Mountain torrents flowed before Yahweh, Where rigid structure at first sight seems lacking, the parallelism sometimes proves to be of a highly complicated form, alternating, introverted, etc. Unlike true metre, this "thought rhythm," as it is often called, is not entirely lost in translation, though the similarity of the length of lines in the original is often quite obscured; one Hebrew word may require three or four English words for its translation. As Gardiner says, speaking of the King James version, "The men who made our translation did not attempt to arrange the lines in a different form from the prose of the rest of the book. The result has been in English to produce a kind of writing unique in our literature, since it is neither regular prose nor regular poetry, but shares the power of both. It has the strong balance and regularity which result from this underlying parallel structure of the Hebrew, and at the same time all the freedom and naturalness of prose." This quality is certainly most excellent in poetry which hundreds must read in translation for each individual who reads it in the original. Not all of us will be ready to go on and declare it in fact a thoroughly satisfactory poetic form, in comparison with true metre. Professor McFadyen seems rather enthusiastic when he says of parallelism: "It suggests a rhythm profounder than the sound of any words -the response of thought to thought, the calling of deep to deep, the solemn harmonies that run through the universe."3 Perhaps Josephus was too much influenced by Greek poetic forms in his ascription of metre to Hebrew poetry; yet there have been many in recent centuries who have not rested satisfied with "thought rhythm" and have persistently tried to find a system of true metre in the Hebrew and kindred poetry. The earlier efforts to recover Hebrew metre, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, were chiefly based on classical models. Lowth saw their unsatisfactoriness and thought it unpractical to work out any definite system, because of our lack 1 Cf. Psalm 29 1, 8; Exodus 15 16b. 2 Gardiner, The Bible as English Literature, p. 109. Briggs, Int. Crit. Com., Psalms I, pp. xxxviii-xxxix. of knowledge of the original pronunciation. In the latter part of the eighteenth century (1776) the rules of Arabic metre, which, like the classical, is quantitative, were applied to Hebrew poetry. At the same time in publications on Hebrew metre (1770) and the Psalms (1780), C. G. Anton made accent the determining principle of measurement. In other respects few would follow him to-day, but in this vital point his "conjecture," as he called it, seems in accord with the character of the Hebrew. Accent is dominant, as the language is known to us; a short vowel cannot stand in an unaccented open syllable, while a long vowel in an open syllable, by the shifting of the tone, may become a mere half vowel, barely pronounced. No real advance over the eighteenth century was made until the latter part of the nineteenth, when various students took up the problem of Hebrew metre with new energy and equipment. One tried to apply the principle of Syriac poetry, in which the metrical system is determined by the counting of the syllables. In his view, there was a constant alternation of rise and fall, so that only iambic and trochaic feet were possible. The comparison with Syriac, like that with Arabic poetry, has the advantage of keeping within the same family of languages as the Hebrew, but both Syriac and Arabic poetry are post-Christian, and it has recently been "shown that the earliest even of the Syriac poetry did not measure by number of syllables."4 More recently, Sievers, who has done much on Teutonic metres, working from the point of view of the laws of speech and song, rather than from a knowledge of Semitic languages, has wrought out an astonishing system, finding everywhere a sort of anapestic foot, two unaccented syllables of any length followed by a long accented. This system involves both quantity and accent, but it is forced to reject the traditional pronunciation and to invent a new one devised to fit the scheme. Even so, as Cornill points out, Sievers gets no orderly system in the number of verse feet in successive lines. 1 Lowth, Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, p. 33. 2 Conjectura de metro Hebræorum, 1770, Specimen editionis Psalmorum, 1780. 3 G. Bickell, various publications, 1879-1884. 'Briggs, Int. Crit. Com., Psalms I, p. xxxix. Follow him, and one may prove any prose narrative poetry, as Sievers's own publications indicate. Very few Semitic scholars have found his arguments convincing. In the same period the now generally dominant theory has been developed by a succession of workers. In a series of publications extending from 1866 to 1887, Julius Ley revived Anton's view that accent was the determining principle in Hebrew metre. He maintained that the number of unaccented syllables did not count and that the metre was determined solely by the number of ictus. In 1882 Karl Budde published a careful study of the Hebrew Qina or elegiac verse. He showed that wherever there is a song of lamentation there is a tendency to a verse form made up of a longer followed by a shorter member. Commonly the first member has three accents and the second two; and between the members there is a decided cæsura. The number of unaccented