220 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
marked and obvious in the book of Job, unless
prologue and speeches are there referred to
different writers.
But a rather different question arises when
we turn to the narratives of Creation; for here
we shall find ourselves dealing not with differences
between narrative and speeches, but with a
question of differences between different parts
of what is alike narrative. The question we
have to put here is this: Are these narratives
in their present form, or do they rest on Hebrew
sources that were, entirely prose? or are there
sufficient traces of rhythm even now left to
suggest that these narratives rest in part at least
on Hebrew sources that were written in poetical
form? If the narratives are prose, and if the
sources on which they rested were also all prose,
then, although the Hebrew story of Creation
shows the well-known resemblances to the Baby-
lonian story, the literary form given to the story
by the Hebrews was at all times different: it
was prose, whereas the Babylonian story was
told in verse. And even if Sievers were right,
and the whole of the Creation narratives in
Genesis were metrical, there would still be a
difference; the Babylonian poems are cast in
the old parallelistic 4 : 4 rhythm, the Hebrew
narratives, according to the hypothesis, mainly
in Sievers' non-parallelistic "sevens." But
Sievers has also drawn attention, and this time