fall, long and short syllables, harmonizing in lively passages with the subject, there is combined, in Hebrew poetry, an ex- pressiveness of accent which is hardly to be found anywhere else to such an extent. Thus e. g. Ps. ii. 5a@ sounds like peal- ing thunder, and 5b corresponds to it as the flashing lightning. And there are a number of dull toned Psalms as xvii. xlix. lviii. lix. Ixxiii, in which the description drags heavily on and is hard to be understood, and in which more particularly the suffixes in mo are heaped up, because the indignant mood of the writer impresses itself upon the style and makes itself heard in the very sound of the words. The non plus ultra of such poetry, whose very tones heighten the expression, is the cycle of the prophecies of Jeremiah chap. xxiv—xxvii.
Under the point of view of rhythm the so-called paralle- lismus membrorum has also been rightly placed: that funda- mental law of the higher, especially poetic, style for which this appropriate name has been coined, not very long since.[1] The relation of the two parallel members does not really differ from that of the two halves on either side of the principal cesura of the hexameter and pentameter; and this is parti- cularly manifest in the double long line of the czsural schema (more correctly: the diszretic schema) e. g. Ps. xlviii. 6, 7: They beheld, straightway they marvelled, | bewildered they took to flight. Trembling took hold upon them there | anguish, as a woman in travail. Here the one thought is expanded in the same - verse in two parallel members. But from the fact of the rhythmical organization being carried out without reference to the logical requirements of the sentence, as in the same psalm vers. 4,8: Elohim in her palaces | was known as a refuge. With an east wind Thou breakest | the ships of Tarshish, we
- ↑ Abenezra calls it (
Hebrew characters) duplicatum, and Kimchi (Hebrew characters),
duplicatio sentenlia verbis variatis; both regard it as an elegant form of
expression ((Hebrew characters). Even the punctuation does not proceed from a
real understanding of the rhythmical relation of the members of the verse
to one another, and when it divides every verse that is marked off by Sidéuk
wherever it is possible into two parts, it must not be inferred that this
thythmical relation is actually always one consisting of two members merely,
although (as Hupfeld has shewn in his admirable treatise on the two-
fold law of the rhythm and accent, in the D. M. Z, 1852), wherever it
exists it always consists of at least two members.
to the later period of the language (vid. Hupfeld in the Deutsch. Morgenl. Zeilschr. vi. 187).
