17 Bible Verses About Music, and Why Scripture Asks Musicians to Play Skillfully

The Bible asks musicians to be good at it. “Play skillfully,” says Psalm 33, and the temple kept a payroll to make sure of it: 288 trained singers, a director appointed because he understood the work, whole families set apart for the job. Music in Scripture is not decoration around the serious business of worship. We are given it as a craft, a profession and, in one strange scene, a condition for prophecy. Seventeen passages follow. Skill is part of…