272 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
Thou bast wiped out their name for ever and aye,
(^7) The enemy (?) + + +.
Silent (?) are the ruins for ever,
And the cities Thou didst uproot—perished is their memory.
are closely connected with one another in thought: Yahweh is on the
point of giving judgment (v. 8), which he will give in justice and
righteousness (v. 9). In the first line of v. 8, which should begin with
the initial h, the term bwy, is parallel to the three terms of the second
line, and the two words Mlvfl hvhyv are non-parallel terms (cp. p. 76 f.):
of these hvhy seems the more needed; Mlvfl may or may not be
original; if the distich was, as some of the distichs in this poem
certainly appear to be, 4 : 3 (p. 173-176), the original may perhaps be
recovered by simply substituting hvhy hnh for hvhyv; if the distich was
3 : 3, by making this substitution and omitting Mlvfl.
Verses 6 and 7 contain only about one line, or at most four or five
words, more than the normal length of one strophe, whereas two
strophes, beginning with a and i respectively, must originally have
stood here. Is the loss of between two and four lines, or, say, six to
ten words, spread evenly over the two strophes, or has the d strophe
wholly dropped out in the same way that whole strophes have dis-
appeared from Ps. xxv. and cxly. (see p. 245)? In the latter case
v. 6 might be the first distich, and v. 7 a corrupt and slightly expanded
form of the second distich of the i strophe ; and what is printed above
as two mutilated lines in v. 6 was in reality a single line with secondary
parallelism (cp. p. 104) between its two clauses—a feature which appears
elsewhere in this poem (see ix. 14 a ; x. 11 b, 12 a, 17 b). Be this as
it may, I am, on the whole, inclined now to think that dfv Mlvfl at
the end of v. 6 and Hcnl in v. 7 a were originally parallel terms in
the final distich of the a strophe; I suspect that this distich was 4 : 3,
that vmtbyvxh conceals a noun with the 3rd pl. masc. suffix parallel to
Mmw, and tvbrH a 2nd sing. pf. form of a vb. parallel to rrnn. Instead of
the last line of v. 6 and the first two of v. 7 given above, I should now
suggest :
Thou hast wiped out their name for ever and aye,
Their... hast thou... for evermore.
If this view be correct all that survives of the d strophe is dbx twtn Myrfv
hmh Mrcz, of which the last word may be a corrupt form of the first word
of the h strophe ; i.e. of twelve to sixteen words of the d strophe, but
four or five survive: under these circumstances to guess what the
initial word was seems to me fruitless.]
6ab Duhm, perhaps rightly, sees here fragments of two parallel
lines (for the thought is certainly parallel) rather than the whole of a
single line (R.V. and most). [But see preceding note.]
7-8 These verses are certainly corrupt, but the above emendations
(like others that have been proposed) are little more than makeshifts.
Silent. reading vmd for vmt; [yet this is very doubtful; see the