There are no harps in heaven, only guitars
Everyone seems to agree: in heaven they play the harp. All English-language Bibles in the Book of Revelation have the 24 elders sing the new song in front of the Lamb with the harp (Rev 5.8; cf. 14.2; or 15.2). The fact that the sounds of the harp should be heavenly music is likely even for many Christians don’t have to be readily catchy. In any case, the harp is not a popular instrument. But why does no Bible translation dare to finally ground this instrument? Not only in terms of sound, it has no place in heaven. The wording of the Greek kithara (or cithara from the Latin Vulgate) suggests something else – the guitar (or the zither).
The well-known Pauly-Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World explains to us what is hidden behind the instrument of the kithara: „The basic component of the kithara was […] a large, box-shaped sound box made of wood, which had a flat base, was flat at the front, bulged out at the back and also continued in the two yoke arms, which were initially bent inwards and then ran parallel upwards. At their junction, the yoke, which had screw handles on the outside, the 7 strings of the instrument, which were firmly clamped in a tailpiece at the bottom of the sound box, were twisted tightly by pegs made of cowhide and roughly tuned; special tuning keys were used for fine tuning“.
In contrast to the harp, where the free strings are stretched vertically into the soundbox, the seven strings of the kithara run parallel to the top of the soundbox. According to the Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification, the kithara belongs to the lute instruments, like the lyre and the violin. Although, unlike the modern guitar, the strings of the ancient kithara are not stretched across a neck, the playing techniques are largely the same. The kitharistes, i.e. the kithara player, usually stood upright with the instrument in front of him and plucked the strings with his right hand using a metal or ivory plectrum. With his left hand he damped or shortened the individual strings as he did when playing the guitar. And if you add to this the fact that in later models the kithara was held to the body with a strap running over the shoulder, the equation is perfect. No wonder that in today’s Greek, kithara refers to both the ancient instrument and the modern guitar.
This only begs the question: why are we still biblically attached to the harp as the instrument of heaven, when it should be the far more popular guitar? The answer is simple: when Christianity came to Europe north of the Alps and the message of the Bible had to be translated, only the Celtic harp was known there as a stringed instrument. Lute instruments only came over the Alps from the Mediterranean region in the High Middle Ages. By then, however, heaven was already full of harps in terms of books and illustrations, so that even Martin Luther, who was himself a passionate lute player, mistakenly stuck to the harp when it came to the kithara.
There is one thing that guitar players can take credit for at masses and liturgies of the word with their more or less skilful string playing. Unlike everyone else, their instrument has long since had heavenly approval. Heaven knows only guitar music for the hymnal praise of God.
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