Two Notes on the Exceptional Shalshelet

The cantillation mark shalshelet appears only four times in the Torah. The root of this word is shin-lamed-shin, meaning three, and in the Ashkenazic tradition as well as in many Sephardic traditions, the melody ascends and descends three times. It appears three times in the book of Genesis and once in the book of Leviticus. In the Mesorah it is referred to as Mar’imin u’Mafsikin (Mesorah Gedolah, Lev. 8:23) — thunderous and pausing, terms that appear to describe the sound of its melody. In this article, we will see how all four shalshelot in the Torah consistently relate to the texts in which they are used.

The Four Instances of Shalshelet in the Torah

Genesis 19:16 places the shalshelet on vayitmahameha, “still he delayed,” in the story of Lot in Sodom, when the angels tell him he must leave the city. Many commentators, including Pseudo-Jonathan, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Radak, note that Lot hesitated to leave and responded in an unusually slow manner, concerned about losing the property he had accumulated — a hesitation well indicated by the up-and-down melody of the shalshelet.

Genesis 24:12 places the shalshelet on vayomar, “and he said,” as Abraham’s servant prays to find a spouse for Isaac. Here again the melody can indicate a passage of time, since the text states a few verses later that “he had scarcely finished speaking when Rebecca… came out.” The shalshelet can indicate that he prayed for the entire time, wondering if his prayers would be answered, until Rebecca appeared.

Genesis 39:8 places the shalshelet on vayema’en, “but he refused,” as Joseph resists the seduction of Potiphar’s wife. Joseph’s refusal takes about forty words in the narrative rather than a brief statement, unlike his later, summarized refusals — the focus is on the time lapse in the narrative, the internal conflict that takes a long period of time.

In all three of these instances, the shalshelet represents a prolonged period of time rather than an internal deliberation per se; even in Joseph’s case, where an internal conflict is clearly occurring, the trope is focused on the passage of time involved, not the conflict itself.

The Fourth Instance: Leviticus 8:23

The one shalshelet in Leviticus differs from the other three, for it is associated neither with a prolonged act nor even with an inner struggle on its surface. The verse describes the consecration of Aaron as High Priest through the ram of consecration; the first word, vayishchat, “and it was slaughtered,” bears the shalshelet. One cannot interpret this as indicative of a prolonged slaughter, since a shochet must perform the act quickly. Some interpreters connect the shalshelet to Moses’ state of mind, marking his awareness that this is his last act as priest, though the position of the shalshelet — on the word for slaughtering rather than on cohen or on Moses’ final offering later in the chapter — makes this reading strained. Zecharia Goren has proposed that the shalshelet separates the act of slaughter from the subsequent handling of the blood.

It appears that the shalshelet here represents not the swift cut of the ram’s neck, but the extended treatment of the blood that followed: Moses applies blood to the right earlobe, right thumb, and right toe of Aaron and his four sons — fifteen applications — and afterward sprinkles blood around the altar, on Aaron, on his clothing, on his sons, and on their clothing, a total of twenty-seven applications together with the slaughter itself. This was, in that sense, a very long shechita, in that a great deal of work needed to be done with the blood afterward — the most straightforward explanation for the shalshelet on vayishchat. This reading is reinforced by the fact that this is the third and final act of slaughter in Leviticus 8, tying the shalshelet’s association with “three” to the culmination of three shechita acts.

We can now understand that there is a common denominator linking all four shalshelet cantillations in the Torah: all of them show a prolonged process of one kind or another, represented by the length of the shalshelet itself, which in the Ashkenazic tradition is often the longest of the ta’amei hakriyah both in duration and in the number of musical notes of which it is comprised.

The Shalshelet and the Pasek

A separate but important dimension of the shalshelet trope is its grammatical function. All shalshelet tropes in the Torah are followed by a pasek. The grammarian R. Wolf Heidenheim wrote that the shalshelet is a disjunctive mark, and that in all seven occurrences elsewhere in the Bible it is the first word of the verse, followed by a pesik, described by the Mesorah as Mar’imin u’Mafsikin.

In a recent article, Marc B. Shapiro presented the view that since the shalshelet is disjunctive, it can never be followed by a true pasek, since a pasek/pesik is only found after conjunctive te’amim. This raises the question of why a vertical line follows the shalshelet if it does not indicate a pesik. Correspondence with Prof. Shapiro suggests a resolution: the pasek following a shalshelet functions as a breathing sign rather than as a disjunctive trope operating within the ordinary hierarchy of conjunction and disjunction. Heidenheim in fact addresses this very issue, stating that the shalshelet and pasek do act as tropes, but not within the hierarchic framework governing the other cantillation marks — the shalshelet is, in this respect, an exception to the Masoretic rules that govern the rest of the system.