Babylonian Exile. If the Levites forgot their music during that period, one could well understand it. But what this would mean is that the musical directions of the psalm-titles are (as indeed they profess to be) pre-exilic.16 It would also mean that the more general community of ideas and expressions reflected in the psalm-titles and in Chronicles, though to some extent continued in Ezra and Nehemiah, belongs essentially to the pre-exilic period—to the period of which Chronicles speaks, rather than
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