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THE BRITISH ACADEMY

The Early Poetry of Israel in its
Physical and Social Origins
By
George Adam Smith, D.D.,LL.D., Litt.D.
Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen
Formerly Professor of Old Testament Language, Literature, and
Theology, United Free Church College, Glasgow

The Schweich Lectures
1910

London
Published for the British Academy
By Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press
Amen Corner, E.C.
1912

0XF0RO : HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

nl^5?>C>

TO

JL. n.

CONTENTS PAGE
PREFACE  vii
INTRODUCTION ix

LECTURE I
Language, Structure and Rhythms .... 1
1. Language . ....... 1
2. Structure  7
3. Rhythms  11
LECTURE II
Substance and Spirit ....... 26
LECTURE III
Substance and Spirit (continued) ..... 43
INDEX OF PASSAGES  101

PREFACE
These three Lectures with their Introduction were delivered in
London before the British Academy towards the close of 1910, but
till this summer I have been unable to prepare them for the press.
In the Introduction I recount the materials available for the illus
tration of the subject ; but it was not possible to cover the whole
range of these within three hours. I have, therefore, much to add
to what was actually spoken. Some of the discussion of technical
questions in Lecture I required expansion; and I desired to give in
Lecture III as full a translation as was possible of all the poetical
passages relevant to the subject.
Where it is necessary to quote the original I have done so, for the
sake of those who are ignorant of Hebrew, in the letters of our own
alphabet. The details of this transliteration are given on page 1 and
at the top of page 4 ; I may say here that in the transliteration of
single words in Lecture III and its notes, I have not thought it
necessary always to mark the softer forms of the letters b, g, d, Jc, p,
and t. The name of the God of Israel is given as Yahweh, except
in the translation of Deborah's song, where, as in our English
version, it appears as The Lord.
What is said on pages 84, 85 as to the translation of the Song of
Deborah, and the division of it into lines, and its rhythms, is applicable
to all the translations offered in these Lectures.
In connection with the discussion of rhythms and parallelism in
Lecture 1, the reader should consult Professor G. B. Gray's para
graphs (44-57) on ' The Poetical Forms of the Prophetic Literature '
in his ' Commentary on the Book of Isaiah, i-xxxix ', in the Inter
national Critical Commentary, 1912. The volume by Professor
Gordon, of Montreal, on The Poets of the Old Testament (1912), has

viii PREFACE
reached me only this month, and I regret that I have not been able
to make use of the valuable materials for translation which it
contains. I reserve the right to use the contents of these Lectures in a larger
work on Hebrew poetry which I hope some day to publish.

GEORGE ADAM SMITH.

The University of Aberdeen.
October 1912.

INTRODUCTION
It requires but a slight acquaintance with the criticism of the Old
Testament to appreciate the difficulty of stating the limits of our
subject— i The Early Poetry of Israel'. We cannot be sure that
all passages which are poetical in form as well as in spirit have as yet
been detached from their environment of prose in the earlier literature
of Israel; and again, the age of many of the poems or poetical
fragments, which we may confidently distinguish as such, is still more
uncertain. For the purpose of the following Lectures I propose to use all pieces
which are generally and reasonably — though not always conclusively —
assigned to the centuries before the eighth century b.c. : the age of
the first prophets whose writings have come down to us, and probably
the age of the bulk of those earliest documents of the Hexateuch, the
so-called Jahwist and Elohist, in which most of the pieces have been
preserved. That will include all the fragments of verse, mostly on
genealogies and the characters and relations of tribes, which are found
in the Book of Genesis, along with the fuller 'Blessing of Jacob' in
chapter xlix and its counterpart (with differences) in Deuteronomy
xxxiii ; in Exodus xv, the Song of Miriam, and at least the opening
of the Song of Moses, and xvii. 16, the War with Amalek ; in Numbers
the fragments found in chapters x. 35 36, xii. 6-8, xxi. 14b 15,
17b 18, 27-30 1 ; and in chapters xxiii, xxiv the longer and shorter
oracles of Balaam, the former of which I judge not later than David's
time ; in Joshua, the address to the Sun and Moon, x. 12 f. ; in Judges,
the Song of Deborah, ch. v, the Parable of the Trees, ch. ix, and the
riddles and verses in the story of Samson, ch. xiv-xvi ; in 1 Samuel
the oracles in xv. 22 23 and 33, the repeated acclamation of David,
xviii. 7, xxi. 12, xxix. 5, and the ' mashal ' in xxiv. 14 2 ; in 2 Samuel
the elegies ascribed to David, i. 17 ff., iii. 33 f. 3 ; and in 1 Kings, viii.
12 f. (after the Septuagint) and xii. 16. Some of these are cited
by the prose documents, which have preserved them, as taken from
two or three early collections of songs : ' The Book of the Upright
1 The fragments in Lev. x. 3 and Num. vi. 24-26 have come down to us in the
Priestly Document of later date. Their date is unknown. 2 English, verse 13.
3 The dates of xxii (= Ps. xviii) and xxiii. 1-7 are more doubtful.

x INTRODUCTION
or Valiant ' (?),J 'The Book of the Wars of Yah web',2 and 'The
Book of the Song or Songs '.3 The presence of other poems in the
earlier Books may be due to the same collections.
With all these pieces, most of which are embodied in works not
later than the eighth century, we might take a number of popular songs
and proverbs quoted by the prophets, which, though we cannot tell
their date, are as primitive in character as the undoubtedly earlier
poems. But I shall also use from poems which are obviously later than the
eighth century, like ' The Song of Moses ' in Deuteronomy xxxii, such
portions as reflect the desert circumstance of Israel's younger days
and the social changes which the nation underwent on their settle
ment to agriculture. And, of course, I shall not hesitate to draw
comparisons and illustrations, especially of the subject of the first
lecture, from the rest of Hebrew literature.
It is hard for us who speak English to regard the poetry of the
Hebrews with a single eye. It lies before us in a double perspective.
In one aspect it is the nearest poetry of all, the first which we learned ;
through the open windows of which we had our earliest visions of
time, of space, of eternity, and of God. Its rhythms haunt our
noblest prose ; its lyrics are our most virile and enduring hymns.
But in another perspective, which has only recently been cleared
for lis, Hebrew poetry lies very far away : the product of an alien
race and of a stage of culture distant from our own. The poetries,
hitherto studied by the large majority of my hearers, lie within the
Aryan race, practically within Europe. They are from civilisations
out of which our own has grown ; and in languages which have
almost exactly our alphabet, and some of which we call classic because
the canons of their literature rule the logic and the rhetoric of our
own. In particular, most of these Aryan languages hold in common
the words Poet and Poetry: by which they understand the twin faculties
of Imagination that ' bodies forth the forms of things unknown ' ,
and of verbal construction and melody in the presentation of these
forms. But the subject of our present Lectures leads us among
another race, not only with a somewhat different alphabet, which
implies a somewhat different voice and ear than ours ; nor only
without some combinations of sound which we count the more musical ;
1 Sepher hay-Yashar, Joshua x. 13, 2 Sam. i. 18.
a Sepher MilMmoth Yahweh, Num. xxi. 14.
s Sepher hash-Shir, 1 Kings viii, 53, LXX; perhaps a corruption of the above
S. hay-Yashar.

INTRODUCTION xi
but with the imagination and the constructive ability, which for us
give the Poet his name, less developed, less sustained. Indeed, we
leave the name itself behind us. Those who among the Hebrews
correspond to the Aryan poets call themselves singers, minstrels,
shepherds of words, comparers, bewailers, and the like — anything but
makers. The verbs which describe their functions express not the
power of creation but the capacity for impression : not the art of
building or of ornament so much as the process of outpouring and the
spirit of urgency. The singers rose from and were inspired by less
coherent forms of life than our own, and this social looseness, along
with their people's ignorance of architecture and other constructive
arts, has had its effect on their poetry.
These things will be explained and illustrated in the course of the
Lectures. In the first I propose to deal with the Language,
Structure and Rhythms of the Poetry.

THE EARLY POETRY OF ISRAEL IN ITS
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ORIGINS
LECTURE I
language, structure and rhythms
1. Language.
In appreciating the Hebrew language as a vehicle for poetry, we
must first reckon with the fact, already mentioned, that its alphabet
is somewhat different from our own. The differences consist (1) in the
use of consonants, and of varieties of consonants, strange to our ears
and difficult to our organs of speech ; along with the prevalence of
several consonants, especially gutturals, which we count among the
less musical ; (2) in the absence of some combinations of consonants,
which to us are melodious and dear ; and (3) in the peculiar relation to
the consonants of the vowels, which are not integral to the root as in
Aryan languages, which were not marked in the earlier script, and the
tradition of which was therefore far less certain than that of our own.
Of our gutturals Hebrew had all except the composite kw or qu, the
velar or shrouded guttural, and x, a composite guttural and sibilant.
But in addition to ours the alphabet contains the light breathing,
'Aleph ('), inaudible at the beginning of a word, and sensible in the
middle only when it breaks between two vowels ; 'Ayin ('), formed
by a curious and difficult check on the breath at the bottom of the
windpipe, with probably (as in Arabic but under the same sign)
a variation approaching the gr of some Frenchmen ; Qoph or the
deeper k (k) ; at least two and possibly three degrees of the letter h.
As in other Semitic languages so in Hebrew the gutturals prevail
to an extent which is as harsh to our ear as the lavish sibilants of
English to an Italian. Here are three instances taken at random, lines
of ordinary words into which there has been no intentional intrusion of
gutturals. The vowels printed above the line are very fugitive sounds.
Final h is not sounded except when it has a point beneath it, and h
after b, g, d, k, p, and t simply indicates the softer forms of these
letters. In Hebrew the accent is nearly always on the last syllable.
Gen. xxvii. 27, 29, from Isaac's Blessing of Jacob —
R6'eh reah b6ni
Kereah sadheh male'
'Asher ber'kho Yahvveh
H6weh ghebhir le'ahekha
'Orarekha 'arur umebharakhekha barukh.

2 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Gen. xlix. 8, from Jacob's Blessing of Judah —
Yehudhah 'attah yodhukha 'ahekha
Yadhekha b6'6reph 'oyebhekha
Yishtahawii lekha bene "abhikha.
Deut. xxxiii. 26, from the Song of Moses —
'En ke,el Yeshurun
Rokhebh shamai'm be'ezrekha
Ubhegha'awatho shehakim
Me'onah 'elohe kedhem
Umittahath zeroc6th 'olam.
Or the contrast may be put in this way. In the English couplet
from the Song of Deborah —
Was shield seen or lance
In the forty thousands of Israel ? —
no gutturals occur and six sibilants (besides th) ; but the Hebrew
has only one sibilant and three gutturals besides five alephs —
Maghen 'im-yera'eh w'romah
Be'arba'im 'eleph b"yisra'el.
Again, a triplet from the same song in English —
Riding roan asses,
Sitting on rugs (?),
Walking the highways — sing them ! —
has six sibilants and three gutturals ; while the Hebrew —
R5khebhe 'Hhonoth sehoroth
Yoshebhe 'al-middln
Weholekhe 'al-derekh sihum —
has eight gutturals besides one aleph, and only three pure sibilants
besides th twice.1
These are ordinary lines, but when as in some passages of the
prophets the speaker gives himself up to denounce or to imprecate,
his lines are packed with words still more full of gutturals. In
Hebrew, to call with the throat 2 is to speak with vehemence. The
dry climate and large leisure of the East bestow on the lower chords
of the voice a greater depth and suppleness ; and Orientals have
elaborated their throat-letters to a number unmarked in any Western
alphabet. How delicately the Hebrews distinguished their many gutturals
may be seen not only from the variety of these, but from the way in
1 It must be remembered, however, that in their use of assonance Hebrew poets
made sometimes a lavish use of sibilants. See the Song of Lamech, and the citation
from Isaiah below, p. 7.
* piai nip.

LECTURE I 3
which in inflection and declension the standard vowels are modified
by neighbouring gutturals. There is, too, an extraordinary beauty
in the mingling of the softer gutturals with the liquids, by which
Hebrew poets have produced some of the gentlest measures heard in
any literature. As in Ps. xxiii. 1, 2 —
Yah well my Shepherd, I lack not,
By waters of rest He doth lead me.
Yahweh Ro'i lo-'ehsar
'Al-me menuhoth yenahaleni.
Or in Ps. xliii. 3, 5 —
Send out Thy light and Thy troth,
They be that lead me !
Why dost thou give in, O my soul,
And be moaning upon me ?
Hold thou to God, for yet shall I praise Him,
My Courage, my God !
Shelah 'orekha wa'amittekha
Hemmah yanehuni
Mah tishtohahi naphshi
Umah tehemi 'alai
Hohili le'lohim ki-'odh 'odhennu
Yeshu'ath-panal we'lohai.
Or the incomparable melody which breaks upon exiled Israel,
Isa. xl. 1 — Comfort ye, comfort my people,
Sayeth your God.
Nahamu. n'ahamu 'ammi
Yomar 'elohekhem.
It would be hard to find in any language lips that more gently
woo the broken heart. I do not know whether Handel had heard
the original, but he has caught the very music in the bars with
which his Messiah opens.
Hebrew has been deemed deficient in liquids, and indeed is without
the musical ng. But I and n (and r) are as frequent as with our
selves. It is of great advantage to the music to have duals and
plurals in im (where we, alas ! have almost only s), some verbal forms
in un, and, for the frequent preposition to, the letter / as a prefix.
Of our dentals and sibilants Hebrew has all except j or soft g, the
want of which is hardly a disadvantage. Besides sh and a sharper
form of s it adds the palatal .? and t. Like the deeper k these are
real additions to its musical resources.
Of the explosives b and p much use was made by the poets. After

4 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
vowels, b, g, d, k, p and t are all soft— bh, gh, dh, kh, ph or f, and
th — except when they are doubled, in which case they remain hard.
v was probably soft like w, as in modern Arabic ; and there was also
the weak consonant, which we signify by y and the Germans by j.
I take next the combination of consonants.
Like most Orientals the Hebrews avoided pronouncing two conso
nants together at the beginning of a syllable. A native of the Nearer
East can hardly open a syllable with a couple of consonants. Either
he slips a furtive vowel between the two, which in Hebrew, however,
does not count as a syllable ; or he prefixes a full vowel with the so-
called ' prosthetic 'Aleph ' and creates another syllable. Thus he
pronounces Protestant Berootestanti, and Scotland 'Iskotalandi.
Similarly the Jew of the time of Augustus or of Hadrian transferred
to his own language the Greek -npoo-QrjK-r] as pardaskeya ; Trpeo-,iJur^s
as peruzbuti; and praepositus as peruphsitos; but otoAtj as
'ist°laand arparriyoi as 'istartigh, with the ' prosthetic 'Aleph '.
He also separated the frequent x of Greek, as in 'aghistaryon for
t£m'ipi,ov, or when it was initial he compassed it by a 'prosthetic 'Aleph',
as in 'akhs°na for ^ivos.1
Perhaps to the same inability is due the absence of -ng, and of the
velar guttural qu which is the charm of some of our most musical
words : queen, quest, quiet, and requiem. A Hebrew could have
uttered the last by dividing the syllables between the q and the w.
But it is not probable that at the beginning of a syllable he ever
took the guttural and the w together ; for either the w would become
a vowel, or he would slip a furtive vowel in before it. Instead of
queen, quiet, quire, and quest, imagine k6ween, kewiet, kewire,
kewest, and you can reckon the music lost to his language, and lost,
it would seem, by so little. This characteristic insertion of the light,
quick ' sheva ', c the volatilised vowel,' as it has been called, suffices
to break that grip of consonant by consonant which is the strength
of some of our finest words — brow, brother, breast, grand, crash,
prince, stream, strain. For as no vowels can do, such bracing of
consonants gives the full phonetic value of strength, of pressure, of
construction ; or when followed by a long vowel, renders the effect
of obtrusion or explosion ; or with the softer consonants sends speech
forth like the flowing of a stream, or like a flag flung on the breeze.
The Hebrew could close a syllable on two strong consonants, yet even
here he was given to slipping a short vowel between them.2 But
1 Other instances are p'rozdor for irpuaoSos, p'rokhophl for irpoicoirq ; s "gar ma
for ypapiiapiov, and 'istell for CTT77A17. There are scores of others.
2 As in the segholates of the 2nd decl. Cf. Dalman. Pah'ist. Lhcait, xxxiv.

