In the printed tradition, are the accents of the Decalogue grammatical?

The question

Roughly speaking, each Decalogue has two strands of cantillation, the טעם תחתון and the טעם עליון. Why is this only roughly true? Because in detail there are four strands: the printed tradition (p-trad) and the manuscript tradition (m-trad) differ in cantillation, yielding two different עליון strands and two different תחתון strands. (The p-trad is fading in popularity, but still visible in editions like Koren's Tanakh and Simanim's Tiqqun.) The most striking difference between the four strands is how they divide up the span אנכי…מצותי into chanted verses. (This span is typically identified as comprising the first two Commandments.)

I have run Richard Goerwitz's accent grammar checker against the m-trad strands (as represented by WLC); this page shows what happens when the checker is run against the p-trad strands.

There is no dual cantillation to detangle here. Whereas the Tiberian manuscripts (and WLC) pack both of their strands onto one set of letters, the Wikisource page עשרת הדברות בסיס/טעמים spells out all the strands separately — p-trad and m-trad alike — each as single cantillation. Every chanted verse (delimited by its own sof pasuq) is grammar-checked on its own. The m-trad is the baseline — MAM's own authoritative text, expected to parse clean throughout — and the p-trad is the object of study.

The verdict

The תחתון is grammatical everywhere — both books, both traditions. In terms of verse boundaries, the p-trad תחתון differs from the m-trad in only one place: the p-trad תחתון ends its first verse at מבית עבדים (so it has one more verse than the m-trad, whose first verse runs on to על־פני instead). Both parse clean. It also differs in some further details — several of them changes of cantillation that give the two strands genuinely different parses, but none that costs either its grammaticality (catalogued in an appendix below).

The עליון is grammatical in the m-trad but not in the p-trad: the p-trad עליון of each Decalogue has exactly one ungrammatical chanted verse — its opening one.

The four strands of אנכי…מצותי

Every p-trad strand accents the Decalogue's אנכי…מצותי span differently from every m-trad strand. Two words in the span do all the deciding — its signal words, עבדים and על־פני. Where a signal word has a silluq + sof pasuq, the strand ends a chanted verse there; where it instead has an etnaḥta or a revia, the strand runs on. The table below lays all four strands over four shared words — אנכי (the span's shared start), then עבדים, על־פני, and מצותי (the two signal words and the span's shared end). Each row shows that strand's own pointed word at all four; a word is red where it ends one of the strand's chanted verses. So every row starts green at אנכי and ends red at מצותי, and the reds between them are the signal accents at work — the strands' differing chanted-verse boundaries, read straight down the columns:

• The signal pair identifies the strand. No two strands share the accent pair on the two signal words, so the pair alone says which strand a text has. Neither word suffices by itself: עבדים cannot tell the m-trad עליון from the p-trad תחתון (both close a chanted verse there), and על־פני cannot tell the two תחתון strands apart, nor the two עליון strands.
• Everything else in the span is coupled to the signal accents. אנכי has a pashta in exactly the two strands whose עבדים runs on mid-verse, and a tipeḥa in the two whose עבדים ends its verse; מצותי has a silluq + sof pasuq in all four — the shared end signals nothing. Between the columns nothing new happens: the two תחתון strands end two further chanted verses between על־פני and מצותי, at לארץ and at לשנאי — the same two words in both — so strands that agree at a signal word agree word for word over the stretch that signal governs.
• P-trad תחתון = m-trad עליון — but only through עבדים. Over אנכי…עבדים the two are word for word identical, each giving that stretch its own chanted verse. They part at על־פני: the p-trad תחתון ends another chanted verse there, while the m-trad עליון has a revia and runs on to מצותי — which is why each has its own row. Over the whole Decalogue the p-trad תחתון has 13 chanted verses, the m-trad עליון only 10.

These are facts about the four strands as Wikisource defines them — idealized strands, each pure by construction. An actual edition need not follow one strand purely, and where it strays, the two signal words above cannot catch it. Simanim's Tiqqun, for instance, follows the p-trad תחתון's chanted-verse boundaries throughout, yet has the m-trad accents at the Shabbat commandment of its Deuteronomy appendix Decalogue. Catching that departure requires giving the Shabbat commandment its own signal words — three disjunctively accented words, catalogued in the appendix below, where the two traditions differ in accents while agreeing on every chanted-verse boundary. The two sets of signal words have complementary jobs: עבדים and על־פני place a text among the four strands within אנכי…מצותי, while the Shabbat trio tells p-trad accents from m-trad accents at a commandment where a real edition can stray from its nominal tradition.

Of these four strands, only the p-trad עליון is ungrammatical — the verdict above already said so — and the section below dissects its merged opening verse.

