b. The verse. — As well established as the line is the second higher poetical unit, the verse. In Heb. poetry a plurality of lines, in by far the majority of instances two of these, regularly com- bine to form a verse. This unit is likewise wit- nessed to by tradition. The sign for the close of the verse (the double point pins 'iin) is undoubtedly the earliest addition made to the consonantal text, and is handed down along with the latter, where accents, vowels, and diacritical points are wanting. The division by cpirs is already witnessed to in the Mishna [Megillnh iv. 4). The verse-division, to be sure, is not confined to the poetical sections of the (3T, but is carried through everywhere. But it is a circumstance of extreme importance that in the poetical sections the verse - divider does not stand at the close of each stichos, but regularly (with extremely rare exceptions) includes several of these. And though it happens frequently that several metrical verses are combined in a single Massoretic verse, on the other hand it is one of the rarest occurrences to find the verse - divider wrongly separating stxchoi of the same verse from one another.
c. Parallelism. — The connecting agency, how- ever, which unites the verse-members so as to form the verse, was not clearly recognized and defined till Last century. The merit of this belongs to Bishop Lowth in his epoch-making book, T)e sacra poesi kebr(Eorum, which appeared in the same year (175.3) as Astruc's Conjectures. There in his Pra;- lectio xix., p. 2.'57,* he says : —
' Poetica sententiarura compoaitio niaximam partem constat in OHjualitate, ac similitudine quadam, fdve parnUelismo. mem- bronim cujusqvic pcriocli, ita ut in duobus plerumque mcmhris res rebus, verbis verba, quaai demensa et paria respondeant.'
From this passage came the term parallelismus membrorum, which has since then been generally
• Compare with this the more detailed discussion in the Pre- liminary Dittsertation to Lowtli's wortta on Isaiah, 1778 [German by Koppe, 1779 ff.l.
employed. We have to do here not with a formal contrivance like rhyme, assonance, alliteration, regularly changing length of the lines (cf. the dactylic distich), but with a connexion by means of the sense, which finds its full expression only in parallelism, and, at the same time, in parallelism separates itself from what precedes and what follows. Lowth continues quite correctly—
* Qu88 res multos quidera gradus habet, raultam varietatem, ut alias accuratior et apertior, alias solutior et obscurior sit ' ;
but by distinguishing three kinds of parallelism, synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic, as well as by the very name ' parallelism,' which was capable of being misunderstood, he contributed at the same time to encourage too narrow a con- ception of the phenomenon.* Nor is it any ad- vantage to complete the scheme, as H. Ewald in particular has sought to do ; all this has only a casual value as compared with the general principle established, that the individual stichoi, which themselves each form a unit of sense, com- bine in the verse to form a larger unit. The possible variety of relation between the stichoi is endless.
A wider background for this phenomenon has lately been gained by observing that the same rule holds good in the poetry of the ancient Baby- lonians and Assyrians, and, perliaps in a less de- veloped form, also in that of the ancient Egj'ptians. Schradert assumes that Israel took over this prin- ciple, along with much else, from Mesopotamia, and Briggs [op. cit. p. 368) also considers this extremely probable. Still the possibility remains that this poetical rule is the common heritage of a large group of the nations of antiquity.J
It is radically wrong to see in the parallelism merely a rhetorical phenomenon, and to disregard it accordingly, as need may be, in conducting metri- cal investigations. In this way one overlooks the fact that the parallelism is founded on the previous separation of the stichoi. It is possible, of course, to take the sense-parallelism and apply it. to a prose composition, at the same time dispensing with a uniform separation into lines, and in this way to weaken it down to a purely rhetorical form, but, when coupled with that separation, the parallelism assumes the character of a fixed device of art. The best proof of this is found in the circumstance that for nearly 2000 years men felt and recognized the Psalms and other poetical portions of the OT to be poems, without having any clear conscious- ness of the device employed to constitute them so. It is a specially happy providence that this device is so connected witfi t^je contents that it had practi- cally to be handed down along with these.
* Still the distinguishing: of three possibilities has a certain logical value. In the unpublished second part of the present writer's Akadaniaclu'. AntrUtucvrtesuiig, 1873 (cf. SK, 1874, p. 764, Anm.), an attempt is made to explain the parallflismiu by goinf; back to the word S^o as a term for poetical discourse. If this Heb. word means originally 'comparison, likeness,' bipartition and parallelism find their ground in the nature of the case. Tlie result of a comparison may be one or other of three kinds. It may disclose (1) equality or resemhlance, e.g. Pr 102*5 lllfi- 22.30^ (2) inequality, unlikeness, or opposition, e.g. J»r 101-25, (3) a more or less, a better or worse, etc., by which a movement, a progress is given, e.g. Pr 12a i.-iie. 17 los 171 191^ aa also 11^1 1511. There can be hardly any doubt that the parallel verse exhibits its {greatest independence and purest development in the various apophthegms of Pr 10 ff., which all fall imder this threefold scheme. The circumstance that, at least in their written form, these belong to tlie later products of Hebrew liter.iture, is certainly no adequate objection to the view put forward in the above-cited lecture, that the funfhmu-ntal rule for the form of Heb. poetry is borrowed from the apophthegm. Yet it is so hopeless a task to reach any prol>abIe ]>ronouncement regarding these first beginnings that the present writer is no longer disposed to maintain that former view.