CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION 233
In translating these lines I adopt two emendations
noted in the next paragraph, and for convenience
of printing throw the sections of the long Hebrew
lines into separate lines:
23 I beheld the earth,
And, lo, 'twas formless and empty;
And the heavens, and they had no light.
24 I beheld the mountains,
And, lo, they were trembling,
And all the hills moved to and fro.
25 I beheld [the ground],
And, lo, there was no man,
And all the birds of the heaven were fled.
26 I beheld the garden-land,
And, lo, 'twas wilderness,
And all the cities thereof were broken down before
Yahweh.
Two emendations suggested by Duhm and
essential to his rhythmical scheme, though they
are not essential to what I believe to be the
correct view of the rhythm of the passage, seem.
to me probable: he reads hmdxh after ytyxr in
v. 25, and transposes hnhv and lmrkh in v. 26:
this gives an exact similarity of structure to all
four verses.
Once again, if any one will read these verses,
whether emended as just suggested or not, with-
out any prepossession as to what metre Jeremiah
must have used, or as to the general desirability
of attaching the term kinah to as much prophetic
poetry as possible, he cannot, I believe, feel that
they have any real rhythmical resemblance to