LECTURE I 5
it cannot be too often repeated that the furtive vowel does not make
a syllable, and we shall find that in verse it often disappears.
On the other hand the Hebrew made a strenuous use of the doubled
consonant, which, though it survives in our script, we have almost
wholly lost in speech. The Hebrew could not lose it, for the
duplication of a radical consonant was a cardinal factor in his
grammar : rendering to his verbs, for example, an intensive or
a factitive force. Thus shabhar with the single soft b is break,
but shibber break hi pieces, shatter; gadhal is grow- great, but
giddel make great, exalt; lamadh learn, but limmedh teach.
Sometimes this form with the doubled letter is used wholly instead of,
or partly in preference to, the simple form, without any purpose of
intensifying the meaning or giving it a factitive turn, but only in
order to bring out and enforce the music of the word and of the action
it describes: as in the two verbs for sing, hallel and rinnen. By
this duplication of his liquids the Hebrew atoned somewhat for his
want of our ringing -ng.
The assimilation of a neighbouring liquid is another cause of the
doubled consonant; as, for example, Yitten for yinten, and the
absorption by the initial consonants in nouns of the final I of the
preceding definite article.1 Still another cause was the licence of the
poets, who not infrequently doubled a consonant where in prose it is
not doubled. Obviously this was done for musical reasons, in order
to increase the stresses on a line or to shift them or otherwise to alter
the time or measure.2
But whatever may have been the causes of the doubled consonant,
the Hebrew poet availed himself of it as the Greek did, yet more
lavishly, for emphasis and urgency, for the impression of weight and
mass, or for lingering melody. Let me give some examples, which
both illustrate the musical value of the doubled letter in Hebrew,
and by their translations expose the difficulty of echoing that music
in our own language with its far less frequent use of the device.
At the same time even English has some possibilities left in this
direction,3 and I have chosen for the translations as many words
with doubled consonants as I could find for a fair reproduction of
the meaning. Where these have failed me I have sought equi
valents for the Hebrew doubled letter in English words that have
braced consonants.
1 Here again we see how the Hebrew avoided as far as possible the pronunciation
of two different consonants together.
2 See below, p. 19.
s e.g. glad and gladden.

6 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
The first illustration is from the Song of Deborah.1
'Az hullemu2 'ikk6bh'e susim
Daharoth daharoth 'abbirau.
Then thudded the hoofs of the horses,
Plunge upon plunge of his stallions.
The next 3 tells how a great crowd was drawn into the order and
melody of a solemn march, its praise billowing up to the Temple.
An exile, torn from his country, remembers —
How I passed through the throng, headed them,
On to God's-house,
To the call of song and of praise,
Surges of worship !
Ki' e'6bhor bassakh 'eddaddein
'Adh beth-'elohim
Bekol-rinnah wethodhah
Ham on hoghegh.
Or take the solemn prayer 4—
Suffice us betimes with Thy mercy,
That we sing and be glad all our days.
Gladden, for days Thou hast stunned, us.
Sabbe'enu babboker hasdekha
TTn6rannenah unismehah bekhol-yomenu
Sammehenu kimoth 'innithanu.
It is, however, for the crashing and reverberation of the sea, or of
the peoples in tumult, that the doubled consonant, now an explosive
or sibilant, is used to its finest effects. The English plurals many
waters and many peoples are weak in sound ; they trickle rather than
surge. But for the first Hebrew has maim rabbim, and for the
second 'ammim rabbim and l6'ummim rabbim.
Take Ps. xciii. 4 —
Than voices of waters immense,
More majestic than breakers of ocean,
Majestic on high Yahweh.
Mikkoloth malm rabbim
'Addir miinmishb"re-yam
'Addir bammarom Yahweh.
Or the passage in which1 Isaiah has by long vowels rendered the
slow lift and roll of the billows, but by doubled consonants their
1 Judges v. 2-2.
* So probably we should read (after LXX, Theod., and Vulgate) instead of
halemu. 3 Ps. xiii. .5. * Ps. xc. Li.

LECTURE I 7
distant booming ; and then, as they are checked, their crash and
hissing sweep along the Syrian coast (Isa. xvii. 12, 13). He is using
this as a figure of the vain tumult of the peoples against the God of
Israel — Hoi h'mon 'iimiiiim rabbim
Kahamoth yammim yeh'mayuii
Ush°'6n le'ummim kabbirim
Kishe,6n maim yishsha'un
Le'ummim kishe'6n maim rabbim yishsha'un
Wegha'ar bo wenas mimmerhak
Weruddaph kemos-harim liphne-ruah
Ukheghalgal liphne-suphah.
Woe, the booming of peoples multitudinous !
As the booming of seas are they booming ;
And the crash of nations immense,1
As the crash of waters are crashing ;
[Nations — as the crash of great waters are crashing,]
But he chides it, it fleeth afar,
Chased as chaff of the hills by the wind,
As dust-rings2 in front of the storm.
I am aware that even so grand a reflection of the surge and tumult
of the sea fails in the rhythm and flexibility with which more than
one Aryan language has echoed it all.
Some ears may feel, too, that in all these poems the doubled letter
tends to increase the staccato effect of which I have spoken. But
on the other hand it gives the voice something to grip and roll upon :
for grief and scorn, or the emphasis of hate ; for solemn prayer and
struggling hope ; or for the ringing forth of joy and triumph.
2. Structure.
Passing from the alphabet, I have time only to note those features
of the Hebrew Vocabulary and of the Syntax which bear upon style
and rhythm.
The Vocabulary has two wants : the want, especially in the earlier
stages of the language, of abstract terms, and the want throughout of
compound words ; neither of which, be it remarked in passing, is a dis
advantage to the kinds of poetry most prevalent in Hebrew. Hebrew
words express things or actions rather than ideas. Even the adjec
tives are not abstractions of qualities or colours, but are derived from
the names of concrete objects which possess or produce these. The
1 Kabbirim, mighty or immense, stands in the text in the fourth line with waters
but obviously belongs to nations in the third line : cf. the Greek. The fifth line is.
elided by many as due to dittography. But see on the swell-verse, p. 20.
2 Or rolling thistles.

8 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
art of compounding words, so natural to the Greeks and other Aryans,
was almost unknown to the Hebrew. It has been calculated that
while Greek has 100,000 words but only 1,800 roots, Hebrew bas
actually 2,000 roots, or 200 more than Greek, yet only 10,000 words,
or one-tenth of the Greek. If this be correct, Greek has 50 times,
but Hebrew only 5 times, as many words as it has roots. Hebrew
words are still sonorous with the sound or vibrant with the feeling
that instinctively called them forth. They are little advanced beyond
the root stage. In comparison with Greek or Latin words they look
both undeveloped and undressed, with a sameness in spite of all their
rugged differences, like the sameness of stones in a brook. And this
impression of simplicity is strengthened by the disappearance of the
ancient case- endings of the nouns.
Further, as Emanuel Deutsch pointed out,1 ' the Semitic idiom is
bereft of that infinite variety of little words, particles, conjunctions,
auxiliary verbs, &c, which, ready for any emergency, like so many
living links imperceptibly bind word to word, phrase to phrase, and
period to period, which indeed are the very life and soul of what is
called Construction.'
The Syntax, too, is simple; the sentence is a straightforward
statement. Co-ordination of sentences is the prevailing rule, and
there are comparatively few forms of the subordinate clause. ' Com
pare with this ', as Deutsch again well says, ' the suppleness of the
Aryan languages and that boundless supply of aids that enable them
to produce the most telling combinations on the spur of the moment,
their exquisitely consummate and refined syntactical development
that can change, shift, and alter the position of word and phrase and
sentence and period to almost any place so as to give force to any
part of their speech.' 2
Consider these features and you will appreciate the type of archi
tecture essential to the Hebrew language. Contrasted with that of
the Greek, it is like building with the stones of the field to building
with dressed and ornamented ashlar from the quarry. In reading
a Hebrew poem I am often reminded of the Law: If thou irilt make
Me an altar of stones, thou shalt not build it of dressed stones? The
metaphor is hardly sufficient. For as you read Hebrew poems you
feel that the words in their rough shapes and loose connections are not
at all building-material ; but are rather missiles like the pebbles from
the brook with which David filled his wallet when he went out
against the giant. It is their separate weight and speed, their hissing
1 Literary Jlemains, p. 301. 2 loc. cit. 3 Exod. xx. 22.

LECTURE I 9
through the air, their impingement and penetration, which strike
the ear.
But out of this springs a consequence important to ourselves who
speak the English' language. From what I have been saying it is
obvious that to translate Hebrew into Greek or Latin is to run its
music into moulds less fitted for them than the Anglo-Saxon used by
Caedmon for his paraphrases, or the English of the authors of our
' authorized ' and earlier versions. In Credmon's poems on the Old
Testament we find a dialect less constructive, melodious and august
than Latin or Greek, which nevertheless by these very defects is more
sympathetic to the original than they can be. Nor does the later
English lose this advantage, but rather adds to it. For, as Dr. Johnson
remarks, the change from Anglo-Saxon to English was effected less
by the introduction of new words than by the simplification of old
ones. Syllables were cut off, terminations were softened, and, as in
Hebrew, case-endings disappeared. Therefore we may dare to say
that readers of the English Old Testament get nearer to the temper
of the music, nearer to the exact rhythm of Hebrew poetry than did
the Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria with the Septuagint, or the
mediaeval Latins through the Vulgate.
A confirmation of these remarks on the temper and structure of
the Hebrew language is found in the terms by which it describes
speech, poetry and song. Almost none of these betray an instinct
for order or construction.
The Hebrews had the idea, common to all languages, of speech as
a counting or telling :
Hash-shamaim mesapp"rim kebhodh-'El
The heavens are telling the glory of God.1
Of the two commonest words for speak 'Amar has the radical sense
of making prominent or salient : indicate, elicit, make a thing speak
for itself; while Dibber, if we may judge from the use of the root
in Hebrew and other Semitic languages to express leading or driving,2
appears to describe speech as the shepherding of words. The meta
phor is natural to a race of nomadic shepherds, and appropriately
renders the loose arrangement of their style. Nab ha', to bubble
or gurgle out (probably also nab ha'), and siah (originally to be
1 Ps. xix. -2 (A.V. 1).
Arab, dabara, to come behind (cf. Heb. debhir, back); Syr. debir, to guide
cattle or sheep, Heb. midhbar, the ground over which they are driven, pastoral
(as distinct from arable) land ; Aram, dabara, guidance. In Arab, dabbara is
to relate, and in Phoen., as in Heb., dabar is to speak. Compare Arabic sak, to
drive, cause to go, and then ask; siyak, intercessor; and fi slak el-kalam,
in the course of the conversation. See, however, below p. 82 n. 2.

10 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
zealous1), haghah and zamam to croon, read, recite, ne'um the
prophetic oracle, mill el to speak, hill el and rinnen to sing, are
all immediate imitations of various sounds of the voice. Further,
haghah and zamam illustrate the Oriental's difficulty to think
except aloud. Mass a', utterance or oracle, literally what rises or is
uplifted, is derived either from the raising of the voice or from the
sense of a burden and of responsibility in the message it carries. The
etymology of shir, song, is doubtful.2 Of mashal and 'an ah
I shall speak later.
The two verbs for sight, hazah, archaic and poetic, and ra'ah,
the ordinary term, are both with their derivatives used of mental
vision, as well as of the experiences of the ecstatic seer. In Hebrew-
there are even fair equivalents for imagination, which are so translated
in our Versions : Yeser, literally moulding, then purpose, imagination
(but also of images); and hashabh, to think, or account, with
mahashabhah, applied both to the thoughts of God and to the
devices or intentions of man. Kautzsch renders the combination of
the two by 'Dichten und Trachten'. But the fact that these terms,
when used of man, are throughout the Old Testament applied only to
evil imaginations and thoughts in rebellion against God, except in
two very late passages where they are used indifferently,3 is a striking
illustration of the great difference between the Hebrew idea of the
Imagination and our own.
All these facts of the language and syntax warn us not to expect
in- Hebrew poetry the regular, intricate and delicate metres of the
Aryan styles. We are dealing with a people originally nomadic and
to the end unskilled in architecture or any elaborate art. The essential
looseness of their life, visible in their language, was bound to affect the
highest achievements of their literature. When they did concentrate
their minds on utterance, their earnestness would appear less in
a passion for beauty than in a sense of urgency and responsibility.
Israel was a people of prophets rather than of poets.
1 Noldeke, Z. D. M. G. xxxvii. 537.
'' Unless we seek the original meaning in the direction indicated by Shurah,
a row or rank, especially of vines. Compare the Arabic sur,'a wall, and surah,
in the plural, a line or stratum in a wall, but in the singular, a section or chapter in
the Koran. The Hebrew sh- corresponds regularly to the Arabic s-. Others relate
the Hebrew shir to the Arabic shi'r.
8 These two are 1 Chron. xxviii. 9, xxix. 18. As examples of the rest, where the
words are used in an evil sense, take Gen. vi. 5, viii. 21 ; Deut. xxxi. 21 ; Ps. x. 2,
cxl. 2; Prov. vi. 18; Lam. iii. 60, 61. Prov. vi. 18, xii. 20, &c, use harash;
Ps. ii. 1 haghah, and Gen. xi. 6 zamam, in the sense of imagining.

LECTURE I 11

3. Rhythms.

The earlier poetry of Israel has reached us embedded in prose and
written as prose — that is, continuously and not in lines or stichoi.
Some longer pieces have titles to indicate that they are songs; but
many fragments are without this signal. How do we mark them as
poetry ? How do we divide them into lines of verse ?
In the first place, of course, by the obvious signs by which in all
literatures the form of poetry is distinguished from that of prose : to
wit, an order of the words of a sentence different from the order
normal in prose ; numerous ellipses and compressions, and a prefer
ence for archaic words or forms of words, especially when these are
more sonorous. In Hebrew poetry the verb does not always stand at
the head of the clause, as is the rule in prose. The definite article,
the relative, and some particles are often omitted. The suffixes to
verbs and nouns, which are equivalent to our personal and possessive
pronouns, as well as the terminations of some parts of the verb,
appear in elongated and more musical forms. Proper names of high
musical quality are placed in irregular but prominent positions.
Rhyme, too, appears, though infrequently. These are the usual signs
that a writing is not prose : * that the writer is aiming at poetical
measure and music ; that he is dividing his discourse into lines
of verse.
And in fact, while the modifications of the forms of the words
produce a melody greater than that of prose, the ellipses and com
pressions and the changed order of the words result in a distribution
of the accents or stresses,2 which proves the metrical character of the
discourse and enables us to mark it off into more or less regular lines.
Like the lines of all poetries in their earlier stages, each of these
measures of Old Testament verse is a ' stop-line ', a clause or sentence
complete in itself. To this rule I have observed almost no exception
in the poetry of our period. I need not give examples here. I have
already given some, and will give many more.
The number of accents to the line varies. Some poems, or parts
of poems, fall into a series of lines with only two stresses each ; 3

1 Yet some of the prose writers in the Old Testament adopt for the sake of
sonorousness one or other of these devices, but never rhyme.
2 A century of research and debate has resulted in a pretty general agreement
among scholars that it is accent or stress, and not the quantity of the syllables,
which is the main factor in Hebrew metre. The student will find a full and clear
history of the subject in Mr. W. H. Cobb's A Criticism of Systems of Hebrew Metre
(Oxford, 1905).
3 See parts ofthe Song of Deborah in Lecture III.

12 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
others into lines with three, others into lines with four. In all these
the number of unaccented syllables varies, within limits of course,
just as in those poetries of Europe of which the metre also depends
on the proportion of the accents. In Hebrew words (so far as we
know) the accent was almost invariably on the last syllable ; occasion
ally it fell on the penultimate, but never before this. Yet in longer
words with suffixes attached to them a minor or secondary emphasis
was inevitable. As in modern European verse, contiguous mono
syllables might each have an accent. But, as I shall have to empha
size later, we are still far from fully understanding the rules of Hebrew
accentuation. All we can say is, that with regard to monosyllabic
particles and some nominal constructions the practice appears to
have varied, even within the same poem.
A signal advance in our knowledge of Hebrew rhythms was the
discrimination 1 of the Kinah, or elegiac, measure, as it is called from
its prevalence in the Book of Lamentations. This measure runs in
i alternately longer and shorter lines divided by a stop, the first with
a rising, and the second with a falling cadence. The stresses are
usually in the proportion of three to two.
But in every one of these measures, while the majority of lines
have the normal proportion of stresses, there are frequent irregularities.
A poem, the most of whose lines have three accents each, will be
broken by several of two or four each ; while sometimes a series
perfectly regular in the proportion of their accents will be closed by
a single longer line with an accent more than its predecessors.2 In
the Kinah rhythm the normal proportion of three to two is not
always observed : we find couplets of four to three and four to
two. Such irregularities in the received text of the poems are regarded
by a number of modern scholars as mere errors of the text, due to its
imperfect tradition ; and these scholars have proposed textual emenda
tions with the view of reducing the poems to a perfect regularity of
metre. It is true that many of the emendations are confirmed by
the ancient versions of the Old Testament,* and that they enhance
either the sense, or the pith, or the music of the poetry. But for the
vast majority of the proposed readings there is no external evidence ;
and a large proportion of them sadly flatten the ring or the swell of
the verses.
I venture to think that such irregularities are capable of other
explanations, and their first and principal cause appears to me to lie
1 By Professor Buddc : Z. A. T. W. 1882. ' See below, p. 20.

