THE BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS 119
tions i. is of crucial importance in the study of
the kinah rhythm: any one who has sufficient
ingenuity to discover an unequal division in all
its sections need have little fear of being able to
do the same for the three succeeding chapters or
any other passages where the occurrence of some
unequally divided lines suggests to him the
"kinah" rhythm. If, on the other hand, the
occurrence in the present text of Lamentations i.
of equally divided lines of four terms is too
frequent to admit of doubt that some such lines
occurred in the original text, then we may suspect
that the same variations also occurred or may
have occurred in other kinah poems.
And as a matter of fact the variation is prob-
ably to be found in one of the earliest kinahs that
survive. In Amos v. 2 the prophet's kinah over
the house of Israel is given: it consists of two dis-
tichs, or long lines as we may here by preference call
them:
lxrWy tlvtb | Mvq Jsvy-xl hlpn
hmyqm Nyx | htmdx-lf hwFn
Fallen to rise no more is the daughter of Israel,
Stretched out upon the ground with none to raise her.
The parallelism resembles the dominant paral-
lelism in Lamentations ii.: it is between the
long lines, not between the parts of these, the
scheme being
a. b2 | c2
a'2 | b'2