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proverbs and that of the preceding, for he counts the number of the words which constitute a verse in the case of the latter and of the former; but such a proceeding is unwarrantable, for the remarkably long Masoretic verse Pro 24:12 contains eighteen words; and the poet is not to be made accountable for such an arrangement, for in his mind Pro 24:11. forms a hexastich, and indeed a very elegant one. Not the words of the Masoretic verse, but the stichs are to be counted. Reckoning according to the stichs, I can discover no difference between these proverbs and the preceding. In the preceding ones also the number of the words in the stichs extends from two to five, the number two being here, however, proportionally more frequently found (e.g., Pro 24:4, Pro 24:8, Pro 24:10); a circumstance which has its reason in this, that the symmetry of the members is often very much disturbed, there being frequently no trace whatever of parallelism. To the first appendix to the “Proverbs of Solomon” there follows a second, Pro 24:23., with the superscription, “These things also to the wise,” which contains a hexastich, Pro 24:23-25, a distich, Pro 24:26, a tristich, Pro 24:27, a tetrastich, Pro 24:28., and a Mashal ode, Pro 24:30., on the sluggard - the last in the form of an experience, of the poet like Psa 37:35. The moral which he has drawn from this recorded observation is expressed in two verses such as we have already found at Pro 6:10. These two appendices are, as is evident from their commencement as well as from their conclusion, in closest relation to the introduction, Pro 1:7-9.
There now follows in chap. 25-29 the second great collection of “Proverbs of Solomon,” “copied out,” as the superscription mentions, by the direction of King Hezekiah. It falls, apparently, into two parts; for as Pro 24:30., a Mashal hymn stands at the end of the two appendices, so that the Mashal hymn Pro 27:23. must be regarded as forming the division between the two halves of this collection. It is very sharply distinguished from the collection beginning with chap. 10. The extent of the stichs and the greater or less observance of the parallelism furnish no distinguishing mark, but there are others worthy of notice. In the first collection the proverbs are exclusively in the form of distichs; here we have also some tristichs, Pro 25:8, Pro 25:13, Pro 25:20; Pro 27:10, Pro 27:22; Pro 28:10, tetrastichs, Pro 25:4., Pro 25:9., Pro 25:21., Pro 26:18., Pro 26:24., Pro 27:15., and pentastichs, Pro 25:6., besides the Mashal hymn already referred to. The kind of arrangement is not essentially different from that in