CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION 213
in others a full-stop may appear at the caesura
and virtually no stop at all at the end of the line.
Sievers, it is true, still points his " sevens " with
spaces for the two caesuras, but the space fre-
quently divides construct and genitive, or other
words as closely connected with one another.
Two lines at the beginning of Genesis xxiii. may
serve as examples of the points just referred to ;
I add a translation to bring out the striking
difference between this kind of metrical com-
position, if it be such, and parallelistic poems :
hnw Myrwfv hxm hrw yyH ynw vyhyv
xyh fbrx tyrqb hrw tmtv Mynw fbwv
NvrbH
And were there years of the life of Sarah one hundred and
twenty years
And seven years. And Sarah died in Kirjath-Arba,
which is Hebron.
And in the following lines from Genesis i., as
reconstructed by Sievers, a full-stop occurs in
the middle of the first line, though the same line
ends with a verb the accusative to which begins
the second line:
Myhlx hvhy xryv rvx yhyv rvx yhy
jwHh-Nybv rvxh-Nyb Myhlx hvhy ldbyv bvF-Yk rvxh-tx
Let there be light: and there was light. And Yahweh
Elohim saw
The light that it And divided Yahweh Elohim between
was good. the light and
the darkness.
Now no doubt there can be found analogies