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 themselves, the alphabetical Ps 37 furnishes us with a safe answer to the question, for this is almost entirely tetrastichic, e.g.,
About evil-doers fret not thyself,
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, (Psa 37:25, Psa 37:26) since the unmistakeable landmarks of the order, the letters, allow a freer movement:
Now I, who once was young, am become old,
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 Sôph pasûk, the placing of which harmonizes with the accentuation first mentioned in the post-Talmudic tractate Sofrim,[2] is by no means (as, since Köster, 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, Serpilius says: “It may perhaps strike some one whether an opinion as to some of the modes of the Davidic species of verse and poetry might not be formed from his, so-to-speak, alphabetical psalms.”
- ↑ Even if, and this is what Hupfeld and Riehm (Luth. Zeitschr. 1866, S. 300) advance, the Old Testament books were divided into verses, פסוקים, 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 these stichs, of which the Talmud (B. Kiddushin 30 a) counts eight more in the Psalter than in the Thôra, viz., 5896, which were originally called פסוקים. Also in Augustine we find versus thus used like στίχος. With him the words Populus ejus et oves pascuae ejus are one versus. There is no Hebrew MS which could have formed the basis of the arrangement of the Psalms in stichs; those which we possess only break the Masoretic verse, (if the space of the line admits of it) for ease of writing into the two halves, without even regarding the general injunction in c. xiv. of the tractate Sofrim and that of Ben-Bileam in his Horajoth ha-Kore, that the breaks are to be regulated by the beginnings of the verses and the two great pausal accents. Nowhere in the MSS, which divide and break up the words most capriciously, is there to be seen any trace of the recognition of those old פסוקים being preserved. These were not merely lines determined by the space, as were chiefly also the στίχοι or ἔπη according to the number of which, the compass of Greek works was recorded, but liens determined by the sense, κῶλα (Suidas: κῶλον ὁ ἀπηρτισμένην ἔννοιαν ἔχων στίχος), as Jerome wrote his Latin translation of the Old Testament after the model of the Greek and Roman orators (e.g., the MSS of Demosthenes), per cola et commata i.e., in lines breaking off according to the sense.
