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Introduction to the Canonical Books of the Old Testament, Tr. by G.h. Box
Introduction to the Canonical Books of the Old Testament Tr by Gh Box Author:Carl Heinrich Cornill General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1907 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: § 4A. Hebrew Metre As poetical pieces appear in all branches of Hebrew literature, the historical books not excepted, it follows that the Prolegomena is the appropriate place for dealing with the metrical question: at the present time, indeed, it has the distinction of being the burning question of Old Testament science, so that even an Outline of Introduction cannot afford to pass it by. A full discussion and exhaustive treatment of details can be attempted here even less than elsewhere: our task must be limited to a brief introduction to those metrical systems which at the present time are of importance, and to a characterisation of their essential governing tendencies. 1. It would be natural to suppose that a poetry which has produced works of such imperishable beauty as Job and the Psalms should have possessed an artistic form ; for the essence of all art lies not in the material but the form. In the poetic art, form consists in the regularity with which syllable is arranged with syllable, word with word, verse with verse, strophe with strophe -- in other words, it consists in a system of metre. More especially where the poetic art has not yet been divested of its twin relationship to music, where the poem is at the same time a song, the presence of metre is necessarily assured ; for singing, above all singing in chorus, is simply inconceivable without fixed form and definite rhythm. The only positive information on the subject of a Hebrew metre that we possess on the Jewish side is found in Josephus, who (Ant. II. xvi. 4)considers the Song of the Exodus (Ex. xv. 1-19) to have been written cv eŁa...« less