extends the network of the rhythmical period, by combining the two and three line strophe with ascending and descending rhythm into greater strophic wholes rounded off into them- selves, the alphabetical Psalm xxxvii furnishes us with a safe answer to the question, for this is almost entirely tetra- stichic, e. g.
About evil-doers fret not thysclf, About the workers of iniquity be thou not envious, For as grass they shall soon be cut down, And as the green herb they shall wither,
but it admits of the compass of the strophe increasing even to the pentastich, (ver. 25, 26) since the unmistakeable land- marks of the order, the letters, allow a freer movement:
Tlow I, who once was young, am become ol1, Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken And his seed begging bread. He ever giveth and lendeth And his seed is blessed.
From this point the sure guidance of the alphabetical Psalms[1] fails us in investigating the Hebrew strophe-system. But in our further confirmatory investigations we will take with us from these Psalms, the important conclusion that the verse bounded by Séph pasik, the placing of which harmonizes with the accentuation first mentioned in the post- Talmudic tractate Sofrim,[2] is by no means (as, since K4ster, 1831, it has been almost universally supposed) the original form of the strophe but that strophes are a whole consisting of an equal or symmetrical number of stichs.[3] Hupfeld (Ps. iv.
- ↑ Even the older critics now and then supposed that we were to make these Ps. the starting point of our enquiries, For instance, Ser- pilius says: “It may perhaps strike some one whether an opinion as to some of the modes of the Davidic species of verse and poctry might not be formed from his, so-to-speak, alphabetical psalms.”
- ↑ Even if, and this is what Hupfeld and Riehm (Zuth. Zeitschr. 1866,
8. 300) advance, the Old Testament books were divided into verses,
(
Hebrew characters), even before the time of the Masoretes, still the division into
verses, as we now have it and especially that of the three poetical books,
is Masoretic.
- ↑ It was those stichs, of which the Talmud (B. Kiddushin 30a) counts
eight more in the Psalter than in the Thora, viz. 5896, which were orig-
inally called (Hebrew characters). Also in Angustine we find versus thus used like
otiyog. With him the words Populus ejus et oves pascue ejus are one
versus. There is no Hebrew MS. which could havo formed tho basis of
