I detail the explicit connection between Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s nineteenth-century commentary and the biblical accentuation system, as it is expressed in his commentary on Psalms..