INTRODUCTORY 21
mean more than that the Psalmist is the constant
recipient of God's goodness; and herein these
modern commentators follow, in misconceiving
the influence of form, the early Jewish interpreter
Resh Lakish (third century A.D.) who explained the
verse thus: "Every one who studieth in the Law
in this world which is like the night, the Holy One,
blessed be He, stretches over him the thread of
grace for the future world which is like the day."
To sum up this part of our discussion: Jewish
Rabbis in the second century A.D. misunderstood
the parallelism that is characteristic of most of
the poetry of the Old Testament, and, with the
exception of Philo and Josephus, no Jews appear
to have given any attention to any metrical laws
that may also have governed that poetry;^2 and
1 Talmud B. Hagigah 12 b ; ed. Streane, p. 64. Another passage
where some modern commentators have failed to see how much the
real range of thought is defined by parallelism is Hos. ii. 5 a, b
Lest I strip her naked,
And set her as on the day she was born.
These two lines are entirely synonymous. For the correct understand-
ing of the second line the most important thing is to recall Job i. 21,
" Naked came I out of my mother's womb"; the two lines mean simply
this : Lest I strip her to the skin so that she becomes as naked as a
child just drawn from the womb. Such a note as Harper's in the Inter-
national Critical Commentary (p. 227), which is partly based on Hitzig's,
is not really interpretation: the lines do not mean that Israel is to
become a nomadic people again. Strangely enough, the modern
commentaries which I have consulted do not give the really pertinent
reference to Job i. 21: and it was not until I turned to Kimhi that I
found a commentator who did. He very correctly paraphrases the
second line: I will cause her to stand naked as on the day of her birth,
and regards it as repeating the meaning of the first line by synonymous
terms (nlmu m'7n7 '71:22 1>3sn).
2 It is possible enough that the practice of distinguishing certain
poems (viz. those in Ex. xv., Deut. xxxii., Judg. v. and 2 Sam. xxii.)
by spacing within the lines, a practice still regularly observed in printed