LECTURE I 13
in the dominant characteristic of Hebrew poetry — the Parallelism of
its lines.1
In Hebrew poetry the clauses or sentences, which (as has been
remarked) are universally, or almost universally, coincident with the
rhythmic lines, stand in couplets, or less frequently in triplets, parallel
in meaning to each other. In other words, the balance of music in
the lines is wedded to — I think that it is controlled and modified by —
a balance of thought and meaning. (This parallelism is sometimes
exact ; the second line of the couplet, whether with or without verbal
variations, does not carry the meaning further than the first has done.
Sometimes it is progressive ; the second line adds details to the idea
of the first, or enforces it from another point of view, or carries it on
to a fresh application. Sometimes the progress rises through three,
or even four or five lines to a climax. \ Sometimes the parallelism is
antithetic. And there is also a variety of the device, characteristic
of the Psalms of Degrees, which merits the name rather of Spiralism
than Parallelism, for by it the expression or development of the
theme turns upon itself, and picks up and repeats some point or
sound on which it has already dwelt. Before I continue the argument
into which I have introduced Parallelism, it is needful to say some
thing about the origins of this feature of many poetries.
Parallelism used to be regarded as the peculiar distinction of Hebrew
poetry. But since the discovery of its prevalence in Babylonian, and
in some forms of Egyptian, poetry, attempts have been made to
derive it from one or other of those two civilisations, by which the
literature and art of Israel were so profoundly affected in other
directions. Parallelism, however, is not uncommon in the dialects
of Semitic peoples more nearly akin to the Hebrews than even the
Babylonians. So far as I know, there is not very much of it in the
classical poetry of the nomad Arabs ; nevertheless, among the virtues
of style which Tha'alibi attributed to the Arab poet, Mutanabbi
(915-65), is the fact that he divided his poetry into parallel sentences.2
In the Palestine folk-songs of to-day Parallelism is frequent. I take
the following instances translated from Professor Dalman's valuable
collection 3 : — Go now, my brother, and go,
Go to the region of Haleb.
Thou, the tattooed on the arms,
Who forgest the necklace of gold !
1 See Praelectio XIX of Bishop Lowth's De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, the classic
passage on the subject, Eng. Translation by Gregory, London, 1847.
2 See Nicholson, A Literary History ofthe Arabs, p. 311.
3 Palastinischer Diwan, pp. 6, 7, 22.

14 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Go now, my brother, and go,
Go to the region of Musr,
Thou, the tattooed on the arms,
Who forgest the necklace of coins.
Thou, that sleepest the sleep of the lamb,
And the line on thy lips is sweet;
Were I not shy of my parents' face,
I would run and would kiss thee asleep.
Thou, that sleepest the sleep of the sheep,
And the line on thy shoulders is blue;
Were I not shy in face of the guests,
I would run and would kiss thee asleep.
Up, hearken the owl,
How she hoots and says;
She says : ' O Zmikna,
Gone are the happy nights ! '
Up, hearken the owl,
How she hoots in the night !
She says : ' O Zmikna,
Flown are the happy nights ! '
Compare with this last the similar slight variations in the end
of Psalm xxiv.
But such instances only remind us that Parallelism, in its many
varied forms, appears in all poetries from their most primitive stage,
in which it is luxuriant, to their most artistic developments. Our
own folk-songs and nursery rhymes are full of it.
Over the water and over the sea,
And over the water to Charlie.
Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he.
I love sixpence, pretty little sixpence ;
I love sixpence better than my life.
They hadna sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three,
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,
And gurly grew the sea.
In the more classic poetry of our language, epic, dramatic or argu
mentative, you will search in vain through long stretches for any
instance of parallelism ; and when its few occasions occur they set
you thinking how far they may be due to the influence of the Old

LECTURE I 15
Testament, and how, nevertheless, in spite of such influence on the
most of our poets, they occur alone, and their form is not, as in
Hebrew poetry, universal and dominant. Shakespeare's dramas and
Milton's epics have very few. But when we turn to our native
lyric and ballad poetry we find parallelism to be more prevalent, and
we feel how instinctive it is in such forms. Here are some examples
chosen at random : —
From Spenser's ' Epithalamion ' :
Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in,
And all the posts adorn as doth behove,
And all the pillars deck with garlands trim.
From Blake : I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart.
From Burns :
Oh, open the door some pity to show,
Oh, open the door to me, oh !
From Hogg :
Lock the door, Lariston, lion of Liddesdale;
Lock the door, Lariston, Lowther comes on.
From Scott: Why weep ye by the tide, ladye,
Why weep ye by the tide?
I'll wed ye to my youngest son,
And ye sail be his bride,
And ye sail be his bride, ladye.
Many of the songs of Burns open with a parallel couplet. And in
other Scottish lyrics, and in many Irish lyrics, whether translations
from the ancient Erse or modern and original, the second line is
either an exact repetition of the first or only a slight variation
from it. Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise.
Or take this from Gray :
Ruin seize thee, ruthless King,
Confusion on thy banners wait !
Or this from ' The Ancient Mariner ' : l
Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink !
1 The Spirals of the Hebrew ' Songs of Degrees ' find analogies in this poem,
Part iii, verses 2 and 3, and in Part vii.

16 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Or this from Campbell :
Britannia needs no bulwarks,
No towers along the steep.
Her march is on the mountain wave,
Her home is on the deep.
Much more occasionally we find it in Shelley, as in ' Queen Mab ' :
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep !
This is pure Hebrew, but it stands alone.
The following, also isolated, examples are from Tennyson's ' Lotos-
eaters ' and ' Maud ' :
Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness ?
All things have rest : why should we toil alone ?
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown.
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed ;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead.
Or take the opening stanza of Browning's ' How they brought the
Good News from Ghent to Aix '.
Qr this from Meredith's ' Love in the Valley ' :
Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light.1
All these examples — and they might be indefinitely multiplied —
appear to be original and instinctive : illustrations of a fashion natural
to poetry. The fact is, poetry was primitively the art of saying the
same beautiful things over and over again in similarly charming
ways, which rhymed and sang back to each other not in sound only
but in sense as well. ' Deep calleth unto deep,' tree to tree, bird to
bird, all the world over. The heart of the poet is full of such natural
antiphons. He knows many metaphors for the thing which he loves
or hates, and he will put them over against each other ; more careful
at first that they are balanced in meaning than in rhythm, though as
his art develops he will control this also to regularity. Like the
musician (and the early poet always was a musician as well), he in
stinctively gives us variation upon variation of the same theme.
1 I have, of course, omitted all obvious reflections of Hebrew parallelism in English
hymns and other poems.

LECTURE I 17
We need not, therefore, seek a Babylonian or an Egyptian origin
for the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. This is due to a universal
instinct, springing in all poetries and very prevalent in their earlier
stages. A more difficult question is why, while the poetries of most
great literatures have grown beyond the habit of parallelism, and
except in their ballads and songs employ this device only occasionally,
the Hebrews should have held to parallelism throughout, fostering
and elaborating it with a constancy — some moderns may think with
a monotony — which finds no analogy elsewhere except in parts of
Babylonian poetry. It is possible that Babylonian influence had
something to do with the development of parallelism in Hebrew ;
there is not enough evidence on the point. We saw 1 that the
Arabs, though not carrying the principle so far as the Hebrews,
reckoned the ability to form parallel sentences one of the highest
virtues of the poet. Was this also due to Babylonian influence ? We
cannot tell. In any case, parallelism became the characteristic and
the dominant mark of Hebrew poetry ; and it is interesting to observe
that of two of the commonest Hebrew verbs for the composition and
singing of verses, mashal, to rule, arrange, compare, and "an ah, to
respond, the first certainly, and the second probably, express this
kind of verse-construction. As for the poetry of our period, whether
in its ruder fragments or in its longer and more artistic pieces, we
find every sort of parallelism — identical, synonymous, progressive,
climactic, and antithetic. The Old Testament contains no clearer
instances of all these kinds than occur in the Oracles of Balaam.
But — to return to my argument — if parallelism be the characteristic
and dominant form of Hebrew verse, if the Hebi-ew poet be so
constantly bent on a rhythm of sense, this must inevitably modify
his rhythms of sound. If his first aim be to produce lines each more
or less complete in itself but so as to run parallel to its fellow, it
follows that these lines cannot be always exactly regular in length or
in measure of time. If the governing principle of the poetry requires
each line to be a clause or sentence in itself, the lines will frequently
tend, of course within limits, to be longer or shorter, to have more or
fewer stresses than are normal throughout the poem.
But apart from parallelism, there are other explanations of the
metrical irregularities in Hebrew verse. In every form of Oriental
art we trace the influence of what may be called Symmetrophobia :
an instinctive aversion to absolute symmetry, which, if it knows no
better, will express itself in arbitrary and even violent disturbances of
the style or pattern of the work. Every visitor to the East knows
1 Above, p. 13.
C

18 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
how this tendency operates, and sometimes grotesquely, in weaving
and in architecture. But its opportunities are more frequent, and
can be worked out more gracefully, in the art of poetry, particularly
when that art is wedded to music. Professor Saintsbury has shown
how numerous are the redundant syllables and the broken lines in the
later blank verse of Shakespeare, and how by his hand they were
made to become things of beauty : ' the irregularity was the founda
tion of the larger and nobler rule.' 1 ' The variation of the pause,
the breaking of the line, the use of the redundant syllable, both at
end and caesura, and the trisyllabic foot improved from this latter are
all great things in the perfecting of the decasyllable. But, to paradox
it a little, the greatest evidence of the triumph of this decasyllable is
to be found in the lines which are not decasyllabic, in those which
exceed and become Alexandrines, more or less regular, of which
there are not a few, and in the fragments, falling short of deca
syllabic length, of which there are many. For these are evidently
. . . quite deliberate indulgences in excess or defect over or under
a regular norm which is so pervading and so thoroughly marked that
it carries them off on its wings.' 2 It is most probable that many of
the metrical irregularities of the Hebrew text, exemplifying all the
varieties which Professor Saintsbury enumerates in the blank verse of
Shakespeare, are due to the same 'quite deliberate indulgences' on
the part of the poets themselves ; but it is needless to say that they
are not carried off with the style of a Shakespeare. On the contrary,
they are often liker the 'blundering attempts' of his predecessors
in English poetry.
And, in fact, modern Arabic poetry betrays many similar irre
gularities. The Dutch scholar, Snouck Hurgronje, reports that
in the improvisations of the singing women of Mekka 'rhyme is
not exactly treated with respect, while they often push metre aside
and employ the easier form of rhymed prose \3 In the metrical forms
given in Dr. Dalman's Paldstinischer Diwan, a collection of Arab
songs taken down from the lips of the peasants and nomads of
Palestine, the lines vary as much as from two to five accents, and
sometimes within the same metrical form from three to four ; 4 and
Dr. Dalman reports that when sung to music, lines with three accents
will be delivered with four, or those with four will be delivered with
five to suit the melody.6
1 History of English Prosody, vol. ii, pp. 53, 54.
2 Ibid., p. 43.
5 Mekka, vol. ii, p. 62.
' Cf. the Song of Deborah, where this same variation occurs.
6 Cf. Prof. Saintsbury on the same in English poetry : ' the endeavour to match

LECTURE I 19
Again, recall what has been said of the effect of the doubled con
sonant on Hebrew metre.1 The licence which the poets took with
regard to this may be part of the explanation of what seem to us
irregularities in the time-measure of neighbouring and connected
lines of verse. This conjecture is supported by the rules for the use
of ' daghesh forte ', the sign which duplicates a consonant. Two
forms of this, ' daghesh forte dirimens ' and ' daghesh forte con-
junctivum', modify the vowels and syllables about them and produce
a shifting of the accent. In Arabic poetry similar licence was taken
with the ' teshdid ', the sign analogous to the ' daghesh forte '. Now
not all these signs have been preserved in our canonical text. There
is some evidence from the versions that they were once more
numerous in the text than they now are,2 and it is possible that the
effects which they mark — the duplication of a consonant, and the
consequent increase or shifting of the accents — were frequently pro
duced in recitation when they were not marked in the script.
With all this we must remember that we do not yet know
everything about the disposition of the accents or stresses in
the early poetry of Israel. We cannot say that the musical accents
in our text of the poetical books adequately represent the original
accentuation ; and we are of course in still greater uncertainty when
we deal with the accents of poetical fragments in the prose-books.
In particular, there are these questions. Had each of the mono
syllabic particles and conjunctions an accent to itself when placed
in verse ? Had the association of two nouns in the so-called ' construct
state ', expressive of the genitival relation, always one accent or might
it have two ? How often did a secondary accent occur in long nouns
with the longer pronominal suffixes ? The fact that modern recon
structions of the metre vary from each other and are even inconsis
tent with themselves in answering such questions proves how much
we have still to learn about Hebrew metres.3
To all these considerations, then, due weight must be given before
we can have assurance in emending the text of the Old Testament
poems on metrical grounds alone ; that is, by repairing what seem to
our ears metrical irregularities. The zeal, manifest in many recent '
reconstructions of Hebrew verse, to reduce the lines to strict metre
and the parallelism to absolute symmetry, seems to me, in the light of
words to music had already communicated a great apparent variety to measure.'
Op. cit., pp. 63, 64.
1 Above, p. 5.
2 For one instance see above, p. 6, on Jud. v. 22.
3 The warning uttered by Bishop Lowth, op. cit., Praelectio III, is not much less
needed to-day. C 2

20 THE SCHVVEICH LECTURES, 1910
what we do know about Semitic and other poetries, to be unscientific,
and in the shadow of what we do not yet know to be very
precarious. I cannot follow the Symmetrians.
But one fact must again be emphasized and illustrated : that a
furtive vowel, whether simple or composite, never makes a syllable,
and that in the reading or singing of verse it is absorbed in the next
full vowel, or else the rhythm will not run. This is very evident in
proper names. Take the frequent recurrence of Ya'akhobh (Jacob)
in the Redes of Balaam (see Lecture III). If the lines are not to
jerk badly we must read Ya'khobh, two syllables, the accent being
on the last. Similarly with Re'ubhen, and even Zebhulun and
Meghiddo; and with S^'ir, 'Edhom, and "ram and Kena'an
which must be pronounced S'ir, Dhom, Ram, and Kna'an. Even
full vowels, I am sure, were often slurred or omitted. The name
Isra'el (Israel) which plays so musical a part at the end of lines in
the Redes of Balaam and the song of Deborah (Lecture III) may have
been pronounced sometimes Sra'el or I srsel. Even in'Is(a)skar the
weight of the accent on the last syllable appears to have crushed
out the preceding vowel.
A few more words may be spent on some varieties of the metre,
to which allusion has been made.
One of these kinds has an interesting analogy in early European
poetry. The presence of a longer, heavier line, generally at the end
of a strophe,1 is similar to what the Germans call the 'Schwellvers'
in old German ballads. There are several instances of it in the Song
of Deborah, and in the great Ode in Deuteronomy xxxii.2 It has to
be noted that the increased weight of this line is not always produced
by an increase in the number of the stresses. It is sometimes due
especially in couplets or triplets of a climactic parallelism to the
employment of a parallel verb or noun with a greater number of
syllables or with heavier consonants.3
In some poems the number of stresses to the line appears to remain
constant (except for the ' Schwellvers ') throughout a period or strophe,
and then with a new strophe to change to another number. We shall
find instances of this in the Song of Deborah, and in the opening of
the Song in Deuteronomy xxxiii.4 From such changes in the rhythm
1 See above, p. 12.
2 See below, Lecture III. The last two lines of verse 3 of the Song of Deborah,
if we read them as one and take the construct state ' God-of-Israel' as under one
accent; the last lines of verses 8, 10, 12, 19, and 27, and the last two of 23. In
Deut. xxxii the last lines of verses 14, 24 (?), 42, 43.
3 See below, p. 5H, on Ps. xviii. 7 (8).
4 See Lecture III.

LECTURE I 21
it is not necessary to infer differences of authorship.1 They may be
due to changes in the theme.
It is also relevant to our period to say something more about the
Kinah or elegiac measure of alternate longer and shorter lines,
usually of three and two stresses each.2f This metre reached its
perfect form by the time of the great prophets, who from Amos to
Jeremiah employ it with a steadily increasing frequency ; and its
most sustained and regular examples are found in the sixth-century
Book of Lamentations, or Kin6th, from which it derives its modern
name. But in all the poetry of-etir ^period there are very few perfect
instances of the Kinah. There are many approximations to it, and
sporadic couplets occur with its normal proportion of stresses. In
other words, the Kinah is still rudimentary during our period, and we
are able to trace its rise and development. For such couplets mainly
occur in poems in which the regular rhythm is of three stresses to the
line, though you also find them in series of lines of four stresses. By
dropping one of these in the second line, which is easily done by
omitting the dispensable verb in the second limb of the parallel or
comparison, the normal Kinah couplet is produced. For example,
the Song of Lamech,3 in which the first two lines have four and three
stresses each (if we reckon the construct state n6she-Lemekh as
under one accent), and the second two lines have the Kinah norm
three and two each, the latter of these by omitting the verb. —
'Adhah weSillah shema'an koli
Neshe-Lemekh ha'azinah 'imrathi
Ki-'ish haraghti lephis'i
Weyeledh lehabburath'i.4
'Adhah and Sillah, hear ye my voice,
Lemekh's-wives, hearken my speech,
For a man I slew for a wound to me,
And a youth for a blow to me.
Or the first couplet of Lamech's other song, Genesis v. 29, the
second line of which is shorter by omission of the verb.
Or the Song of the Well,5 of which the first three lines have each
1 As has been done by Carl Niebuhr in his Versuch einer Beconstellation des
Deboraliedes (Berlin, 1894).
2 See above, p. 12.
3 Gen. iv. 23 ff. The rhymes guide us in the discrimination of the lines, see below,
p. 24.
4 Notice, however, that the second noun in this line is longer than that in the
preceding parallel line ; and may possibly have had a secondary accent in addition
to the primary.
6 Num. xxi. 17 f.

