credo illis gui eam linguam probe callent, and it is not a mere fancy when Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, Jerome and others have detected in the Old Testament songs, and especially in the Psalms, something resembling the Greek and Latin metres. For the Hebrew poetry indeed had a certain syllabic mea- sure, since, — apart from the audible Shebd and the Chateph, both of which represent the primitive shortenings, — all syl- lables with a full vowel are intermediate, and in ascending be- come long, in descending short, or in other words, in one position are strongly accented, in another more or less slur- red over. Hence the most manifold rhythms arise, e. g. the anapestic wenashlicha miménnu abothémo (ii. 3) or the dactylic
az jedabber elémo beappé (ii. 5). The poetic discourse is freer in its movement than the Syriac poetry with its constant as- cending (_ ) or descending spondees (.* _); it represents all kinds of syllabic movements and thus obtains the appear- ance of a lively mixture of the Greek and Latin metres. But it is only an appearance— for the forms of verse, which con- form to the laws of quantity, are altogether foreign to early Hebrew poetry, as also to the oldest poetry; and these rhythms which vary according to the emotions are not metres, for, as Augustine says in his work De Musica, “Omne metrum rhythmus, non omnis rhythmus etiam metrum est.” Yet there is not a single instance of a definite rhythm running through the whole in a shorter or longer poem, but the rhythms always vary accord- ing to the thoughts and feelings; as e. g. the evening song Ps. iv towards the end rises to the anapzstic measure: Ai-
atta Jahawé lebadad, in order then quietly to subside in the iambic: /abetach téshibeni.[1] With this alternation of rise and
- ↑ Bellcrmann’s Versuch iiber die Metrik der Hebrder (1813) is com- paratively the best on this subject even down to the present time; for Saalschtitz (Von der Form der hebr. Poesie, 1825, aud elsewhere) proceeds on the erroneous assumption that the present system of accentuation does not indicate the actual strong toned syllable of the words — by following the pronunciation of the German and Polish Jews he perceives, almost throughout, a spondeo-dactylic rhythm (e. g. Judg. xiv. 18 Jule chardshtem beeglithi). But the traditional accentuation is proved to be a faithful continuation of the ancient proper pronunciation of the He- brew; the trochaic pronunciation is more Syrian, and the tendency to draw the accent from the final syllable to the penult, regardless of tho evucitions originally governing it, is a phenomenon which belongs only
