The rhythm of clauses however, together with many other features of Hebrew poetry, such as assonance and alliteration, distinctive use of words and constructions, and so forth, chiefly concerns the student of the original. But the rhythmical balance of clauses combined in a verse admits of being reproduced in translation, and can to a large extent be appreciated by the English reader. Owing to this peculiar nature of its form, Hebrew poetry loses less in translation than poetry which depends for much of its charm upon rhymes or metres which cannot be reproduced in another language.

This balanced symmetry of form and sense is known as parallelism of clauses (parallelismus membrorum) or simply, parallelism1. It satisfies the love of regular and harmonious movement which is natural to the human mind, and was specially adapted to the primitive method of antiphonal chanting (Ex. xv. 1, 20, 21; 1 Sam. xviii. 7). Such poetry is not

Many passages in

sharply distinguished from elevated prose. the prophets are written in poetical style, and exhibit the features of parallelism as plainly as any of the Psalms2.

The law of parallelism in Hebrew poetry has an exegetical value. It can often be appealed to in order to determine the construction or connexion of words, to elucidate the sense, or to decide a doubtful reading. The arrangement of the text in lines, adopted by Dr Scrivener in the standard edition of the A.V. from which the text in this edition is taken, and in the Revised Version, makes this characteristic of Hebrew poetry more plainly perceptible to the English reader.

The various forms of parallelism are generally classified under three principal heads:

(1) Synonymous parallelism, when the same fundamental thought is repeated in different words in the second line of a couplet. Thus in Ps. cxiv. 1:

"When Israel went forth out of Egypt,

1 This fundamental principle of Hebrew poetry had been noticed by earlier writers, but attention was first called to its importance, and its nature was fully examined, by Robert Lowth (1710-1787), Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and afterwards Bishop of London, in his De sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii habitae (1753). 2 E.g. Is. lx. 1-3; lxv. 13, 14; Hos. xi. 8, 9; Nah. i. 2.

The house of Jacob from a people of strange language": and the same construction is maintained throughout the Psalm. Every page of the Psalter supplies abundant examples.

(2) Antithetic or contrasted parallelism, when the thought expressed in the first line of a couplet is corroborated or elucidated by the affirmation of its opposite in the second line. This form of parallelism is specially suited to Gnomic Poetry, and is particularly characteristic of the oldest collection of proverbs in the Book of Proverbs (chaps. x-xxii. 16). Thus for example:

"Every wise woman buildeth her house:

But folly plucketh it down with her own hands" (Prov. xiv. 1). But it is by no means rare in the Psalms, e.g. i. 6,

"For Jehovah knoweth the way of the righteous:

But the way of the wicked shall perish."

(3) Synthetic or constructive parallelism. Under this head are classed the numerous instances in which the two lines of the couplet stand in the relation of cause and consequence, protasis and apodosis, proposition and qualification or supplement, or almost any logical or constructional relation; or in which, as is very frequently the case, the parallelism is one of form only without any logical relation between the clauses. Thus e.g. : "Yet I have set up my king,

Upon Zion my holy mountain" (Ps. ii. 6).

The simplest and most common form of parallelism is the couplet or distich: but this may be expanded into a tristich (triplet) or a tetrastich (quatrain) or even longer combinations, in a variety of ways. Thus the three lines of a verse may be synonymous:

"The floods have lifted up, O Jehovah,
The floods have lifted up their voice;

The floods lift up their din" (Ps. xciii. 3).

Or the first two lines may be synonymous, and the third supplementary, as in Ps. ii. 2:

"The kings of the earth take their stand,
And rulers hold conclave together,

Against Jehovah and against His anointed."

The third line may be antithetic, as in Ps. liv. 3:

"For strangers are risen up against me,

And violent men have sought my life:

They have not set God before their eyes."

Or the first line may be introductory, and the last two synonymous, as in Ps. iii. 7:

"Arise, Jehovah; save me, my God:

For Thou hast smitten all mine enemies on the cheek;
Thou hast shattered the teeth of the wicked."

In a few instances the first line is parallel to the third, and the second is parenthetical, e.g. Ps. iv. 2.

Similarly in tetrastichs (usually including two verses) we find (a) four synonymous lines, as in xci. 5, 6. Or (6) the first line is parallel to the second, and the third to the fourth, but the second couplet is required to complete the sense; e.g. in Ps. xviii. 15. Or (c) the first line may be parallel to the third, the second to the fourth, as in xxvii. 3:

66

'Though an host should encamp against me,

My heart shall not fear:

Though war should rise against me,

Even then will I be confident."

Or (d) the first three lines may be parallel, and the fourth supplementary, as in Ps. i. 3. Or (e) the first line may be independent, and the last three parallel, as in Prov. xxiv. 12. Or two synonymous lines may be contrasted with two synonymous lines, as in xxxvii. 35, 36:

"I have seen the wicked in his terribleness,

And spreading himself like a green tree in its native soil:
And I passed by, and lo! he was not,

Yea, I sought him, but he could not be found."