22 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
three accents, but the fourth only two, unless a secondary accent was
added to the last word —
tAli bhe'er 'enu-lah
Be'er hapharuha sarim
Karuha nedhibhe ha'am
Bimehokek b°mish'andtham.
Spring, O Well, answer her!
Well, pi-inces dug her;
Delved her folk's nobles
With batons, with their staves.
In the opening of the Song of Moses in the Red Sea,1 where the
normal measure is two stresses to each line, the couplet —
Yahweh 'ish-milhamah
Yahweh shemo
Yahweh man-of-war
Yahweh His name —
is only possibly a Kinah couplet ; the construct state in the first line
may be under one stress.
In the Oracles of Balaam, in which the usual number of accents to
the line is three, there are several couplets with four-three and with
three-two.2 In the Song of Deborah, in which some divisions have
two accents to the line and others three, and a few four, we find
only three couplets in the Kinah proportion of three to two.3 In the
Blessing of the Tribes in Genesis xlix, in which the normal measure
is three stresses to each line, it is possible to read rough couplets of the
Kinah in verses 11, 13, 14, 17 ; while in its counterpart, Deuteronomy
xxxiii, both couplets of verse 3, both of 10, one in 9, and those in
18 and 25 are regular Kinah couplets. The Song in Deuteronomy
xxxii affords by far the largest number of actual instances of the
Kinah rhythm,4 but it is instructive that on other grounds this poem
has been reckoned to be later than our period. The 'Mashal' on
Saul and David, quoted thrice in the First Book of Samuel,5 is a
genuine Kinah couplet produced by the means mentioned above, the
omission of the verb in the second parallel clause.
Hikkah Sha'ul ba'alaphau
Wcdhawidh b6ribhebhothau
Slain hath Sha'ul his thousands
But David his myriads.
1 Exod. xv. 3.
2 For example, Numbers xxiii. 9 (1st and possibly 2nd couplet), 10 (2nd c), 24,
xxiv. 5, 7, 18c-19a.
3 Judges v. 1, 6, and perhaps the first of 19. See Lecture III.
1 c. g. verses 11, 14, 16, 21, 23 (?), 24 f., 29, 30-2, 34, 36, 39, 41.
0 xviii. 7, xxi. 12, xxix. 5.

LECTURE I 23
In David's Dirge on Saul and Jonathan,1 in which we might have
expected the Kinah or elegiac measure throughout (had this been by
that time perfected), there are only three, or possibly four, instances
of it.2 In the three couplets of the Dirge on Abner,3 the last two
may fairly be reckoned as of this elegiac measure, but they are
irregular. This survey confirms the statement, with which I started this
section of the lecture, that in the earlier poetry of Israel the Kinah
rhythm is still rudimentary. It has not reached the consummate
form in which it appears from the eighth century onwards.
Once more — though this be a digression from our period — some
thing must be said about the rhythm of the discourses of the great
prophets. It is generally agreed that portions of these were com
posed and delivered as metrically as any of the Psalms. But the
text shows many irregularities, and the poetry is often broken by
what is sheer prose. The Versions help us to remove some of the
former; while much of the prose proves itself to be a later in
sertion by its interruption or even contradiction of the metrical
verses with which it is entangled; or by its very weakness and
banality. But at the same time, considering the rhetorical purpose
of the prophets, we should expect to find in their discourses an even
greater liberty in the metrical forms which they employ ; and it is
not surprising that sometimes they pass over to prose. Consider
what was said above of the Mekkan improvisations. With regard
to irregularities in the prophetic metre, the following sentence on
the speeches of the Elizabethan drama is not irrelevant: 'When
Dr. Johnson reprehended, in a famous phrase, the mixing of the
methods of the poet and the declaimer, he was unconsciously de
scribing the real virtue of the thing — the application, as no other
poetic form has ever mastered it, of the double appeal of poetry and
rhetoric, the magical order of poetry, and the magical apparent
freedom of rhetoric' 4
In conclusion, some words on Alliteration, Assonance, and Rhyme.
Some alliteration and some assonance are inevitable consequences
from the prevailing parallelism, but in this case they frequently, of
course, consist in the repetition of the same words. In the passages
quoted above from the Psalms and from Isaiah to illustrate the music
i 2 Sam. i. 19 E.
2 Verses 21 (?), 25, 26. See Lecture III. 3 2 Sam. iii. 33, 34.
4 Saintsbury, op. cit., pp. 21, 22. Snouck Hurgronje reports that in the same
Molid— a kind of Memorabilia of the Prophet recited at Mekka— poems and
rhymed prose usually succeed each other (Mekka, ii. p. 147).

24 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
derived from a mingling of the liquids and softer radicals, and from
the use of the doubled consonant, and from the attempts to echo the
booming and crashing of the sea, we have examples of the expertness
in the art of Assonance possessed by the later poets of Israel.
In the poetry of our period this art is not so well developed or
sustained ; but words containing the same or similar letters, though
it be only one of each, are often placed in immediate succession to
each other, or are grouped in the same couplet, so that little rills of
music are let loose ; yet they never run far.1 Alliteration, apart from
the repetition of the same word in the parallelism, is infrequent.2
Nor is Rhyme usual in the longer poems; but it occurs in not
a few of the shorter pieces, and the same rhyme is carried through
all their lines as in some Arab forms, or, as in other Arab forms,
through all save the last two or three lines. Take the Song of
Lantech 3 — 'Adhah weSillah shema'an koli
Neshe-Lemekh ha'azinah 'imrathi
Ki 'ish haraghti lephis'i
Weyeledh lehabburath'i.
Adah and Sillah, hear ye the voice of me,
Lemekh's-wives, hearken the speech of me,
For a man have I slain for a wound to me,
And a youth for a blow to me.
The next and concluding couplet does not rhyme.
Or take the second fragment attributed to Lamech, the subject of
which is Noah's introduction, or revival, of the culture of the
vine 4 — Zeh yenahamenu mimma'asenu
Ume'is6bhon yadhenu
[Min ha'adhamah 'asher 'ererah Yahweh].
This doth relieve us from the work of us,
From the toil of the hands of us,
[Out of the ground the which Yahweh cursed].
Here again the rhyme fails in the last line — if indeed the last line be
genuine. Or take the Philistine taunt of Samson 5 —
Nathan '"lohenu bheyadhenu 'eth-'oyebhenu
W6'eth-maharibh 'arsenu
Wa'asher hirbah 'eth-halalenu.
1 One of the most evident is the use of the sibilants in the Song of Lamech. There
are several in the Oracles of Balaam, and others in 2 Sam. i. 21, 22, 23.
2 Gen. xxvii. 27 ; Judges v. 4, 18 ; xiv. 14, 18.
¦ Gen. iv. 23. ' Gen. v. 29. 6 Judges xvi. 24.

LECTURE I 25
Gave the god of us, to the hands of us, the foe of us,
And the waster of the lands of us,
Who multiplied the slain of us.
One other example, the women's eulogy of David J —
Hikkah Sha'ul ba'alaphau
Wedhawidh beribhebhothau.
Slain hath Sha'ul the thousands of him,
But David the myriads of him.
An analysis of all the poems and poetical fragments of our period
shows that there are about twelve with no rhymed couplets, and that
in all the others there are about forty-five rhymed couplets. Of these
no fewer than twenty-eight rhyme, like the instances quoted above, on
the same pronominal suffixes ; two on plurals in -im, and four on
proper names terminating in the same syllable (for example, -on).
The lines of four or five other couplets conclude with synonymous
names, divine or human.
What is true of the poems of our period is true of Old Testament
poetry throughout. The vast majority of the rhymes which are
found in it are formed by the recurrence of the same pronominal
suffixes — the suffixes which in Hebrew are equivalent to our
personal pronouns. Occasionally rhymes are formed on the plural
terminations -im or -oth, and more rarely on the plural termination
of the verb, -un. But it is significant, that we often find that
the lines of the poems terminate in names at once musical and
famous: like Isra'el or Yeshurun, or one or other of the names
of the Deity. And still more significant is the postponement to
the ends of the lines of synonymous verbs or nouns which do not
rhyme. This is but another proof that to the taste of early (as of
later) Israel it was more natural to produce a parallel (or antithesis)
of meaning than a harmony of sound.
Finally there are a few instances of Paronomasia, or play upon
words : as for example Genesis, v. 29 on the name of Noah, ix. 27 on
the name of Japheth, xlix. 16 on that of Dan, 19 on Gad, and
Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8 on Meribhah. Perhaps also in the couplet,
in Judges v. 12, a similar echo is intended between the name
Deborah in the first line and the verb dabberu in the second.
1 1 Sam. xviii. 7.

LECTURE II
Substance and Spirit.
Although the inspiration of the greatest minds in Israel was
something unique in the ancient East, and although (as we shall
see) a certain distinction between the people and all their neighbours
may be traced even in that early period of their history with which
we are dealing ; nevertheless Israel was no isolated creation. The
qualities, which equipped the people for their spiritual service to
humanity, were their natural inheritance as children of that family of
mankind to whom we give the ambiguous name of Semites, but
whose common genius for religion, common religious institutions,
common powers and forms of prophecy, missionary zeal and capacity
for martyrdom have proved in history to be anything but ambiguous.
And so in particular with Hebrew poetry. Neither its spirit, nor the
aspects of nature nor the human interests with which it is occupied,
nor its characteristic forms can be adequately appreciated, except by
comparison with, and frequent illustration from, the poetries of those
other Semitic tribes with whom Israel shared the same blood,1 the
same or similar physical conditions, the same forms of language, the
same economy, and in part the same historical experiences.
It is a question whether Arabia was the cradle of the Semitic race ;
but no one doubts that upon this vast peninsula and the deserts in
truding from it upon Syria — the deserts from which Israel themselves
came up — the racial type has been most faithfully preserved from the
earliest times to the present day. Upon Arabia nature has bestowed
few gifts beyond that of breeding men. A ribbon of fertility round most
of the coast line, and broadening considerably on the Indian Ocean,
encloses a high, bare and broken plateau, with stretches of absolutely
barren rock and shifting sand ; but also with wider regions from which
the annual rains entice a sparse and quickly withered vegetation ; while
at the roots of hills where springs rise, or in the hollows where under
ground waters gather and can be tapped, there are oases of real
fertility. The life of man is mainly pastoral, with a comparatively
small proportion of agriculture and very few industries. The popula-
1 It is possible that this prevailing Semitic strain of Israel was crossed by non-
Semitic strains, e. g. the Hittite, but that is a question which cannot be discussed
here.

LECTURE II 27
tion is broken up into tribes, that are defined not by the more or
less vague areas over which they roam in search of pasture, but by
ties of blood and kinship, supplemented by fictions of a common
descent or other artificial expedients. Famine and war are the annual
curses of their life. The insufficiency of water and pasture ; the
strain of hunger and the jealousy of blood, all the heat and reckless
ness which are bred of poverty and pride ; the constant temptations
to raid the camels and cattle of other tribes; with the sacred obligation
which binds a whole tribe to avenge the slaughter of one of its
members — all these create a climate of feud ; while the necessity of
living in shifting camps, and the absence (except for rare moments
in the history) of economic or military interests common to the whole
peninsula, and of an authority effective over so vast and wild a
surface, render impossible any polity save of the most loose and
friable kind. Such incoherence, derived from residence in these
deserts perhaps for millennia before the race broke into history, has
cursed to the end even the most settled and progressive of Semitic
peoples. Israel itself is an illustration.
Within the tribe order and authority have always been more or less
vague. There is, of course, unwritten, consuetudinary law; but
behind it little executive force. The tribal sheikh or ' senior ' is but
primus inter pares ; and in the camp, devoid of gaols 2 or police, he has
nothing to enforce his decisions, or those of the tribal judge, or those
of the 'kahin', the representative of the deity and therefore the final
court of appeal, except his personal influence and the power of public
opinion. In such a society the strongest moral motive is shame —
shame before one's parents or before one's fellow-tribesmen, and this is
reflected in what Wellhausen calls the only moral name for God among
the Arabs before the rise of Islam, el-Wasi, the Restrainer. In such
an ethical temper the importance of certain forms of poetry is obvious.
In a sense more exact and acute than the author of the phrase has
used it, poetry becomes ' the criticism of life '. Its eulogies and satires
focus public opinion and enforce the unwritten law of the desert more
keenly than the sword itself. Very frequent, both in early Israel and
among the Arabs, are the songs which praise the brave, the liberal and
the true, or taunt the coward, the niggardly and the treacherous.
The vendetta or system of blood-revenge by which the duty of
punishing a murderer is imposed, not on some executive authority but
on the whole family or clan whose blood he has outraged, has been

1 Thieves and other defaulters are bound to the ropes of the sheikh's tent and
subjected to torture. Musil, Arabia Petraea, iii, Ethnoloyischer Peisebericht.

28 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
called the ' one element of jurisprudence in the wild life of the desert '.
It springs from the simple principle of blood for blood —
Who sheds the blood of man
By man his blood be shed— 1
of one life for one life. But the nomads have formally developed
this to a degree of which the practical consequences are incalculable.
Should the murderer himself escape, his punishment may be exacted
of any of his kinsmen to the fifth generation ; if none of these are
within reach, every ally or client of his tribe, nay even every person
from the same district or nation, is in peril of being slain in his stead.
The moral effects of such a system are twofold and contrary. On the
one handit undoubtedlyrestrains from murder. The infinite possibilities
of vengeance which it lets loose engender a reluctance to take life except
in self-defence — a reluctance which all travellers in Arabia have
observed with surprise even among the wildest tribes. But on the
other hand when once a man has been slain, the excitement of whole
tribes to the punishment of the deed becomes a fertile source of
disorder, of injustice — as in the case of accidental manslaughter — and
of tribal war, which may last, and has lasted, for a century at a time.
The right to slay is not confined to open war ; under it all kinds of
crafty assassination occur, and even when the)r are accomplished in
violation of other rights, like the sacred one of hospitality, they are
praised — as in the case of Jael and Sisera — in the name of religion.
Beneath such widespread and enduring responsibilities — on the one
side for the guilt and on the other for the expiation of the murder —
no man on meeting a stranger can tell how he stands to him, and
fear and mistrust prevail. Wherever a central authority has been
established among the nomads one of its first attempts has been
either to mitigate the excesses of the system or to do away with it
altogether.2 More certain are the moral benefits of that traditional right of
sanctuary by which the violence of the vendetta is mitigated. Even
to the guiltiest who crave it, asylum is granted in every tent in Arabia ;
and the respite may be used for the investigation of the case, or for
some compromise between the slayer and the relations of the slain.
So much for the tribe. There never was a nation in Arabia till
1 Gen. ix. 6. See below, Lecture III, p. 40 n. 3.
2 See Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, and Doughty, Arabia Deserta
(both passim), for the theory and practice respectively of the system. But one of
the best accounts of it I know is given in Von Oppenheim's Vom Mittelmeer zum
I' mist-hen Coif, ii. 92- 4. To all of these I am indebted for the above details. The
last gives several instances of attempts to put down the system by the Wahabees,
Mohammed 'Ali, the Russians in the Caucasus, and the Sublime Porte.

LECTURE II 29
Mohammed fused the tribes for a time by the fierce heat of his
religion and the passion for spoil. But occasionally trade has thrown
round these jealous and restless groups of men a long and a strong
bond. The oases form islands in the sea of the desert; and the
eminent fertility of the southern coast, with its conspicuous product
of incense, so sacred a requisite of the ancient civilisations at the
other end of the peninsula, developed from oasis to oasis a considerable
commerce, and turned the nomadic tribes who possessed camels (at
first unknown to those civilisations) into confederacies of carriers.
The southern kingdom of Sheba or Saba was built on commerce.
Mekka, on the main line of traffic thence to Syria and Egypt, was
a great market as well as a shrine. Mohammed himself, before he
became a prophet, led a trading caravan from Mekka to Damascus,
the great harbour of civilisation on the northern coast of the desert.
You will remember that one of the earliest x appearances of Arabs in
the Old Testament is as traders : Ishmaelites or Midianites carrying
spices and frankincense into Egypt.
The restlessness of the Semite was not confined to his vast breeding
ground. Fertile mother but poor nurse of men, Arabia has ever urged
her hungry children upon the rich lands to the north and the west of
her — Babylonia, Syria and Egypt. The history of her frontiers is
a history of migrations : heavy tides of men which in time burst even
the strongest bulwarks opposed to them, and rush, or soak and trickle,
into full possession of the civilisations beyond. By ways both of
peace and war, often against their will and in despite of their desert
pride, the nomads are drawn into the beginnings of agriculture.
Sometimes they delay the economic change, which they dread, and
content themselves with imposing blackmail on the peasants or
employing these as serfs for their planting and reaping. The sons of
the alien are their ploughmen and vinedressers. But the end is
inevitable. They grow discontented with the pits in which they store
their grain. They build barns and walls about their orchards, with,
in time, towers to protect these and the wells which they have appro
priated. They go into caves or stone houses for the winter,
but ultimately they abandon their tents even in summer and build
stone or clay houses for occupation all the year round. In the course
of four or five journeys along the desert frontiers of Syria I have seen
every stage of this long transition from the nomad and pastoral forms
of life to the settled and agricultural : a process infinitely more
gradual and complex than that academic division into nomadic and
semi-nomadic, into fellahin and half-fellahin which is the fashion
1 Gen. xxxvii. 25-8.

