(b) The projihet may communicate Divine oracles, which he has himself received. Here again strict, measured form is natural.
(c) The nronhet may speak in his own name, taking for nisba.sis, and expanding. Divine oracles. Uetwixt these last two possibilities the threat mass of prophetical passages continuallj- oscillates ; and
• Cf., for the ori(iin of earlier and later prophecy, the present writer's American Lecturea, The Heligion of Jgrait to the Exile, New York and London, Putnam, 1809, Lect iii. and iv.
transition ca.ses occur, in which it is imposiibla to draw the boundaries sharply.
((/) The prophet maj* himself tell of his entrance upon olHce and what happened in connexion with it, such as the conversations he held. To this category belong, for instance, the accounts of visions such as we have in Am 7fl'., the appear- ances beheld by an Ezekiel or a Zechariah, etc., but no less tlie experiences of Hosea (chs. 1-3), not to .speak of the little Book of Isaiah, whose kernel is the .story of the prophet's meeting with king Ahaz (6'-9''), and some things related of Jeremiah (e.g. 18'"-).
(c) Another author may tell about the prophet in such a way that the latter becomes the hero of the story. In such instances it is relatively indifl'erent if occasionally it is the prophet who speaks of him- self in the third person, but this is scarcely a likely contingency. To this last category belong Am T'""', Is 20, and in a much less degree chs. 36-39, but, above all, large sections of the Book of Jeremiah, particularly from ch. 26 onwards. If these last- named sections at last expand into a life of Jere- miah, n.ay, into a history of his times, if Is 36-39 was mainly taken from a popular work of history and a|ipended to the older Book of Isaiah, it is evident that we have now reached the sphere of prose pure and simple. But even in these sections there are prophetical discourses which by a stretch may be said to lead us back to the realm of poetry.
Besides, personal endowments must be taken into account. One might have the full conscious- ness of a call to the prophetic office and yet be no born poet. Then it might happen that at one time the prophet would put on the unwonted poetic harness and go earnestly to work for a while, only to relapse presently into heedlessness, while at another time he would disdain to use it at all and would employ prose. Something of this kind may be observed, for instance, in Ezekiel.
Under such conditions the literary form in the prophetic writings continually vacillates to and fro, and we meet also with transition forms betwixt prose and poetry, which it is difficult to class with certainty. The possibility of a careless treatment of poetical rules, giving rise to an imperfect type or mixed species of discourse, is open to Hebrew sis well as to an}- other language, nay, it lies nearer to hand in it than in many other languages. The stichic structure only needs to be neglected for the disco\ir.se to flow on with tolerable freedom from restraint, while the parallelism is retained as far as possible and by its peculiar undulating progress always m.akes itself felt. Grimme {ZDMG, 1897, p. 0S3f.) is wrong, then, when he rejects in tola the idea of a 'rhythmic prose'; the dilemma by which he attempts a reductio ad absurditm of it is not co"ent for those who do not accept his system. His argument fails in particular to do justice to the parallelism of the thought. For an analogy to the above-named mixed species, we may compare our own doggerel verse or rhymed prose.
For the prophetical books, then, a sliding scale must be adopted, with many indefinable transi- tions. The poetical form will be most strictly observed in the cases described above under [a) and, a little less, (6) ; the prophet himself will move with more freedom in those included under (c) ; the instance tited under {d) will give ample scope for the intermixture of prose ; finallv, in the la.st case prose will be the form started witli, which will only occasionally make waj- for poetry. Details would be out of place here.
3. Artistic Poetry. — To this category belong in a certain sense the whole of the poetical books, for these were all either composed or collected in full view and with clear consciousness of their artistic
POETRY (IIKBREW)
POISON
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form. Tliis took place, without exception, in Inter post-exilic times. But at the same time there is scarcely one of tliem wliicli had not its roots in the ancient folk-poetry. Along with lyiio poetry, the friiome and the Wisdom literature occujiy the forefront in this arena.
(a) Lurk Poetry.— (\) The Song of Songs.— This belongs, as was pointed out above (p. lu), wholly to the realm of folk -poetry. It is a collection of popular wedding - songs, belonging to a late period. But it owed its retention in the Canon simply to the circumstance that it was taken to be an e.\tremely ingenious allegorical poem with a religious meaning, and that its author wa.s assumed to be Solomon. It is not an impos- sible suggestion that, because of this conception, the book underwent here and there editorial re- vision.* See, further, art. Song of Songs.