Even longer combinations than tetrastichs sometimes occur, e.g. in Ps. xxxix. 12; Num. xxiv. 17: and on the other hand single lines are found, for the most part as introductions or conclusions, e.g. in Pss. xviii. 1; cix. 1; cxxx. 1; xcii. 8; Ex. xv. 18. While maintaining its fundamental characteristic of rhythm, Hebrew poetry admits of the greatest freedom and variety of form.

Strophical arrangement. Series of verses are, as might be expected, combined, and many Psalms consist of distinct groups

of verses. Such groups may conveniently be called stanzas or strophes, but the terms must not be supposed to imply that the same metrical or rhythmical structure recurs in each, as in Greek or Latin poetry. The strophes in a Psalm do not even necessarily consist of the same number of lines or verses.

Such divisions are sometimes clearly marked by a refrain, as in Pss. xlii-xliii, xlvi, lvii: or by alphabetical arrangement, as in cxix or by Selah, denoting probably a musical interlude, as in Pss. iii and iv. But more frequently there is no external mark of the division, though it is clearly indicated by the structure and contents of the Psalm, as in Ps. ii.

Alphabetic or Acrostic Psalms.

Eight or nine Psalms1 present various forms of alphabetic structure (Pss. ix, x, xxv, xxxiv, xxxvii, cxi, cxii, cxix, cxlv). In cxi and cxii each letter begins a line, and the lines are arranged in eight distichs and two tristichs.

In Pss. xxv, xxxiv, cxlv, Prov. xxxi, Lam. iv, each letter begins a distich, in Lam. i, ii, a tristich. In Ps. xxxvii each letter begins a pair of verses, commonly containing four, sometimes five, lines. In Lam. iii each verse in a stanza of three verses, and in Ps. cxix each verse in a stanza of eight verses, begins with the same letter, and the letters are taken in regular succession.

Such an arrangement, artificial though it seems, does not necessarily fetter a poet more than an elaborate metre or rhyme. It is not to be regarded as 'a compensation for the vanished spirit of poetry.' It was probably intended as an aid to memory, and is chiefly employed in Psalms of a proverbial character to connect detached thoughts, or when, as in Ps. cxix and in Lamentations, the poet needs some artificial bond to link together a number of variations upon one theme.

The elaborate development of the system in Lamentations proves that alphabetic structure is not in itself a proof of a very late date2.

1 Also Lam. i-iv: Prov. xxxi. 10-31. Traces of alphabetic structure have been pointed out in Nah. i. 2-10: and the original of Ecclesiasticus li. 13-30 was alphabetic. See Schechter and Taylor, Wisdom of Ben Sira, pp. lxxvi ff.

2 The early Roman poet Ennius wrote acrostics (Cicero, de Divina

CHAPTER VII.

THE HEBREW TEXT, THE ANCIENT VERSIONS,

AND THE ENGLISH VERSIONS.

i. The Hebrew Text1. A few words on the character of the Hebrew Text are necessary in order to justify the occasional departures from it, which will be met with in this commentary.

The extant Hebrew MSS. of the O.T. are all comparatively recent. The oldest of which the age is known with certainty is the St Petersburg MS. which is dated A.D. 9162; the majority are of the 12th to the 16th centuries. They all present substantially the same text3, commonly called the Massoretic Text1. Thus while we possess MSS. of the N.T. written less than three centuries after the date of the earliest of the books, our oldest MS. of the O.T. is more than ten centuries posterior to the date of the latest of the books which it contains; and while our MSS. of the N.T. present a great variety of readings, those of the O.T. are practically unanimous in supporting the same text.

This unanimity was long supposed to be due to the jealous care with which the Jewish scribes had preserved the sacred tione, ii. 54, § 111); and they are said to have been invented in Greece by the comedian Epicharmus (B.C. 540-450). We may compare the alliteration, which is a common feature of early poetry. Alliterative and acrostic poetry was written in Assyria and Babylonia. See Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch. 1895, P. 131.

1 For an outline of the history of the Hebrew text see the writer's Divine Library of the Old Testament, Lect. iii.

2 Dr Ginsburg (Introd. to the Heb. Bible, p. 469) places an undated MS. in the British Museum somewhat earlier, c. 820-850 A.D.

3 The variations between them are (roughly speaking) not greater than the variations between the different editions of the A. V. which have appeared since 1611, and they concern for the most part unimportant points of orthography.

4 Massōrā means (1) tradition in general: (2) specially, tradition concerning the text of the O.T., and in particular the elaborate system of rules and memoria technica by which the later scribes sought to guard the text from corruption. Those who devoted themselves to this study were called 'masters of Massōrā,' or 'Massoretes'; and the term 'Massoretic' is applied to the text which their labours were designed to preserve.

PSALMS

e