174 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
I remarked: "The lines throughout the poem
are of equal or approximately equal length, the
normal length being three or four accented words.
Of the eighty-three lines into which the Revised
Version divides the two Psalms, fifteen are
abnormally long or short, i.e. they contain more
than four or less than three accented words."
But as I then proceeded to show, these fifteen
exceptionally long or short lines in the Revised
Version mostly vanish when even the present
Hebrew text is correctly divided and punctuated.
The poem, then, consisted almost, if not quite,
entirely of lines of three or four accents. This
conclusion was, of course, consistent with some
or all of the distichs being 4 : 3; but Dr. Cheyne,
who had a short time before devoted a careful
study^1 to the metre as well as to other aspects
of the poem, excluded this possibility, for he
found in the fact that the poem was partly
trimeters, partly tetrameters, an indication either
of the imperfect skill of the Psalmist in the manage-
ment of his metre, or of the interference of a second
writer with the original. Dr. Briggs's view^2
seems to be similar. But if it was the intention
of the writer to use some 4 : 3 distichs, it is that
intention and neither lack of skill nor subsequent
1 In the Book of Psalms (1904), i. 27 f.
2 In the " International Critical Commentary," p. 70, and the notes,
pp. 72 and 74, on the g and F strophes: he rejects these strophes in their
entirety because they appear to him to consist of four-stress lines, and
according to his theory the poem was originally exclusively 3 : 3.