418. The last verse dealt with heavenly things, which belong to love. The current verse deals with spiritual things, which have to do with faith. These are expressed by the harp and organ.
The symbolism of stringed instruments — harps and the like — as the spiritual qualities of faith is evident from many things.
It is exactly what the same kind of instruments represented in the worship of the representative church, and what vocal music represented as well, which is why there were so many singers and musicians. 1 The underlying reason is that all heavenly joy makes the heart cheerful, and the cheer was attested to in song that had string instruments added to echo and enhance it. All the heart's emotions carry with them the tendency to spill out in song and so in the accompaniment to a song. The feeling in the heart is heavenly in nature; the song it inspires is spiritual.
[2] The symbolism of songs and other kinds of music as something spiritual is clear to me from angel choirs, of which there are two kinds: heavenly and spiritual. The singing of the spiritual choirs has a sound reminiscent of [beating] wings that can be compared to the sound of stringed instruments, which makes it easy to distinguish them from heavenly choirs. (They will be described later, with the Lord's divine mercy.) 2
The earliest people, moreover, assigned anything of a heavenly nature to the heart's province and anything spiritual to the lungs' province. In this way they associated spirituality with any use of the lungs, such as for vocal music and so on; as a result they associated it with the "voices" or sounds of wind instruments. The reason was not only that the heart and lungs represent a kind of marriage, as love and faith do, but also that heavenly angels belong to the province of the heart and spiritual angels belong to that of the lungs.
The presence of these meanings in the current verse can also be seen from the consideration that the Word is the Lord's, but would be devoid of life if it were merely telling that Jubal was the father of those who play the harp and the organ. Nor would it be useful to anyone to know this.
Footnotes:
1. King David appointed 288 official musicians (1 Chronicles 25:7); see also 1 Chronicles 9:33; 15:16-22; 25:1-31; 2 Chronicles 5:12-13. [LSW]
2. For discussion of these choirs, see §§1648-1649, 2595-2596, 3350-3351, 3893, 8115. [LHC]