30 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
with some writers at the present day.1 Nor after their final settlement
to agriculture do such immigrants soon grow away from their tribal
constitution or relinquish their tribal customs. They do not readily
combine into nations, and the nations frequently break up again.
They continue to practise the vendetta, modified by the rights of
sanctuary, and preserve many other institutions derived from their
nomadic ancestors. There is no fuller illustration of all this than the
history of Israel.
Such a society — desert-born and desert-bred, but in its more vigorous
elements migrating to the fertile lands and adventuring on the economic
changes which this involves — determined the human themes of the
poetry of the race. Besides love and war, courage and death, these
themes are the following : the pastoral life with its providence for
the beasts and its benevolence to strangers ; not patriotism nor civic
pride as with ourselves, but pride of blood and family ; famous
genealogies, tribal origins and histories ; tribal loyalties, hospitalities
and powers of vengeance ; or migration and travel ; the long desert
journeys ; the shif tings of the camps; the desolate aspects of abandoned
sites, the hollow hearths with their cold ashes, the rows of stones marking
where the fringes of the black tents have touched the ground — a scene
so familiar and so moving to the Arab that certain classic forms of his
poetry, whatever be their main subject, invariably start with the
description of this. Some further remarks are necessary.
First, in Arabia before the times of Islam women as well as men
were poets, and you can understand how the more proper themes of
their verse were the return of their victorious warriors to the camp ;
the lamentation of the dead, dirges being mainly (though not
exclusively) the office of women ; and things deserving of satire and
taunts, feminine powers in this line being recognized among the
Semites as everywhere else.2 Women were frequently spectators of
the tribal battles, and since they were more free than the fighters to
see the whole action and more able to award praise and blame, it does
not surprise us to find from women some of the most vivid ballads of
war. This also appears in the early poetry of Israel.
Secondly, the songs of travel say wonderfully little of trade. Trade
appears to have inspired or influenced the poetry of the Semites as
slightly as it did their religion.3 There are, of course, scattered meta-
1 See further the author's Jerusalem : its Topography, Economics and History, i.
285 ff. ; Expositor, Seventh Series, No. 33, p. 254 ff.
2 On Satire see below, pp. 37, 38.
8 See Encyclopaedia Biblica, 'Trade and Commerce (by the present writer),
§§ 21-24.

LECTURE II 31
phors suggested by commerce; like that fine figure in which the
disburdening of the clouds, come up from the sea and hanging low on
the horizon, is likened to the loosening and emptying of a merchant's
bales on the floor of the market.1
Thirdly, some of the classic metres of Arab poetry are derived by
experts from the rhythmic movements of the camel or horse on the
long desert journeys. This should have been noticed in last lecture.
The beat of horses' hoofs is metrically rendered in one of the couplets
of the Song of Deborah.
And again, the panoramas of desert scenery which the songs
of travel unroll are lists of place-names, but each name is skilfully
woven into the music and has a small vivid picture attached to it ; so
that these songs are among the most stirring pieces of Arab poetry.2
The natural phenomena of the desert are few and simple. Far
from the sea coast with its perpetual strife of land and water, and far
from the river deltas with their visible creation of land out of water,'
the Arabian nomads know nothing of those materials of the great
cosmogonies, developed by Semites who left Arabia and settled in
Mesopotamia or on the Delta of Egypt or on the Syrian coast. Nor
is there in the desert any rush of vegetation with the spring, nor
apart from the Dead Sea Valley has there been within human memory
a living volcano — in short no suggestions of forces that could make or
ruin worlds. The nomad lies between the bare stones and the clear
stars. The only physical processes which excite his imagination are
the dawn and the sunset, the passage of the planets, the shadows
flung by great rocks, the rustle of the desert breeze, the mysterious
crackle and whisper of the earth's surface when the night cold grips
it ; the rain and the thunderstorm. Thus any mythology which arose
in Arabia was virtually exhausted in the identification of the gods
with sun, moon and stars above and with the rocks below, whether
these were the great cliffs that cast a beneficent shadow or were meteoric
stones fallen from heaven and worshipped as images of deity ; and in
the recognition of theophanies and divine actions in the thunderstorm
and rainbow — two favourite themes of Arab poets. Every traveller on
the desert is familiar with the mysterious crackling which rises into
the still air on the fall of a cold night. It is this which probably
suggested the belief so prevalent among the Semites that the dry
places of the desert — as distinguished from those regions of the earth
which a god has manifestly endowed for himself with water and
fertility — are thronged by jinns and demons innumerable, which,
1 See below, Lecture III, p. 60.
" For an example see below, Lecture III, p. 59 ; cf. 62, 63.

32 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
however, invade from there the houses and persons of the inhabitants
of settled lands. A curious trace of this imagination occurs in the
parable of our Lord where the unclean spirit driven out of a man
walked through dry places seeking rest and returned to the house
from whence he came out.1 Musil tells us that the Skh ur, the great
Arab tribe on the eastern border of Moab, 'hear at night in the desert all
sorts of voices, al- m fay el' ; and that 'female spirits, ad-da ffafi y at,
appear in the desert every night from Thursday to Friday, playing on
tambourines, ad-dfuf, beating drums, at-tbul, and dancing to them.
No one dare approach these, else he must dance with them till he falls
down dead '.2 And again ' in the desert one must not whistle, for whoso
whistles calls the devils together, therefore every Sakhari gets angry
with whistling and bids the whistler cease \3 I once asked one of my
servants, not a Bedawee but a city-bred Syrian, to draw some water
for me after dark from a cistern in the desert of Judaea. He excused
himself, and when I insisted he trembled. When I said, c What do
you fear ? You will see nothing there,' he replied : ' It is not what I
shall see, but what I cannot see, that I fear.' I know what he was
thinking : that the unseen spirits might crowd and hustle him into the
water, as he bent over it to draw.
When the nomad left the desert for some oasis or the margin
of the fertile lands, his first emotions were roused by fountains
and trees. Contrasted with his stagnant cisterns, often covered by
a green scum, the fountains were to him alive — he called them living
water. The sudden and voluminous outbreaks of water, often as
f ullgrown streams, which happen between the harder and softer strata
of the Syrian limestones, appeared to be the work of some under
ground god. As I have said elsewhere, no one may imagine how
possessed such a landscape feels, as if chosen, overpowered, married
and fertilised by some deity — Be'ulah the Hebrews called it, Ba'al's
land the Arabs — who has not across the forsaken plateaus to the
east of Moab or on the desert flanks of Anti-Lebanon fallen on one
of the sudden Syrian rivers with its wealth of verdure. No wonder
that we find songs addressed to the wells as if they were living beings
and of divine power. Nilus describes Arabs about a well in the desert
' singing hymns ' to it.4
Again, there are the trees — singly or in scattered groves — to which
in his bare silent deserts the Arab was unaccustomed. Taking his
1 Matt. xii. 43 f. ; Luke xi. 24.
2 Arabia Petraea, iii, Etlmologischer Meisebericht, 323.
3 Ibid. 313.
4 Migne, Patrologiae, Patres Qraeci, Ser. I, Tom. 79, Sp. 648.

LECTURE II 33
mid-day rest beneath them in the stillness of that hour in the
east, the nomad might fall asleep with only gratitude in his heart
for the shade they flung over him. But in the cool of the day he
would waken with their rustling before the breeze, and startled by the
voice of God, put up his prayers before he passed on. I have felt it
myself on my return to the neighbourhood of trees after only a fort
night in the desert stillness.
From the social and physical influences upon the poetry of the race
I pass to its personal sources in the racial temperament and genius.
Like human nature everywhere the nature of the Semite is a bundle
of paradoxes ; but his particular paradoxes are explained by the
discipline of the desert, endured — I must repeat for the point is
essential — endured perhaps for millennia before the race broke into
history. The first of these paradoxes is the combination of strong sensual
grossness with equally strong tempers of reverence and worship.
Mr. Doughty has most emphasized this, but it is obvious
throughout the race. He somewhat violently likens the Arab to a
man sitting in a cloaca up to the eyes but his brows touch heaven.
The Arab is a shepherd and cattle-breeder, his own butcher, and lying
at nights with his beasts about him. But the long fasts, which he
annually endures, purge the body and lend to the mind a swift
detachment from the things of sense.1 We find one type of this
double temper in Jacob the father of the tribes of his people : a hardy,
unscrupulous herdsman, yet capable of spiritual dreams and of
wrestling with the unseen. We shall see another in Balaam and in
his counterpart Mohammed.2
The second paradox is a marvellous capacity for endurance and
resignation broken by fits of ferocity : the ragged patience usually
bred by famine. We see it survive in the long-suffering, mingled
with outbursts of implacable wrath, which characterizes so many
Psalms. These are due to long periods of moral famine, the famine
of justice, from which such Psalms are to be dated.
The third paradox, equally explicable by the life of the desert, is
a versatile subtilty of mind, devoid both of originality in thinking and
of the power of sustained argument and imagination.3
And the fourth is a distinct subjectiveness in the Semite's attitude
to the phenomena of nature and of history, combined with as distinct an
objectiveness or realism in describing these phenomena.
1 Arabia Deserta, i, pp. 56, 400, 467, 473 ; ii. 336, 378.
2 Lecture III, p. 69.
3 See above, Introd. and Lecture I, p. 10.
D

34 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
These last two I take together in their influence on the poetry of
the race.
The detachableness of mind from the things of sense, of which
I have just spoken as one effect of the influence of the desert, is
prevented by the stern necessities of the nomad life from becoming
mere visionariness or speculation. To the nomad on his bare,
war-swept soil few things happen, but everything that happens is
ominous ; as Amos, himself a shepherd of the desert, has illustrated.1
It has not come there without some intention towards, some meaning
for, the observer himself or his tribe. Hence the temper of Semitic
feeling and reflection is as different from the contemplative repose of
the sages of the further East, as it is from those sustained and
intricate powers of argument which have grown upon the western
mind in the security and leisure of the great civilisations. The leisure
of the desert is vast, but it is the leisure of the sentinel : of a man
required to observe and reason, yet his reasoning, till he settles and
becomes subject to civilisation on some sea-coast or river-delta, is not
roused to the first causes of things ; nor, except under the influence
of a religion like Israel's, does his imagination travel forth to their
ultimate destiny. He is engrossed with their impression on himself
for the moment, their significance for his tribe and their effect on its
present situation. The Semitic nomad's interest in phenomena is
practical, and its practical nature persists even after his settlement
in civilisation : as -we see in the case of Israel and their religion.
For that religion continued to be largely engrossed with the bearing
of the facts of nature and history upon the fortunes of Israel
themselves; and it required all the ethical powers of prophecy to
control and purify so self-regarding a temper. To the last the
Hebrew mind is not speculative, except when crossed by foreign
influences, as it is at one end of the history in the makers of the
cosmogonies, and as at the other, for example, in Spinoza.
This sentinel attitude of the mind has set the temper of Semitic
poetry. To it are due the opposite qualities of that poetry —
opposite but equally great. We constantly hear Semitic poetry
called 'subjective'. So it is if by 'subjective' is meant self-
regarding, and to this I shall return.2 But at the same time it is
thoroughly realistic, regarding things not under a leisurely and
reflective fancy but as the practical observer feels the impression of
them at the moment of their appearance. Hence the prevailingly
lyric form of the poetry and its simple, concrete and lucid character.
Bishop Lowth does not exaggerate when he says that Hebrew
1 Amos iii. 3-8. 2 See below, pp. 36, 37.

LECTURE II 35
verse illustrates and exemplifies the remark of Aristotle x that
' the great excellence of the poetic dialect consists in perspicuity
without meanness '. Even in order to express the mysterious or to
attain the sublime the Semite never resorted to the vague or the
obscure. This is true of Arabic poetry, when untouched by Persian
mysticism, and it is equally true of the poetry of the Hebrews with
their deeper sense of the mystery of life and their grander conceptions
of God. In this we may contrast the Semite with the Celt. They
are at extremes both geographically and in the matter of climate ;
but not more different are the mists which roll round Ireland and the
Hebrides from the shadowless landscapes of Arabia than the obscurity
and vagueness of the sublime in Celtic poetry is from its sharp outline
and clear shining in the poetry of the Semites. The cause is not only
the physical atmosphere in which all great things stand out simple
and clear. It is also that habit of mind which is bred in the nomad
by the necessity of forming rapid and sharp conceptions of all
phenomena.2 The accuracy of the poetry in its description of nature is matched
by its truthfulness in rec6rding events. In this the Arab poet shows
a conscience. There is a couplet by Zuhair, which Sir Charles Lyall
has fitly adopted as the motto of his admirable translations of ancient
Arab poems —
' Of all the vei-ses which thou hast made the fairest to praise
Is that whereof, when they hear, men say, Yes, that is the truth ! '
In this we have, as every modern authority insists, the warrant of
the historical value of the poetry. The Arabs themselves emphasized
it. They call their poetry ' the public register of the Arab people ;
by its means genealogies are remembered, and glorious deeds
handed down to posterity ' ; and Muhammed ibn Salem el-Jumahi
says : ' Verse in the days of the Ignorance was to the Arabs the
Register of all they knew and the utmost compass of their wisdom ;
with it they began their affairs and with it they ended them.' 3 Herr
Musil records the extraordinary powers of two Arab herd-boys, to
whom he listened at the Kal'at el-Hsa, as they sang the genealogies
and great deeds of their own and other tribes.4
1 Poet. 22.
2 Since writing the above paragraph I have come across the following remarks on
the Arab poets by Wellhausen (Cosmopolis, Feb. 1896, p. 598) : ' Sie phantasieren
nicht ins Blaue hinein, sondern halten sich streng an die Wirklichkeit, weil sie nicht
anders konnen, weil sie in der genauesten Beobachtung lebendiger und unlebendiger
Wesen aufgewachsen sind. Diese Poesie klebt am Boden und ist im hochsten
Grade realistisch.'
8 Both quoted by Sir Charles Lyall : Ancient Arabian Poetry, p. xv.
1 Arabia Petraea, Moab, p. 84. D 2

36 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
We can appreciate, however, the serious damage to ,which the
historical value of such poetry was exposed by the oral tradition on
which its survival so long depended. Faults of ear, memory and
temper were inevitable as it was repeated from one tribe, or one
generation, to another. Different singers would have different
favourites among its heroes ; and as it passed across Arabia different
tribal prejudices .would play upon it. Thus errors, confusions and
even deliberate alterations were multiplied. Just as in Hebrew, two
or more editions of the same poem became current. Fragments
originally distinct were pieced together. Or the author of a poem
was forgotten and his work attributed to another.
We must remember, too, the other side of the paradox. So realist
a poetry is preserved from becoming the mere enumeration of things
seen, only by the acute interest or fervent passion which the poet's
own experience of them has excited. The Semite has not a distant
imagination. No literatures suffer more than his from separation
in space or time between the writer and his subject. It is true that
the Old Testament holds much great poetry, both in prose and
verse, which appears to prove the contrary. How vividly, for instance,
have the Deuteronomists of the eighth or seventh centuries repainted
in their own rich style the distant wanderings in the wilderness, or
the late poet of Deuteronomy xxxii rendered the passage of Israel
from the desert to the fertile land ! But that is due first to their
extraordinarily vivid religion, their burning sense of God and His
way through the ages, and, secondly, to the passion with which
the individual Israelite threw himself into the personality of his
Mother the Nation and felt again, as though they were his own,
her secular sufferings and sins. On the other hand, even in the Old
Testament, history at a distance is the mere inflation of older annals
by exaggeration of their statements and moralising additions to the
events they record. Contrast the contemporary or nearly contem
porary narratives of David in the Books of Samuel with the account of
his reign in Chronicles. Some of the later Psalms, which rehearse
the history of Israel, are little more than lists of events and
names which even their warm piety does not always redeem from
stiffness and a stale savour. With regard to journeys, adventures,
battles, mournings and the like, in order to be effective a writer of
the Semitic class of imagination must have been in living touch with
what he describes. Wellhausen x has remarked bow much of the
1 Cosmopolis, Feb. 1896, p. 599 : ' Vielfach fallt Dichter und Held zusammen. . . .
Wenn aber ein berufsmassiger Dichter von den Taten Anderer singt, so sind es die
Taten eines lebenden Helden, dem er nahe stent, oder es sind die Taten seines.
Stammes, die so gut wie seine eigenen sind.'

