Pipe and flute

The chalil (or halil), usually translated “flute”, was a pipe like the Greek aulos: a tube made from reed, blown through a double reed like an early oboe. The name comes from a word meaning “to pierce” — a hollow tube. Its sound was shrill and piercing, and Greek vase paintings show aulos players blowing two pipes at once. Another word, ugav, also some kind of pipe or flute, appears with Jubal (Genesis 4:21) and in Psalm 150.

The pipe went with joy and with grief. It played at feasts (Isaiah 5:12) and before a band of prophets, and when Solomon was made king “all the people followed him, playing flutes” (1 Kings 1:40). It was also the sound of mourning: Jeremiah laments “like a flute” for Moab, and at the house of a synagogue leader Jesus found “the flute players and the noisy crowd” (Matthew 9:23). The Mishnah, a later Jewish law book, says that even the poorest man should hire at least two flute players and one wailing woman for his wife’s funeral. In Jesus’ saying, children in the marketplace call out, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance” (Matthew 11:17).