24 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
or other features are prominent which distinguish
those parts of the Old Testament commonly
regarded as poetry. Most of this literature,
especially the latest of it, survives only in trans-
lation; and, with regard to much of it, it is
disputed whether it actually runs back to a
Hebrew original at all. The exact date, again,
of much of it is uncertain, and I shall, therefore,
attempt no rigid chronological order of mention;
in general the period in question is from the third
or second century B.C. to the second century A.D.
Of the apocryphal books it was clear even
before the discovery of the Hebrew original that
Ecclesiasticus (c. 180 B.C.) must have possessed
all the characteristics of ancient Hebrew poetry ;
and even the alphabetic structure of li. 13-30 had
been inferred.^1 But Ecclesiasticus may well be
older than some of the latest poems in the Old
Testament.
The Hebrew original of the first book of
Maccabees (c. 90 B.C.) has not yet been recovered:
but, even through the translations, it is easy to
detect certain passages to which the use of
parallelism gives an entirely different character
from the simple prose narrative of the main body
of the work. Such passages are the eulogies of
Judas (iii. 3-9) and Simon (xiv. 6-15) and also
i. 25-28, 36 b-40, ii. 8-11 (13 a). Isolated distichs,
1 By G. A. Bickell in the Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie, 1882,
pp. 319 ff.