LECTURE II 37
best Arab poetry before Mohammed was written by men or women
who were either actors in the scenes they celebrated or closely
associated with these. The bearing of this on those early poems of
Israel which are attributed to the leaders of the actions they vividly
describe, Moses, Miriam or Deborah, is obvious ; and I shall return
to it in the next lecture.
The same personal interest of the authors in their subjects led
them to mix with their descriptions a great deal of another kind
of poetry. 'The Arabian ode sets before us a series of pictures
drawn with confident skill and first-hand knowledge of the life its
maker lived, of the objects among which he moved, of his horse, his
camel, the wild creatures of the wilderness, and of the landscape
in the midst of which his life and theirs was set ; but all, however
loosely they seem to be bound together, are subordinate to one
dominant idea which is the poet's unfolding of himself, his admira
tions and his hates, his prowess and the freedom of his spirit.' x Of
this testimony an emphatic corroboration is given by Dr. Georg Jacob
in his Altar abisches Beduinenleben 2 : ' Das beschreibende Element
ist stark in der altarabischen Poesie vertreten, dem entspricht auch
die durchweg stichische Komposition der Gedichte, aber es ist keine
objektive epische Beschreibung, sondern eine unruhige skizzenhafte,
untrennbar verwoben mit dem Ich, der stark ausgepragten Subjek-
tivitat des Dichters.' Hence the readiness with which the realist
narrative poetry of the Arabs passes into that of a very subjective
' criticism of life ' : a criticism inspired by personal or tribal interests
and passions.3 Their poems of war abound in praise and blame. Satire
especially is frequent : taunt-songs whether upon the foe or upon
the indolent and cowardly of the poet's own tribe ; and delivered both
as incitements on the onset to the battle or at its close in the poetry
both of triumph and lamentation. This form of poem, the Higa',
was probably developed, as Goldziher4 has shown, from the solemn
curses which poets were called in to pronounce upon the enemy as
the tribe went out to meet him ; and which, as inspired, were believed
to be as essential to victory as the arms and the courage of the tribe.
' You are a poet, help us with your tongue,' cried a warrior of the
Kureish to a singer before the battle of Bedr.5 Of the same kind
1 Op. cit., xviii. '* p. 202. 3 Lyall, loc. cit.
4 Abhandlungen zur arabisclien Philologie, Erster Theil (1896), pp. 1-121.
5 Mr. Nicholson in his Literary History of the Arabs, p. 124, quotes from the
Kitab-el-' Aghani a story of the poet el-A'shd, who on his way to recite to
Mohammed a poem in his honour was intercepted by the Koreish and bribed to be
silent. ' O ye Koreish,' cried Abu Sufyan, ' this is A'sha, and, by God, if he becomes
a follower of Mohammed he will inflame the Arabs against you by his poetry.
Collect, therefore, a hundred camels for him.'

38 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
was the spell which Balak of Moab called Balaam to pronounce upon
Israel. And of the other kind of satire, delivered after the battle
both upon allies and enemies, we have rich instances in the Song of
Deborah ; but notice that the prophetess had also been called to
deliver a song before the battle.1
Another consequence of the ' subjective ', passionate temper of
Arabic poetry is the well-known absence from it of the epic. Lyrics,
ballads, odes, besides metrical proverbs and riddles — all these we find,
but no epic. Its place is taken, as has been frequently said, by the
Prose-romance, combined of personal narrative, family tradition and
myth, frequently quoting older verse or breaking out into verse of
its author's own making.
One other general feature of early Arabic poetry must be mentioned,
and most fitly here, for it is partly due to the realism of the nomad,
and his absorption in the present situation. Arabic poetry is almost
entirely devoid of hope or imagination of a life beyond the grave.
The few sparks of these, which are struck in Arabia before Moham
med, have been reasonably attributed to the impact of Jewish or
Christian ideas on the Arab mind. Now the nomads are not without
belief in the continued existence of their dead. When passing recent
graves in the sand I have heard my Bedawee guides call on the buried
by name, and have sometimes observed them pour on the ground a little
of our drinking-water as if for their refreshment. Arabs also make
pilgrimages to the tombs of famous ancestors and sacrifice to them.2
It nevertheless remains true, that they have no clear conceptions of
a life hereafter, with or without God, or of a resurrection or of a
judgement. Travellers among them have remarked on the wonder
of this, after twelve centuries of the teaching of Islam on such
subjects. The reason, as I have remarked, is in part the absorption
of the nomad's mind by the stress and strain of his present life ; and
in part the fact that the tribal interests, the security and the survival
of the tribe in this life, overwhelm the individual's interests,
and the importance of what may happen to him hereafter. But
perhaps also the nomadic form of life is part of the explanation. The
living do not continually dwell beside their people's graves, and
these disappear and are forgotten. There are no solid sepulchres,
and very few inscribed monuments.3 It takes a settled community,
living beside their dead, and kept in remembrance by stable and
eloquent monuments, to habituate the imagination to the subject of
1 Judges v. 12. See below, Lecture III.
2 Musil, Arabia Petraea, iii, Ethiiologischer Beisebericht, 329 ff.
3 Doughty, i. 241, 618, &c.

LECTURE II 39
their fate and to develop dogmas and pictures of the life to come;
as we see in the case of the Semites' neighbours the Egyptians, and
also among Semites who left the nomadic life and settled in Baby
lonia to the inheritance of an older civilisation. In spite of their
desert traditions these also achieved strong and detailed conceptions of
the world of the dead ; but this was always done under the figures of
the dusty, bat-haunted tombs which they learned to build and carve
in proximity to their own homes.
v/ During this survey of the character of the primitive Semites and of
the circumstance and main directions of their life, I have noticed
some illustrations of the subject in the early history and poetry of
Israel. But these illustrations by no means exhaust the parallel
between the circumstance and experience of Israel and those of her
Semitic kinsmen ; nor the consequent resemblances of her character
and genius to theirs. In the rest of this lecture let me remind you
how exact that parallel is ; how close — with certain essential differ
ences — these resemblances are.
According to all the traditions of Israel the forefathers of the
people came up from the Arabian desert into possession of the fertile
lands of Syria ; and in common with the early prose narratives the
poetry reflects every phase in that change of physical environment
through which such a passage necessarily brought them, every stage
in the economic and social developments which it involved.
There is no exception to this, not even in the story of Abraham.
Because the tradition describes him as starting upon his migration to
PalestinVfrom Ur of the Chaldees, one of the larger cities of Baby
lonia, it has been argued that the family or tribe to which he belonged
were townsfolk already settled and (in the strict meaning of the
word) civilised ; and that Abraham fell back from this stage of culture
upon the nomadic or at least the ' semi-nomadic '. Such a direction
is difficult to conceive for any progressive breed of men 1 ; nor do the
premisses in Abraham's case compel us to conceive it of him. Ur of the
Chaldees lay on the very edge of the settled country, near the mouth
of one of the great avenues which lead up to this from the centre of
Arabia. It is possible therefore, and, in the light of the patriarch's
subsequent migrations, most reasonable, to assume that the stock
from which he sprang was part of that second Semitic or Arabian
invasion of Babylonia, to which archaeologists give the name of
1 It must be allowed, however, that it is not impossible. The Beni Jafn of the
first Christian century, who were said to have migrated from Yemen to the Roman
frontier, had been nomads only during their desert wanderings, and brought with
them to their new settlements memorials of their ancient culture. See V. Oppen-
heim's work cited in next note, i. p. 96.

40 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
' Canaanite ', and that at the time when he broke from his people they
had not yet firmly settled in Mesopotamia nor abandoned their nomadic
habits. Distant migrations, such as Abraham is described achieving,
have taken place between the Euphrates and the Nile within even
recent times and devoid of the religious motives imputed to him.1 But
the tribes who have adventured upon them have been tribes which,
though hovering in some cases upon the frontiers of civilisation, have
not been settled in villages or towns. Nor do the traditions either of
Abraham or his immediate descendants 2 show that they progressed
in the inevitable transition to settlement further than many of the
tribes whom to-day we call purely nomadic or semi-nomadic.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are described roaming over great distances
on, and even within, the borders of civilisation, and crossing the
desert from Syria to Egypt and Egypt to Syria, just as some tribes,
small and great, have been known to do within the last century. It
is true that some of the patriarchs are represented as practising
agriculture, but we are not told whether they did so by their own
labours or by that of their slaves, or by forcing or hiring the peasants
to work for them.3 Abraham dwelt in tents and had to purchase
a burial-place upon the settled soil. When his descendants came
into Egypt they called themselves shepherds, that is nomads, desert-
dwellers, a race alien to the settled Egyptians ; and therefore Pharaoh
assigned them a place for residence, not in the interior of Egypt, but
upon the desert border, where they might continue their pastoral life.
Again, Israel left Egypt utterly uninfluenced by the Egyptian civilisa
tion. In the next lecture we shall see that some of their early poems,
as well as some of the statements of the prophets,4 represent them as
still a desert people when found in the desert by their God and guided
by Him to the fertile country promised to their fathers.
An even more significant piece of evidence is that the traditions
impute to the incoming Israel two feelings which have always been
characteristic of the nomads of the desert — the sense that the inhabi
tants of the fertile land were of a taller and heavier build than
themselves, and a dread of walled cities.5 Such statements cannot

1 For such modern instances see Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer sum Persischen
Golf. 2 His nephew Lot is the one exception, drawn into ' the cities of the 'Arabah '.
" See above, p. 29.
' Hosea and Jeremiah.
'¦ Num. xiii. 28-33 ; Deut. i. 28, ix. 1 f. Ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs represent
the inhabitants of Palestine as bigger every way than the Arabs of the deserts.
And at the present day any traveller who has spent some weeks among the latter
will feel the same difference of height when he returns among the fellahin.

LECTURE II 41
be the invention of Israelite historians writing centuries after Israel
had dispossessed the Canaanite and the Amorite and had themselves
settled to tillage. The feelings which these traditions impute
could have been experienced only while Israel were still sons of the
desert, a people of tents and without the nourishment of agriculture.
Again — in spite of the tradition of the national unity under Moses
before Palestine was reached — Israel are represented during the
process of that invasion and after its achievement as still a number
of loosely connected tribes. One of the strongest of these, Judah,
was reinforced by, if indeed it did not entirely consist of, clans which
for centuries resided on the desert border. Another tribe, Simeon,
never left the desert. The whole nation was reminded that it
inherited a civilisation which it did not create.1 Customs and
institutions, tempers and attitudes towards civilisation, religious
conceptions and religious rites long persisted in Israel, some of which
were identical with those of the desert nomads and some were strongly
reminiscent of them. ' To your tents, O Israel ' was still the national
cry in the days of the kingdom. Long after the monarchy had
created a central executive government among the people, with guards
or police and prisons, the private vendetta, mitigated by a modified
form of the right of asylum, was retained in the national law.
I have spoken of the ' Arab ' character of Jacob, the father of the
people. David and his troop of broken men lived the life of a desert
tribe, inflicting blackmail on the peasantry. Amos, the first of the
eighth-century prophets, was a desert shepherd with the nomad's
hatred of buildings and scorn of luxury. And all through our period,
although death is everywhere present and men are busy mourning and
burying their dead, and although the records breathe a great and
wistful tenderness on the subject, there reigns the same silence upon
another life as we have marked among the Arabian nomads.
In the next lecture we shall see that all these things, thus hastily
reviewed, are reflected in the early poetry of Israel : the desert
circumstance and shepherd life ; the desert tropes and figures ; the
desert theophanies ; every phase of the inevitable transition to agri
culture on a fertile soil with its effects on the nomad's appetite
and imagination ; the long survival of the nomadic habits and
tempers ; the purely tribal ethics and interests, the fertility of the
tribe, its genealogies, its pride and its hatreds, its loyalties and
sympathies, its relentlessness to enemies, its savage scorn and exulta
tions ; and, not least, all the nomad's strange silence — even in the
1 Deut. vi. 10, 11.

42 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
moments of mourning when his heart is most vocal on the virtues of
his dead — about another life for them.
We shall find, too, the same faculties and tempers of imagination :
a terse, vivid realism combined with a ' subjective ' or self-regarding
treatment of all phenomena. We shall find — with a far less developed
art of rhythm and metre — the same poetic styles, lyric, ballad, ode,
proverb and riddle, with the same absence of epic ; and a similar sub
stitution for it of the prose story, compounded of many of the same
elements found in that of the Arabs.1
But with all this likeness, even to detail, there are two strong
differences : a sense of Israel's distinction, even of their uniqueness,
among their fellow-nations, and, obviously as the cause of this,
a spirit of religion, a progressive faith in God and His guidance of
the people, for which we find no equivalent nor analogy in the poetry
of the Arabs before Mohammed. 1 Above, p. 38.

LECTURE III
Substance and Spirit (continued).
In this lecture I have to show how far the early poetry of Israel
reflects the circumstance, movements, and tempers of the life de
scribed in last lecture ; and how it does so with many resemblances to
Arabic poetry, but with these two differences : a sense of Israel's dis
tinction from the other Semitic peoples of the period, and, what is
obviously the cause of this, a growing confidence in God and in His
guidance of the nation, to which there is no analogy in Arabic poetry
before Mohammed.
I shall best accomplish my task by a translation of the poems as
full, and as little interrupted by comment, as possible.
For preface I recall what was said about the dates of the poems.1
A chronological arrangement of them is beyond our knowledge, and
therefore I shall take them for the most part in the order in which
they lie in the Old Testament. Till we get well down the series all
dates are impossible. With the exception of the ' Blessing of Jacob ',2
parts at least of which reflect the conditions of the tribes of Israel
after their settlement in Palestine, none of the poems quoted in the
Book of Genesis afford any clear evidence of whether they were com
posed before that settlement or are later reflections upon • traditions
from the time to which they are assigned. All we can be sure of is
that the verses are earlier than the prose documents which contain
them — earlier, that is, than the ninth or eighth century. Their char
acter is primitive, and except perhaps for the contrast between
Israel's and Esau's lands, in Isaac's blessing of his sons, they contain
nothing incompatible with a date before the settlement. Significant
also is the character of the prose narrative, Genesis iv-xi, in which
the first pieces are embedded. The religious spirit of this narrative
is an ethical, and, except that it imputes to the Deity a jealousy of
human powers and achievements, a lofty one. But this does not hide
the original tempers of the traditions which are employed to point
the morals. Cultivation is a punishment, and the fertile soil is under
a curse ; the discovery of wine is hailed as a relief. The progress of
civilisation breeds arrogance, ending in disaster. The offering of
1 See above, Introduction. 2 Ch. xlix.

44 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Abel the shepherd is acceptable to God, that of Kain the cultivator is
not, though the evidence here is curiously complicated by the fact
that both are represented as standing on the fertile soil, and that
it is the cultivator who is punished by being driven out upon
the land of Nod, that is Nomad's-land, where blood revenge is the
law — symptoms which betray the standpoint of the legend as in the
cultivable country. More clearly the story of the Tower of Babel
betrays that dislike of cities and horror of great buildings which we
have seen to be characteristic of the tent-dwelling nomad. But the
same hostility to ^dyjlisatioii- appears in Israel as late as the eighth
century, in the prophet Amos, himself a desert shepherd. So that
it is impossible to say when the stories or poems which it. inspires
ceased to be composed in Israel. All we can affirm is that there is
nothing in the poems — always excepting Jacob's and perhaps Isaac's
blessing — which forbids a very ancient date. On the mixed character
of the narratives, on the question whether they wholly reflect the
settled conditions of Israel or contain some primitive elements, and
on the questions of the relation of the poems to them, see the com
mentaries on Genesis and the monographs dealing with the subject.1
The very first verses, those attributed to Lamech, are also the
rudest in spirit : one breathing the characteristic extravagance of
the nomads in the pride of revenge, the other the first sense of
introduction to the use of wine. The former, Gen. iv. 23, 24, has
also, like so much Arab poetry, no thought of religion. The measure
is irregular. The first couplet has four stresses to the line, or 4 : 3,
according as you take the construct in the second line. The second
couplet is 3 : 2, the third 3 : 3 —
'Adhah and Sillah, hear ye my voice,
Give ear, Lemekh's-wives, to my speech,
A man have I slain for a wound to me,
And a boy for a blow to me.
For seven-fold avenged is Kain,
But Lamekh seventy and seven !
The Hebrew tense allows the alternative / slay in the third line ; so
that it is doubtful whether the singer celebrates a single act of ven
geance or his general power and custom in that direction. In any case
the song is the boast by a chief or a tribe 2 of that exaggeration to
1 Of the latter especially Stade's in the Zeitschrift zur A.T.lichen Wissenschaft,
1894, 250 ff. ; Wellhausen, Die Composition des Hexateuch; Budde's Urgeschichte ;
Gordon's Early Narratives of Genesis; of the former Gunkel's, Driver's, and
Skinner's. 2 If we retain the two women's names in the verse, which seems required by the
metre, it is an individual who sings ; if we leave them to the prose it may be a tribe
addressing its women, which read for wives.

