22 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
what Josephus says on that subject is expressed
in Greek terms, was written as part of his apology
for all things Jewish, and appears at most to
imply that Josephus had some perception of
difference of rhythm in different Hebrew poems.
The account he gives wears a rather more learned
air, but is in reality as vague and insufficient as
the account given to Dr. Dalman by some of
those who supplied him with his specimens of
modern Palestinian poetry.^1
editions of the Hebrew Bible even when other poems such as Psalms
and Job are not so distinguished, goes back to this period. It is
certainly vouched for by sayings in both Talmuds (j. Meg. iii. 74, col.
2, bottom; b. Meg. 716 b; cp. Shabbath, 103 b, bottom), of which the
Jerusalem Talmud is commonly considered to have been completed
c. A.D. 350, the Babylonian c. A.D. 500; and by the time that the
tractate Soferim was written (probably c. A.D. 850), according to state-
ments therein contained (Soferim, ed. Joel Muller, xiii. 1, p. xxi), it was
customary in accurately written MSS. to distinguish Psalms, Proverbs,
and Job in the same way ; and in some of the earliest existing MSS.
Psalms and Job as well as the four passages above mentioned are so
distinguished. But it is difficult, not to say impossible, to derive from
these facts any theory of the nature of parallelism, or of the rhythm
of the lines so distinguished : on the contrary, the different divisions
of these poetical passages in different MSS., the failure to distinguish
at all such obvious poems as the blessing of Jacob in Gen. xlix., the
poems attributed to Balaam in Num. xxiii., xxiv., and the blessings of
Moses in Deut. xxxiiii. (cp. Ginsburg's edition of the Hebrew Bible),
and the fact that the directions in the Talmud for writing certain
passages vrcx,yipc;,s group together''the poems in Ex. xv., Deut. xxxii.,
etc., and the lists of the kings of Canaan in Jos. xx. 9-24 and of the sons
of Haman in Esth. ix., rather suggest the absence of any clear theory
of either parallelism or rhythm.
1 "In modern Arabic folk-poetry the purely rhythmical has begun
to drive out the quantitative principle so that a distinction may be
drawn between quantitative and rhythmical poems."...
"I have never been able to discover how the composers of this folk-
poetry go to work in the composition of these poems. To the question
whether there was nothing at all in his lines that the poet numbered so
as to secure regularity (Gleichmass), I received from several different
quarters the reply, that nothing at all was numbered, that for the folk-