The question whether poetry has a place in the Holy Scriptures could be raised as long as men held fast to the strict verbal inspiration doctrine. From that standpoint the admixture of so strongly human and subjective an element might appear to contradict the purely Divine and objective origin of the words of the Bible. Better knowledge now teaches ns that no device of human language is to be declared incapable of employment in Scripture. Yet poetry will not be the rule there, for neither of the two collections of books that make uji the Bible is arranged from the point of view of art, but from that of religious value ; they are collections not of national bnlles leltres but of Sacred Writings. At the same time, however, the Old Testament embraces all that has come down to ns of the literature of the people of Israel in its early days, go that for our knowledge of the poetry and the poetical art of the ancient Hebrews we have to turn solely to this collection of their Sacred Writings.
* Cf. e.g. Hardenberg (NoTklli), Uymnen an ii» IfacJtt,
i. The Form of Hebhew Poetry.—^. Poejis wniTTIcy IS Prose. — Prose-poems are not absent from the OT, j'et the border-lines for their re- cognition are hard to draw. If all fiction could be called poetry, then the tale of the woman of Tekoa (2 S 14'"") would have to be included in this category, and still more the story told by the prophet Nathan (2 S 12'"^). But "in both the.se narratives we have simply rhetorical artifices, both give themselves out in the first instance as bare statements of actual occurrences. It is otherwise Willi Jotham's fable (Jg 9"*), which presents itself within the framework of his address as a didactic composition, and is to be placed on the same plane as the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. The Books of Jonah, Ruth, Esther, and the Daniel narratives in Dn 1-G, are regarded by modern OT science as products of Jewish novel-writin<', of which furtlier instances, outside the Canon, have come down to us in the Books of Judith, Tobit, 2 Maccabees, etc.* But their quality as poetry stands and falls with the verdict reached by criti- cism, for, the moment their contents are declared to be historical, they lose all claim to this title. In any case, it is to be observed that these prose- poems one and all belong to a late period ; but, on the other hand, the jjrologue and the epilogue of the Book of Job, which in contradistinction from the speeches in chs. 3-41 are composed in prose, show that the date alone does not decide the pro- cedure in this matter. The reason for this diti'er- ence of form will have to be examined below (see pp. g"" and 10*).
B. Poems wjuTTsy ix Verse.— l. The External Evidence. — Far more prominent are the poems composed in verse, and of these alone we mean to speak in what follows. That the ancient Hebrews possessed and consciously employed in poetry pre- scribed poetical forms constructed for that special purpose, may be proved with certainty from the OT itself. The evidence is found first of all in the peculiar expressions used to designate poetry, the poet and his activity (cf. especially the roots '7sa and Tp), in the application of these peculiar terms to certain compositions (cf. the numerous intro- ductions and superscriptions, such as Ex 15', Jg 5', Nu 21"-*'), in the statement that certain passages were recited to the accompaniment of music, and sometimes of dancing, e.g. Ex IS-*, IS 18" ; cf. also many of the titles of the P.salms. We are carried a point beyond this by the alphabetical poems, in which equal poetical units are clearly separated from one another through their initial letters being arranged so as to form the Heb. alphabet. Most important are Pss 111 and 112, in which each several line bears a new letter, and next to these are to be reckoned those poems in which, like Pss 23. 34. 145, PrSl'""*', a letter is given to each verse. The Synagogue tradition {S/iabbath 1036, Sopherim, ch. 12 ; cf. Strack, Prolegom. crit. in Vet. Test. Heb. p. 80) at least testifies to and enjoins the writing in distinct lines of the songs Ex 15, Dt 32, Jg 5, 2 S 22, no doubt because these are called ' songs ' in the titles they bear. But this is to recognize expressly the poetical form of these passages.
2. The rules for the form of Heb. poetry. — a. The line.— Par more uncertain than the fact that the Hebrews possessed a form of composition specially devised for use in poetry is the question as to the rules of this form, or, in other words, as to the metrical system of the ancient Hebrews. On this suliject there is no tradition worthy of the name, rather must the laws of Heb. metre be deduced from the poems themselves. Fortunately,
• Cf. C. A. nrii,-i,'9((;rn<To; Inlrod. lo .Stttd;! of Uoli/ Scripture, New York, IbO'j. p. 34111.), who calls these books 'prose works of the ima^nation.'
P0]::TRY (HEBREW)
POETRY (HEBREW)
there are two factors that from the first stand out as indubitably established. The first of these is the line ((rrlxos), externally authenticated, as hoM just been said, by Pss 111 and 112, as well as t)3' the circumstance that in the MSS some poems are written sticliically, and latterlj' also hy the newly discovered fragments of the Heb. Sirach, which are likewise written in stichoi. It is the fundamental rule of all metrical composition, the jiie indispensable conilition, that the continuous flow of the discourse should be divided into short word-groups, which, as far as the sense is con- cerned, have a certain independence. It is only in highly developed forms of poetry that the inde- pendence of the lines, in this ni.atter of the sense, IS more or less superfluous. The limit for the length of these lines is one imposed by nature, namely, that each line should be capable of being pronounced in a single easy breath. Such lines detach themselves from one another with perfect clearness in all the poetical parts of the OT, and there cannot be a moment's doubt that it is not the logic of the discourse but an artificial design that has divided the flow of the language in this way. In Hebrew, especially, the end of the line uniformly coincides with a break in the sense, and even the accentuation of our texts is seldom wrong as to the correct division. It is possible to have poems which employ no other method as to their form than such a separation into the briefest units that give a complete sense, although these do not stand in an exact rhythmical relation to one another or mutuallj' unite themselves into uniform groups. This is exemplified, for instance, in a number of Goethe's finest poems, such as Der Gesang der Geistcr iiher den Wassern, Grenzen der 3Ienschheit, Ganijmed, Prometheus, etc.