fall, long and short syllables, harmonizing in lively passages with the subject, there is combined, in Hebrew poetry, and expressiveness of accent which is hardly to be found anywhere else to such an extent. Thus e.g., Psa 2:5 sounds like pealing thunder, and Psa 2:5 corresponds to it as the flashing lightning. And there are a number of dull toned Psalms as Psa 17:1, Psa 49:1, Psa 58:1, Psa 59:1, Psa 73:1, 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 Jer 24:1.
Under the point of view of rhythm the so-called parallelismus membrorum has also been rightly placed: that fundamental law of the higher, especially poetic, style for which this appropriate name as 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 caesura of the hexameter and pentameter; and this is particularly manifest in the double long line of the caesural schema (more correctly: the diaeretic schema) e.g., Psa 48:6, Psa 48:7 : 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 Psa 48:4, Psa 48:8 : Elohim in her palaces | was known as a refuge. With an east wind Thou breakest | the ships of Tarshish, we
- ↑ Abenezra calls it כּפוּל duplicatum, and Kimchi שׁונות בּמלּות ענין כּפל, duplicatio sententiae verbis variatis; both regard it as an elegant form of expression (דוך צחות). 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 Silluk wherever it is possible into two parts, it must not be inferred that this rhythmical relation is actually always one consisting of two members merely, although (as Hupfeld has shown in his admirable treatise on the twofold law of the rhythm and accent, in the D. M. Z. 1852), wherever it exists it always consists of at least two members.
