ELEMENTS OF HEBREW RHYTHM 137
Be this as it may, there has certainly been an
increasing agreement among modern students of
this subject, particularly under the influence of
Ley,l to find in the stressed words or syllables the
"pivots or posts," to use Professor Saintsbury's
phrase, of the Hebrew rhythm.
But allowing this, what is the limit—for there
surely must be some limit—to the number of
unstressed syllables that may accompany each
or any of the stressed syllables? Again, is there
any law governing the position of the stressed
syllable in relation to the unstressed syllables
that go with it?
Taking the first of these two questions first:--
Does a single word extending beyond a certain
given number of syllables necessarily contain more
than one stress? or is such a word ambiguous,
capable of receiving two, but capable also of
receiving only one stress? And is the actual
number of unstressed syllables that may accom-
1 jrk ymt yrwx
hvhy trvtb Myklhh
which contains six fully stressed words and is rendered in the LXX--
Maka<rioi oi[ a@mwmoi e]n o[d&?,
oi[ poreuo<menoi e]n no<m& kuri<ou.
which contains six accents. Ley (Zeitschr. fur die AT. Wissenschaft,
1892, pp. 212 ff.) argues that one of the things which Origen is struggling
to express is that in this particular verse we find the unusual phenome-
non of text and translation containing the same number of stressed
words and consequently the same rhythm.
1 Julius Ley, Die metrischen Formen der hebraischen Poesie, 1866;
Grundzuge der Rhythrnus, des Vers- and Strophenbaues in der hebraischen
Poesie, 1875 ; Leitfaden der Metrilc der hebraischen Poesie, 1887.