236 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
does the text of a short passage accidentally lose
in transcription eleven letters distributed over
five places without the sense being in the slightest
degree affected?
It is by such methods as these, which could be
illustrated by an abundance of other examples,
that Duhm succeeds in imposing regularity of
line and strophe on Old Testament poetry. And
it is on results so obtained that Duhm and others
build up far-reaching critical and exegetical
conclusions.
I will in conclusion briefly summarise some
of the facts and some of the inferences drawn
from them to which I have endeavoured to draw
attention in these discussions, and briefly refer
to one or two points which it has not been my
purpose to discuss more fully.
The main forms of Hebrew poetry are two--
parallelism and rhythm, to which, as a third
and occasional form, we may add strophe.
Rhyme, so common in many languages, and a
constant and necessary form of all strictly
metrical poetry in Arabic, as well as a character-
istic of that other type of composition in Arabic
known as saj’ ("rhymed prose"), is in Hebrew,
as in Assyrian, merely occasional. Curiously
enough it is conspicuous in one of the earliest
existing fragments of Hebrew poetry, the song
of Lamech (Gen. iv. 23, 24), and yet it never