Why the p-trad עליון fails: the merged first verse

As the four-strands table above laid out, in the m-trad עליון the first commandment אנכי…עבדים is its own chanted verse, and לא יהיה לך אלהים אחרים begins the next — two separate verses, both of which parse clean. The p-trad instead merges the first two commandments into a single verse. That one merged verse is what the grammar rejects. Shown stripped to letters and accents and divided at the p-trad תחתון's verse boundaries — one p-trad עליון verse (pE) spanning the five ordinary p-trad תחתון verses (pT) it merges:

The single etnaḥta falls at לשנאי, leaving a first half crowded with a segolta plus three separate revia domains (at עבדים, על־פני, and לארץ); the prose grammar cannot build it and returns a pashta_phrase error — the same failure, at the same structural point, in both Decalogues.

The cause is the merged structure, not sheer length: Deuteronomy's p-trad עליון Sabbath verse runs 55 words and parses clean, while this merged verse (51 words) does not. Keeping the two commandments as the m-trad's two separate verses (9 and 42 words) is exactly what lets them parse.

A tidier nesting — until you scrutinize it

It is tempting to call the p-trad's arrangement the neater one. Its five תחתון verses nest perfectly inside a single עליון verse — a clean five-in-one — whereas the m-trad divides the very same words into two עליון verses and four תחתון verses that do not nest cleanly at all: the m-trad תחתון's opening verse אנכי…על־פני straddles the עליון's break after עבדים, so neither strand's verses sit wholly inside the other's. In the gradient bars below, mE's first break lands inside mT's first verse, which runs on to על־פני — that is the straddle:

But the p-trad's tidiness is bought with an ungrammatical cantillation — the very one dissected above. Once you see the accents that buy the five-in-one, its neatness evaporates. This is not to say the tidier nesting could not have been cantillated grammatically; perhaps some other accentuation would have carried it off. That is a theoretical question I am not prepared to settle here.

Source

All eight strands (two books × תחתון/עליון × m-trad/p-trad) are taken from the Wikisource base page עשרת הדברות בסיס/טעמים (revision 3025606, 2026-07-20), which every p-trad-vs-m-trad comparison table there transcludes. A handful of wiki templates are resolved to plain pointed text (legarmeh and paseq both conflated down to a Unicode PASEQ, ketiv dropped from ketiv-qere, setumah and petuḥah divisions dropped); the chanted verses are split at sof pasuq.

See also this document on the Decalogues in the Simanim Tiqqun — its main Decalogues follow the p-trad עליון and its appendix Decalogues the p-trad תחתון. It follows the p-trad's chanted verse boundaries without exception, but not its every cantillation detail — most consequentially at the Shabbat commandment, where its Deuteronomy appendix Decalogue has the m-trad accents.

See also this document on the Decalogues in the Koren Tanakh — it has the p-trad תחתון in its Exodus main Decalogue and the p-trad עליון in its appendix Decalogue.

Appendix: how the two תחתון strands differ

Both תחתון strands parse clean everywhere, so the differences below do not bear on the grammaticality question this page asks — not even the several that do change the parse. They are gathered here only to make concrete the verdict's point that the strands differ in ways that never cost either strand grammaticality. The one structural difference — the p-trad ending its first verse at מבית עבדים, and the boundary accents on אנכי, אלהיך, מבית, and עבדים that follow from it — is the verdict's own point and is not repeated here.

In Exodus the two strands differ in essentially one grammar-irrelevant respect: the vocalization of לא תרצח — תִּרְצָ֖ח (m-trad, qamats) against תִּרְצַ֖ח (p-trad, patax). Both have the same tipeḥa; only the vowel differs.

Deuteronomy differs in more ways. Three are differences of cantillation — which, unlike the Exodus vowel-swap, do change the parse — and all three fall within a single stretch of the Sabbath commandment. Below is just that stretch — the run of words the two strands accent differently, everything before and after it being identical — shown in each strand, m-trad above p-trad, stripped to letters and accents, each line ending on a disjunctive accent. Those three line-ending words are the Shabbat commandment's signal words — the ones the Simanim and Koren pages highlight on their scans to tell a p-trad Shabbat commandment from an m-trad one:

One further difference is purely vocalization — vowel-pointing, not cantillation: the same תִּרְצָ֖ח / תִּרְצַ֖ח split as in Exodus.

A p-trad Bible on the web: CTR

Possibly the only p-trad Bible on the web is CTR: a web version of The Complete Tanach with Rashi, served from Chabad.org. CTR has not only the characteristic opening verse of the p-trad תחתון but also the p-trad תחתון accents in the Sabbath commandment.

For more on CTR: see my review, which calls it “certainly the weirdest Hebrew Bible on the web, and possibly the worst.”