LECTURE III 45
which, as we have seen, the nomads carried the principle of the
vendetta ; it may be matched by similar Arab vaunts,1 and like many
of them, it is addressed to women. There are on record vows by
Arab chiefs to slay 100 men in revenge for one, and a case in which
this is said to have been done.2 More relevant instances are found
in the story of the famous war of el-Basus which broke out on the
murder of one Kulaib for the slaughter of a camel which had tres
passed on the pasture of his clan. After much fighting between the
tribes involved, Muhalhil, the brother of Kulaib, met Bujair, the son
or nephew of a chief of the other side, el-Harith, who had, however,
refrained from taking part in the feud; and struck with his beauty,
he asked him who he was. When he discovered this, he slew him,
saying, 'Pay for Kulaib's shoe-latchet.' Harith, desiring to stop the
war, magnanimously refused to seek vengeance for Bujair's death.
But Muhalhil repeated his boast, ' I have taken satisfaction only for
Kulaib's shoe-latchet ! ' so Harith broke out in verse —
Bujair then was nought as a price for a slain man ?
A lord for a latchet, the price is too dear ! —
and the feud flamed afresh.3 Both this story and Lantech's song
illustrate from what trifles the nomads' spirit of revenge might spread
forth into prolonged and devastating wars.
Of late it has been usual to deny that the piece has any connection
with the preceding prose record of the invention of metal weapons.
The beginnings of the use of these by the nomads happened within
historical times. The Egyptian monuments show to us Arabs armed
only with wooden boomerangs, and a well-known Egyptian story
describes the weapon-smiths journeying to them with their wares out
of Egypt. In any case the narrator, by quoting Lamech's song at
precisely this point, intended to emphasize the connection between
the acquisition of the new art and the increased powers of revenge
of which the song boasts. This is in harmony with the rest of his
story. The rise in culture implies the better equipment of the im
memorial right of the desert and its exaggerations by the nomads.
But if that be so, what a weird reflection we find in those early days
of the fatal services of modern science to international hatreds !
The other song attributed to Lamech, Gen. v. 29, also breathes
1 Above, Lecture II, pp. 28, 30.
2 For these instances see Jacob, Altarabisehes Beduinenleben, 1897.
3 The Enghsh reader will find the story in Lyall's Ancient Arabian Poetry, 6 f. ;
or at greater length in Nicholson's Literary History ofthe Arabs, 55 ff.

46 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
the spirit of the nomad, but on his introduction to a settled life of
tillage and on his first experience of the benefits of the vine :
This gives breath to us 1 from the toil of us
And the pain of the hands of us.
[From 2 the ground which Yahweh hath cursed].
The first two lines make a Kinah couplet, 3 ; 2, with rhymes. Whether
the last clause is also metrical and to be read as a third line is more
than doubtful ; it neither scans nor rhymes with the couplet. I take
it as a prose gloss on the latter, explaining the toil and the pain.
The next pieces in our series,3 Gen. ix. 25, and 26-27, are quoted
in a story which gives a different impression of the effects of the vine :
the story of Noah's drunkenness and the behaviour of his sons, Shem,
Ham and Yapheth. The lines, whose origin is probably quite in
dependent of the narrative, are curses on Canaan, identified by the
narrator (who quotes them to point the moral of his narrative) with
Ham, for his disgraceful treatment of his father. The first couplet is
in 2 : 3— Cursed be Kena'an !
Slaves'-slave shall he be to his brothers.
The text of the following is doubtful. As it stands and is confirmed
by the Greek, it reads (in metre : 3 (or 4) : 4:3:2: 4) —
Blessed be Yahweh, Shem's-God,
And Kena'an be slave to him ! 4
God widen for Yapheth,
That he dwell in Shem's tents,
And Kena'an be slave to him ! 4
Professor Budde proposes, by omitting 'God' and a slight change of
vowel, to read the first line :
Blessed5 of Yahweh [is] Shem,
while others conjecture Bless, Yahweh, Shem's tents.6
There is a play upon the name of Yapheth-yapht le Yepheth.
The next line is ambiguous: to dwell in Shem's tents may be
either a friendly or a hostile invasion.

1 Heb. yenah'menu literally as above, and then = comforts, or relieves,
us. Gk. read yenlhenu = gives us rest : with a play on the word No"h.
2 Or because of.
3 The metrical fragments in the intervening chapters belong to the Priestly
Document : e. g. Gen. ix. 6 (see p. 28).
4 Or them. 5 B'ruk for baruk.
0 So Graetz reading barek, and 'oh°le for ,clohe.

LECTURE III 47
But these questions of text and translation are as nothing com
pared to other questions started by the verses. What tribes or races
are meant under the three names ? What period of history is reflected
by this description of their relations to each other ? Shem must either
be equivalent to Israel or inclusive of a group of peoples to which
Israel belongs ; for Yahweh is his God. Canaan or K°na'an is likewise
a group of tribes, some of whom were dispossessed by Israel and
reduced to servitude. Yapheth is a name applied in the Old Testa
ment to the northern and western nations en masse. But when did
these oppress Canaan, or invade the tents of Shem either as friends
or enemies ? And why is such an invasion, especially if hostile, prayed
for, or welcomed, by an Israelite singer ?
To such questions one answer, very prevalent of late, is that the
song reflects the condition of the people of Palestine during the most
flourishing period of the Israelite monarchy, the same to which the
prose narrative belongs. The highland Canaanites had then been
finally reduced by Israel, and the coast Canaanites driven from their
southern seats by the Philistines, with whom some accordingly identify
Yapheth. Others take Yapheth to be the Phoenicians, who had
peaceful relations with Israel soon after the settlement and again
under Solomon and Ahab, and at the same time oppressed the
Canaanites of the interior.1 But this seems improbable in view both
of the facts that the Phoenicians were themselves known to Israel at
this time by the name of Canaan, and that there is no other sign of
Israel being known by the name of Shem ; and of the difficulty of
conceiving how either the Philistines or the Phoenicians, under Yapheth
or any other name, could be welcomed to Shem's tents by an Israelite
singer. For this interpretation two substitutes have been offered.
One2 takes the verses as picturing certain racial relations in Syria
during the second millennium B.C., for which there is some evidence.
On this view Canaan stands for the first migration into Palestine from
the east, which was pressed on to the coast by a second migration
from the same quarter consisting of the Hebrew and Aramaic peoples
here included under the name of Shem ; while Yapheth stands for
some northern race, perhaps the Hittites, pressing southwards upon
both Canaan and Shem. This view is most attractive because of the
evidence for the second millennium already referred to, and because it
does justice to the character of the three names as names of races —
and these primitive races — rather than of nations or tribes. But in
1 For the Philistines, e.g. Wellhausen and Meyer ; for the Phoenicians, Budde and
more recently Holzinger.
2 Gunkel, Genesis.

48 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
details this view is quite uncertain, and leaves unexplained Yapheth's
welcome to the tents of Shem by a Shemitic bard. The other historical
interpretation of the verses takes them as a whole, or at least as far
as the reference to Yapheth is concerned, to be very late, reflecting
the arrival in Palestine of the Greeks under Alexander, their subjuga
tion of Phoenicia or Canaan, and their welcome by Jews.1 But this
interpretation also fails to account for some other features of the
verses in the light of the actual conditions of the period. Where do
the Persians come in ? Why does a Jew of that time call his people
Shem and not Israel ? Or, to start the previous question, is it likely
that a poem so late as the Greek period should have been inserted in
one of the earliest documents of the Hexateuch ?
To such difference of opinion is scholarship reduced by our ignor
ance of so much of the history of Israel !
But while these matters of fact must remain for the present
uncertain, most clear and impressive are the interests and the spirit
of the verses. Whatever their date may be, the poems reflect that
interest of Israel in the characters and fortunes of foreign races, of
which we shall find other instances in Hebrew poetry and to which
there is no real analogy in the poetry of the Arabs. This interest, too,
is religious, and towards Yapheth, sympathetic. On any reading of
the text the verses welcome the introduction of some northern races
to Israel's tents as by the hand of God Himself. There is the same
readiness to rise at the sight of some historical movements — by us
unfortunately unknown — to the conception of a universal Providence,
which we see in the prophets of the eighth century and which is
much more developed by them amid historical circumstances that we
know in detail. Equally with the welcome to Yapheth, the curse en
Canaan is the reflection of some historical situation. The context in
which the narrator has set it shows that he, at least, felt the cause of
Canaan's political inferiority to have been their low ethical temper.
If we knew that the song was considerably earlier than the narrator's
date — as evidently he implies — its religious attitude to Yapheth
would stamp it as a document of the utmost importance in the
history of the mind of Israel. Quite possibly it belongs to a date
soon after the settlement, when Israel had begun, but had not
achieved, the subjugation of the Canaanites; when the northern
portion of these in Phoenicia were being simultaneously oppressed by
peoples from further north ; and the pious expectation was natural
in Israel that such northern peoples would assist Israel in their over
throw of the hated race and dwell at peace with Israel in acknow-
1 Bertholet, Die Stellung der Israeliten u. der Juden zu den Fremden, 198 f., &c.

LECTURE III 49
ledgement of the same God, to whose Providence the events reflected
were all felt to be due.
The other fragments in Genesis illustrate the characteristic interest
of the Semites in tribal origins and genealogies and their desire for
a numerous progeny.
The next in order is the oracle to Hagar, Gen. xvi. 11 f., before the
birth of Ishmael.
And the angel of Yahweh said unto her,
Lo, thou art heavy, and bearing a son ;
Call thou his name God-heareth,
For Yahweh 1 hath heard thy distress.
Of mankind the wild-ass shall he be,
His hand against all, every hand against him,
From his brothers out East shall he dwell.
Literally ' out from the face of his brethren ', but by Semitic orienta
tion this means 'to the East' of them. For there the Arabs, the
descendants of Ishma'el, dwelt ; wild and hostile to their kinsfolk the
settled Semites of Syria.
The next pieces are of Rebekah, Isaac, and their posterity ; xxiv. 60 :
And they blessed Rebekah and said,
Our sister thou, become thousands, ten-thousands,
That thy seed may hold their foemen's gates.2
xxv. 23 : And Yahweh said to her,
In thy womb are twin tribes,
Twin peoples shall break from thy body,
And a people than a people be stronger,
And the greater the smaller shall serve.
Then come Isaac's blessings on Jacob and Esau, xxvii. 27-29, 39-40 :
the first direct and the second ambiguous. The lines have, some two
some three, stresses each. In the first 'fragrance ' would be a better
word than 'scent', but the latter has been chosen to bring out the
alliteration of the original, re'eh reah; one of the few alliterative
lines which we shall meet with.
See, the scent of my son,
As the scent of a plentiful3 field,
Which Yahweh4 hath blessed.
1 Possibly a later substitution for 'El = God.
2 The phrase does not necessarily imply that Rebekah's people were settled in
towns. 3 So Greek and Vulgate. The rhythm, too, requires the additional accent.
4 Again possibly for an original 'El, God. E

50 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Give thee God from heaven's dew,
And from fats of the earth,
Wealth of corn and wine !
Serve thee the tribes,
Bow to thee peoples !
Be lord to thy brothers,
Thy mother's sons bow to thee !
Who curse thee be cursed,
And who bless thee be blessed !
And to Esau :
Lo, [far] from earth's fats
Thy dwelling shall be,
And [far] from the dew
Of heaven above.
On thy sword thou shalt live
But thy brethren serve.
A sentence has been added in prose from the later time when Edom
threw off the sovereignty of Israel : ' And it shall be when thou hast
the power thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck ' ; clear proof
that these poetical fragments are earlier than the narratives which
quote them. But how much earlier?
The ambiguous ' from ' is subtly used in these two pieces : positively
in the first, but in the second in its privative sense ; otherwise there
would be no contrast between the fortunes of the two brothers. If
this be the right interpretation, the land which is thought of for
Esau cannot be that to the east of the 'Arabah of which he is said to
have dispossessed the Horim 1 ; for this is not ' far from the dew and
earth's fats ', being in fact about as fertile as Israel's own. It must be
that which was equally Esau's land to the west of the 'Arabah,2 the
wild desert south of the Negeb. Does this imply an early date for
the piece ?
The ' Blessing of Jacob ' will be taken most suitably later on with
its counterpart in Deut. xxxiii.
When we pass from the traditions of the Patriarchs to those of
the origins of the nation from Egypt onwards to the settlement in
Palestine, we are on firmer ground with regard to the events of the
history and at the same time we find clearer reflections both of the
changing environment of the migrant people and of their economic
progress. The first pieces are those in Exod. xv. 1 ff. and 20, 21, attributed
to Moses and to Miriam. In the light of what we have learned of
' Deut. ii. 12.
2 See the Expositor, Seventh Series, No. 31- (Oct. 1908), pp. 331 ff.

LECTURE III 51
the authorship of Arab poems we shall not be prejudiced against the
authenticity of such high names in the titles to these pieces. Much
early Arabic poetry is genuine history, and the best of it was com
posed by doers, or spectators, of the deeds they chant.1 But in Israel,
as among the Arabs, it became the custom to add new verses to old
poems, as well as to attribute to ancient names poems, whose dialect
or contents prove them wholly to be late.2 We must, therefore,
examine the evidence which each poem offers apart from its title.
In the Song of Moses this is of a mixed character. The latter part,
verses 13-18, contains phrases which imply the settlement of the
people in Palestine, and the establishment of their God in His
sanctuary there. Moreover the prose note appended in verse 19 refers
only to the earlier verses. In these, it is true, are several words and
verbal forms not elsewhere found save in the Psalms and post-exilic
writings 3 ; but they are not therefore necessarily late, and nothing
else disturbs the impression that the vivid verses are the celebration of
the scene by one who has witnessed it.
Some notes are needed on the rhythm. Keeping in mind that the
cardinal factor in Hebrew verse is its Parallelism,4 we divide the
lines accordingly and find that most of them are of two stresses each.
This is true even of verse 6, for though at first it seems to have two
lines of four stresses each, these are divisible by a caesura and between
the halves also there is a pause in the sense. Similarly in the opening
sentence of verse 7. By such a division, too, we secure a regularity
of couplets throughout ; without it the first line of verse 7 becomes
a third to the two of verse 6, whereas it belongs properly to the
couplet which follows it, as the pronominal suffix at the end of this
couplet distinctly shows. Similarly the third and fourth lines of
verse 1, unless they are separated, become a third line to the opening
couplet. We may, therefore, safely take two stresses to the line as
the normal measure of the poem. But there are also a few lines of
three stresses : in verse 2 the first, in 5 the second, and in 8 the third
and fourth — all these indubitably; with perhaps also the first of
verse 4.5
We shall find the same metre — normally of two stresses to the line
1 Above, Lecture II, pp. 36, 37.
2 Some psalms which in the Hebrew canon are anonymous bear in the Greek
version the names of famous men. For the Arab analogies see above, p. 36.
3 Deeps (fhomoth), depths (mesoloth), streams (nozelim), heart of the sea,
flash my sword, and the terminations -enhu, -a mo and -emo.
4 Above, Lecture I, pp. 13, 17.
s For the heavy construct, chariots-of-Pharaoh, needs almost certainly two
stresses.
E2

52 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
but varied by lines of three stresses— in parts of the Song of Deborah ;
and the variety is to be explained on the grounds given in Lecture I.1
One line is alliterative, the third of verse 8, and one couplet is
rhymed, the last of verse 9. As far as possible I reproduce these
features in the following translation. But sometimes a Hebrew line
of two accents can only be given in English with three, as in the
second line of this poem.
1. Then sang Moses and the sons of Israel this Song of Yahweh
and they said, Yahweh I sing,
High hath He triumphed.
The horse and his rider
He hurled in the sea.
2. Strength of me, song of me Yah,
He is my succour.
My God, I praise Him,
My sire's- God, exalt Him.
3. Yahweh, man of war,
Yahweh His name.
4. Phar'oh his chariots, his host,
He poured in the sea,
The choice of his captains
Were plunged in the Red-sea.
5. The deeps overwhelmed them,
To the depths they went down like a stone.
6. Thy right hand, Yahweh,
O glorious in might ;
Thy right hand, Yahweh,
It shatters the foe.
7. In the wealth of Thy triumph,
Thou tear'st Thine opponents.
Thou launchest Thy wrath,
It eats them like stubble.

4. Plunged, or better dumped, tubb°'u; the use of the root in Arabic, &c,
proves that the original sense of this onomatopoeic word was to stamp or dump
down, like the die upon the coin. Captains: Driver, knights: the rank is
uncertain. 6. Glorious, lit. showing Himself glorious. The masc. form proves that unlike
the next verb it refers to Yahweh not to His hand.
1 pp. 17, 18.

