In 1 Chronicles 15:20-21 we read:
…Maaseiah and Benaiah were to play the lyres according to alamoth, 21 and… Jeiel and Azaziah were to play the harps, directing according to sheminith.
So, what on earth do Alamoth and Sheminith mean?
Well, if you’ve got footnotes in your Bible, you might see a note on both these words which says something like “probably a musical term”.
Or, in other words, we’ve got no clue what they mean. But they’ve got something to do with music.
Plenty of scholars have taken some pretty solid guesses about what they mean though.
Alamoth
First, Alamoth.
It likely comes from a word meaning something along the lines of “young, unmarried women”.
So, a lot of people take this to mean that Alamoth refers to the pitch of the lyres. Specifically, soprano. Like the pitch of a young woman’s voice.
I read another source describe Alamoth as probably sounding like a bunch of girls laughing.
Alamoth also appears in the heading to Psalm 46.
Sheminith
Sheminith is even more difficult to nail down than Alamoth.
It seems to come from the Hebrew word shaman, which could mean either “eight” or “dripping fat/oil” (don’t ask me why it means both those things).
So, most scholars apparently think that Sheminith means “eighth”.
If that’s correct, it might refer to an eight-stringed harp/lyre. However, others think it is a reference to a specific note, like how the word “octave” in English just comes from the Latin word octo, also meaning “an eighth”.
I saw one source that suggested Sheminith was meant to stand in contrast to the soprano of Alamoth; so, it specifically means a note “one eighth (one octave) below the tenor”. In other words, bass.
But, there are also potential connections between the definition of “dripping fat/oil” and Sheminith. Overall, nobody really knows for sure what these words mean.
And Sheminith also appears in the headings of Psalm 6 and Psalm 12.