syllables in these comparatively regular units is exceedingly variable. This evidence points strongly toward the contention of Ley that only stresses counted in the metrical system. More recently it has been strongly argued by Zimmern and Gunkel that Old Babylonian poetry possessed an accentuating metrical system based on the equal value of the accentual rises. The same seems to have been true in the case of the Egyptian poetry. A theory of more published in 1896-18975 arrived at a more exact quantitative law, but was forced to distinguish syllables of the values of 4, 3, and 2 mora. Like Sievers's even more recent theory, this seems too artificial, and the vast majority of students to-day rest in the conviction that in ancient Hebrew poetry the accents alone counted. As the poetry has come down to us often imperfectly preserved, even these are so irregular that frequently the text must be emended, or we must say we can discover only a tendency toward regular arrangements of the number of ictus. 1 E. Sievers, Studien zur hebräischen Metrik, 1901, etc. 2 Zeitschrift für Altetestamentliche Wissenschaft. A general statement of Budde's views is given in § Poetry, in Hastings, Dict. of the Bible, Vol. III. 4 Hebrew Qina. " H. Grimme in Z. D. M. G., L, pp. 529 ff., LI, pp. 683 ff. If the actual pronunciation of the living Hebrew was as free in its variations of time as Sidney Lanier holds English to be, and if poetry must be divisible into feet of exact time equivalence, then we may suppose that the accents were made to fall at regular time intervals in the pronunciation of Hebrew poetry. In that case the discrimination of half vowels, full short vowels, and long vowels made in our Hebrew text must be far indeed from representing true time relations in the original pronunciation of the poetry. Probably, too, other syllables than those now accented must have received the tone, but one may well remember in this connection, that our knowledge of many of the long vowels goes back into the consonantal text of the Hebrew, and so is early. In its parallelism, Hebrew poetry followed, as we have noted, a form already long used in Babylon and Egypt, which countries had successively dominated Syria for many centuries before Israel found settlement among the Canaanites. The evidence thus far attainable seems to show that in metrical structure, too, the poetry of the three was similar. More elaborate systems of Hebrew metre, such as those of Sievers or Grimme, involving as they do disregard of the earliest pronunciation of the language which we possess, will probably continue to be rejected by most students of Semitic literature and to commend themselves only to those who approach the subject with fixed convictions based upon later forms of poetry and music.2 1 It is true that in the later Jewish poetry, which had adopted metrical form, half vowels were often counted as forming full syllables. 2 It is generally held that Anglo-Saxon poetry and the ancient German two-membered alliterative verse were measured by the number of accented syllables, without regard to the unaccented. The ancient Latin Saturnian metre may have been of the same form. Until it can be shown that these later verse forms had a more exact metrical structure, it is not to be expected that this will be established in the case of ancient Semitic poetry. For Anglo-Saxon see Saintsbury, History of English Prosody; for the German, Budde, § Poetry, Hastings, Dict. Bible; for this theory of Latin, Duff, Literary History of Rome, pp. 74-75. CHAPTER III POETRY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM (About 1040 to 940 B.C.) AFTER the Deborah song, no contemporary poem that connects itself with definite historical events embodies Israel's experience until generations have passed. The succeeding years witnessed harassing struggles between the Hebrew tribes and others who desired to possess Canaan, or to plunder its inhabitants; but the next life-and-death struggle was with a people which had settled on the western coast plain at almost the same time that Israel crossed the Jordan and overran the central mountains. This people, the Philistines, left its name on the country which we call Palestine. In the days of Amos, about 750 B.C., the Philistines were still counted an immigrant people, come from Caphtor.1 They are supposed to have been a part of the peoples from the northern shores and islands of the Mediterranean who pushed southward, on land and water, during the twelfth century B.C., pressed from behind by those great movements in Europe that brought the Dorians into Greece. They sought foothold in the Egyptian Delta, but were driven back by the Pharaoh, and a part of the receding wave found settlement on the coast plain of Canaan. The Philistines have left no written records to tell through what struggles and defeats they learned the vital lesson of united action. From Israel's experience with them, it would seem that they were ever able to act together effectively, though they dwelt in separate city states, with different kings. Whether this be true or not, it is evident from the earliest strand of narrative preserved in Samuel 2 that they eventually succeeded in reducing the disunited tribes of Israel to a state of subjection similar to that of the days of 1 Crete? Amos 97. For the contents and character of this strand, see below, ch. IV. |