LECTURE III 53
8. By the blast of Thy nostrils
Heaped were the waters,
Stayed like a stack as they streamed,
Stark were the deeps to the heart of the sea.
9. The foe had said,
' I chase, I make,
I cast the spoil,
My lust they glut,
I flash my brand,
Ousts them my hand ! '
10. Thou blewest with Thy wind,
Ocean overwhelmed them ;
Sank they like lead
In the glorious waters.
The song of Miriam (xv. 20 f.) is a tiny fragment, but with the prose
introduction to it tells us almost as much as the song of Deborah
about the conceptions of poetry which prevailed in early Israel.
And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a toph (or
timbrel) in her hand, and all the women went after her with timbrels
and with dances, and Miriam chanted — that is, chanted in antiphon —
to them : Sing to Yahweh,
High hath He triumphed ;
The horse and his rider
He hurled in the sea.

8. I am not sure of the line-division of this verse given above. The sentence I
have made two lines can only be so divided by giving two stresses to the construct
phrase. Give them but one and the sentence is one line with three accents, like
the two lines which follow it ; and the verse becomes a triplet. The third line
has a three-fold alliteration. Stayed, stopped or stood still; Stark were, or
t-urdled, congealed, condensed, became solid.
9. After the three-stress lines of verse 8 the resumption of a two-stress measure
for the vaunts of the foe is effective, especially as the unaccented syllables at first
are few. We get the impression of an eager, almost panting voice. The last two
lines rhyme but only on the pronominal suffix for my, and therefore not so distinctly
as in the above translation. I flash ('arik) usually rendered I draw, as though
' empty ' the scabbard of the sword. But both here and in the passages in Ezekiel,
in which the phrase occurs, the context implies a more thorough action than the
mere drawing of the sword. The Arabic analogue suggests either ' I make my
sword to flash ', or ' I pour it out, sweep right and left with it '. (Cf. our phrase,
'to rain blows.')
10. They sank. The word salalu is onomatopoeic (in Arabic it is used of
gurgling water), and hissed or whistled would come nearer to the sound it
conveys. But lead does not whistle on falling into water. Gurgled is better;
yet sank itself somewhat echoes the sound intended. Driver, whizzed down.

54 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Some years ago I travelled for a few days in the deserts of Judaea
under the protection of a Bedawee tribe. The guides they gave us
were the chief's son and brother, with five other men. At Engedi
we reached the limits of their territory, where we had to take fresh
guides from another tribe. So they made for us what the Arabs
call a 'fantasia'. It was bright moonlight. The seven of them
stood up with the same instrument as the toph of Miriam and her
women, and of the same name, daf f x ; and began a slow dance to the
accompaniment of their music. In a little the chief's son — mark you,
no professional minstrel but the principal personage among them —
stood out from the rest and, still dancing, chanted an improvised
verse descriptive of our journey. His fellows caught it and sang
it back to him. He followed with other verses, thirty or thirty-
five in all, each describing some phase of the journey, or
some aspect of the landscapes through which we had passed, with
allusions to the virtues of his tribe, and, of course, with hints at our
own still prospective liberality. The chorus did not always repeat
the first verse; but when a fresh one of superior quality was im
provised by the young chief they caught at that, and for the next few
verses made it the refrain. And all the time they danced and one of
them played their timbrel.
Here was the very kind of poetry which we find in the account of
Miriam's song, and in fact among all primitive peoples. To them
poetry is not merely the arrangement in regular measures of vivid,
musical words ; nor is the composition of it left to the professional
poet. Song is not the work of the voice alone. Early peoples expected
in poetry what we seek from our orators, that the whole body shall
contribute to the rhythm ; that music shall always accompany it ;
that it shall be the product of experience rather than of imagination ;
that no strange heart or voice is sufficient for it, but that the very
head, hands and limbs which have done the actions celebrated shall
spring, warm and rhythmical, from the doing of the things to the
singing of them. Of such poetry we may say that it is just the
peroration of life ; and that after all must be the vividest poetry.
The narratives of the wilderness enclose a singularly small number
of verses ; and first a fragment on the war with 'Amalek, Exodus
xvii. 15, 16 : And Moses built an altar and called its name Yahweh-
Nissi (my standard), and he said:
1 The daff (or tar) is the tambourine or timbrel, skin tightly bound over
a hoop, in which loose metal plates are inserted. A similar instrument is the hand-
drum darabukkeh, a. jar of pottery with a skin bottom. It is to me uncertain
which of these was the Hebrew toph.

LECTURE III 55
On Yah's standard a hand,
Yahweh at war,
With '^malek for ever ! 1
The next two are the lines on the lifting and resting of the Ark,
Numbers x. 35, 36 : And it was when the Ark was lifted that
Moses said : Arise, Yahweh,
That Thy foes be scattered
And Thy haters flee from Thy face.2
And when it rested he would say :
Return, Yahweh,
To the myriads,3 the clans of Isra'el.
There is also the oracle to Aaron and Miriam when they had
spoken against Moses, Numbers xii. 6-8. The lines are irregular, of
two or three stresses each. And Yahweh said to them 4 :
Hear now My words !
Be a prophet among you,
By visions I make Me be known to him,
And by dreams with him do I speak.
Not so is My servant, Mosheh,
Of My house most trusted is he.
Mouth to mouth with him do I speak,
Not in vision 5 nor by riddles.
[And the form of Yahweh he beholds]
Why then feared ye not —
To speak 'gainst My servant, Mosheh?
It is always a question whether a poem is older than the narrative
in which it occurs, or the narrative than the poem with the poem
composed to fit it. In this case the oracle seems (from its second
line) to have been addressed to a larger audience than Miriam and
Aaron, the culprits in the accompanying story, and may have origin
ally belonged to the tradition of a wider revolt against the authority
of Moses. The language betrays nothing late, nor do the ideas;
unless it be held that the more rational form of prophecy, as dis
tinguished from that which worked by ecstasy or dreams, did not
1 Hand, sign or indicator. Standard: for kes read nes, which seems
necessary after verse 15. For ever, Heb. from age to age.
2 The last is a swell-line. 3 Others read, and bless.
* Soone Greek version and the Sy riac. Y a h w e h in the second line of the Hebrew
text is contrary both to sense and metre, and may have slipped there from here.
s Hebrew has without a negative the word mar'eh, vision, as in the third line, but
here to be taken adverbially as if clearly or plainly. If this be the correct
reading, then we have an instance of the use in these early oracles of an
ambiguous word in both its meanings.

56 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
appear in Israel before the age of Samuel. Against so dogmatic
a conclusion, and in support of the possibility of a contemporary
date for the poem, we may set the strong witness of the traditions to
the personality of Moses and to the character of his work for Israel ;
as well as the fact that among the Semites poems were frequently the
only records of events, and that they did deliver the truth about
these as well as contemporary impressions of men and nature.
But certainty on the point is impossible. The curious line, and the
form of Yahweh he beholds, is doubtful. It is the only third line in
the piece, all the rest are in couplets, and it seems an afterthought.
These are all the verses which the earliest narratives refer to the
wilderness. But the narratives are themselves full of the desert's
poetry. Their theophanies and miracles are the theophanies and
the miracles of the desert. The first appearance of the Deity to
Moses is on the Semitic wilderness and in one of its common bushes.1
That the glory of the Lord should have first shone to him and that
the Lord should have first spoken to him, not from some palm or
whispering oak of the fertile soil, but from an ordinary desert bush,
the characteristic vegetation of the Arabian wilderness ; and that this,
while it burned with the glory of God, was nevertheless not con
sumed, is a fit symbol of the religion of Israel from first to last. For
that religion glowed with an authentic Divine fire, not seen elsewhere
in the Semitic world ; yet its roots were in the desert soil, and in stock
and fibre, in rites and institutions it remained essentially Semitic still.
A later poet, blessing the tribe of Joseph after they had settled on
a fruitful territory, wishes for them in climax to other blessings,
The favour of the Bush-dweller.2
The other theophany of these early days is the thunderstorm,
a favourite theophany of Arabian poets 3 : the mountain enveloped
with cloud and burning with fire ; and some of the earliest poems
salute the appearance of God from the same region and in the same
figures, adding that of the rain. So in the opening of the Song
of Deborah 4 : Yahweh, at Thine outset from Se'ir,
On Thy march from the range of 'Edh6m,
Earth did quake,
Heaven swayed,
Clouds poured water,
Hills shook down at Yahweh,
Yahweh, Isra'el's-G6d.
1 Exod. iii. 1 ff. 2 Deut. xxxiii. 16.
8 See above, Lecture II, p. 3. * Judges v. 4-5.

LECTURE III 57
Or the opening of the song in Deuteronomy xxxiii :
Yahweh from Sinai did come,
And rose from S6'ir upon them.
He shone from the Mount of Paran,
And broke from Meribath-Kadesh
From the south fire . . . them.1
These facts, that the thunderstorm was a favourite theophany of the
nomad Semites ; that it occurs in what are admitted to be very early
Hebrew poems ; that all the memories of the people trace the domi
nant revelation of their God to the thunders of Sinai ; and that
(towards the end of our period) Elijah is bidden to look for the
presence of God no longer in the thunder and other violent forces of
nature but in some spiritual manifestation — these facts suggest the
following question. Do the Psalms and other poems in the Old
Testament which chant of similar theophanies likewise belong to our
period; before Israel had cast off the influences of the mythology
characteristic of the desert, and by long settlement in sight of a
maritime coast, and by their contact with Babylonian culture had
come under the influence of those mythologies of the sea and the
delta, which prevail in the later poetry of the Old Testament ? To so
interesting a question there is no certain answer. But it is worth
noting that except at the crossing of the Red Sea 2 there is no reference
in our poetry to the mythical powers of the Ocean ; and that two of
the Psalms which celebrate the appearance of Yahweh in thunder
storms, the Eighteenth and Twenty-ninth, are both ascribed to David ;
the former, be it remembered, even by some scholars who deny the
certainty of any other Davidic Psalm.
The relevant verses of Psalm xviii are very powerful. Earthquake
and thunderstorm are mingled, but notice how the former is felt only
at the beginning and end of the piece. Between these the thunder
storm dominates — dominates even the earthquake, which is stilled
till it has passed. Never was a more sublime theophany. The
equal massiveness and rapidity of the clouds, the awful darkness,
the thought of the pent-up waters packing the heavens, the flash of
the God's approach, the thundering, the zigzags crossing and
shivering through each other, the ravel of the lightnings — all is
described in a way which defies translation. And the effect might
be more stupendous if the text were firmer and we understood
1 The last two lines emended partly after the Greek.
2 And there only to Tehom or Tehomoth, which forms, some argue, imply
a late date for ' The Song of Moses ', Exod. xv. 1-10. See above, p. 51 n. 3.

58 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
better some of the separate phrases. It is noteworthy that the
meaning of one at least of these1 was already forgotten by later
scribes, and can be restored only from the Arabic, a symptom not
unfavourable to the theory of an early date.
The lines are normally of three stresses each, but as usual there are
a few variations. The verses are couplets, except three which are
triplets. There is no rhyme except in the two verbs of the first line,
nor alliteration except in the first two words of verse 12. Another
edition of the text is found in 2 Samuel xxii.
7. Earth was shaking and quaking,
The bases of heaven did tremble,
They reeled, for that He was wroth.
8. A smoke went up from His nostrils,
And fire from His mouth devoured,
Out of Him brimstones were kindled.
9. And He bowed the heavens and came down,
And the storm-cloud was under His feet.
10. And He rode on a Cherub and flew,
And swept on the wings of the wind.
11. Darkness He set for His ambush,
Round about Him His covert,
With the pent-up waters packed were the clouds.
12. At the brightness before Him they kindled,
Burst through the lightning (?) and brimstones.
7. The first two verbs rhyme, wattig'ash wattir'ash. Heaven, so in 2 Sam.
xxii, our text reads mountains. In line three the verb is a heavier form of the
first verb in line one ; see above, p. 20.
8. Brimstones, i. e. in the original sense of burning stones.
10. Cherub, Heb. Kerubh, the mythical wind monster.
11. In the second and third lines the text is uncertain and the metre broken. It
is not clear how the lines are to be divided. The phrase of the text darkness of
waters, ljeshkath-maim is improbable. I propose heskath-maim from
hasak, to hold up, restrain : for the same verb in Arabic, hashak, is used of
clouds full of water, and of excessive rain. Trans, gathering of waters or as
above pent-up waters. So in 2 Sam. xxii, but with another radical hashrath (?).
Also the Greek of 2 Sam. reads a verb in the third line. Instead of 'abhe,
clouds or masses of, I propose therefore 'abhu, were thick or packed. In
any case the line is a heavier one than the preceding two with which it forms
a triplet. The metre is irregular and the lines might alternatively be divided thus :
His covert around Him the pent-up waters,
Packed were the clouds.
12. Text and meaning again uncertain. As it stands the Hebrew confirmed by
the Greek gives two irregular lines : At the brightness before Him His clouds
passed away (or through) — Hail and brimstones of fire. In 2 Samuel, Hebrew and
Greek have the defective— At the brightness before Him they kindled — . . .
brimstones of fire. By reading the first line as in 2 Samuel, and transferring
the verb of our Psalm to the second line, we get as above a regular metre and
a natural meaning. But Hebrew and Greek both read barad, hail ; at this point
we expect rather barak, lightning, which therefore is suggested above.
1 See the note on verse 11.

LECTURE III 59
13. Yahweh did thunder from heaven,
The Highest uttered His voice.
14. He shot out His arrows and strewed them,
He hurled the lightnings and ravelled them.
15. The beds of the waters were seen,
And bared were the world's foundations —
At Thy rebuke, Yahweh,
The blast of the breath of Thy nostrils.
The other description of the appearance of God in a thunderstorm,
the Twenty-ninth Psalm, describes the progress of the storm from the
peaks of Lebanon down the mountain-flanks and out upon the desert.
I quote with it, for comparison and contrast, a celebrated Arabic poem
on the same subject. The two describe similar directions and similar
effects of the storm. But the Arab contents himself with these and,
unlike the Hebrew, sees no theophany. The art of his presentation
is superior to the Hebrew's, and he is a far greater master in metre,
like all his kind, as might be expected from their much later date. I
give the Arab poem, which is by the famous Imra el-Kais (died
cirea 540 a.d.), in Sir Charles Lyall's admirable translation :
O Friend — see the lightning there ! it flickered and now is gone,
as though flashed a pair of hands in the pillar of crowned cloud.
Nay, was it its blaze, or the lamps of a hermit that dwells alone
and pours o'er the twisted wicks the oil from his slender cruse ?
We sat there, my fellows and I, 'twixt Darij and al-'Udhaib,
and gazed as the distance gloomed, and waited its oncoming.
The right of its mighty rain advanced over Katan's ridge,
the left of its trailing skirt swept Yadhbul and as-Sitar ;
Then over Kutaifah's steep the flood of its onset drave,
and headlong before its storm the tall trees were borne to ground ;
And the drift of its waters passed o'er the crags of al-Kanan,
and drave forth the white-legged deer from the refuge they sought
therein.
And Taima — it left not there the stem of a palm aloft,
nor ever a tower, save one firm built on the living rock.
And when first its misty shroud bore down upon Mount Thabir,
he stood like an ancient man in a grey-streaked mantle wrapt.
13. The text gives a third line, a careless repetition of hail and brimstones of
fire from the previous verse.
14. Them and them at the ends of the two lines can only refer here to the
arrows and the lightnings, and not, as is usually implied, to the enemies of the
Psalmist, for these have not been mentioned since verse 3. Therefore the usual
translation of the verbs by scattered and discomfited is wrong. The second
line describes vividly, and accurately, the mixed and hustled flashes of a lavish
lightning, the zigzags leaping into and across each other. The Greek favours this
view by its multiplied for hurled : lavished and ravelled the lightnings.
i.5. Waters: in 2 Samuel, the Sea.

60 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
The clouds cast their burden down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit,
as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store ;
And the topmost crest on the morrow of al-Mujaimir's cairn
was heaped with the flood-borne wrack like wool on a distaff wound.
At earliest dawn on the morrow, the birds were chirping blithe,
as though they had drunken draughts of riot in fiery wine ;
And at even the drowned beasts lay where the torrent had borne
them, dead,
high up on the valley sides, like earth-stained roots of squills.
The Hebrew Psalm, of uncertain date, opens like the narrative
poems of our period, with praise to God, and to its praise it returns
after the description of the storm, for it hears God through the whole
course of the latter.1 Mark how both the Arab and the Hebrew
close their descriptions with the havoc wrought on the beasts, and give,
in contrast to this, the Arab the singing birds on earth, the Hebrew
the singing angels in heaven :
1. Give to Yahweh, ye sons of God,
Give to Yahweh the glory and might.
2. Give to Yahweh of His name the glory,
Worship Yahwe'h in holy estate.
3. Yahweh His voice is out on the waters,
The God of glory doth thunder !
Yahweh out on the waters great.
4. Yahweh His voice in power, Yahweh His voice in splendour.
5. Yahweh His voice breaking the cedars,
Yahweh shattereth Lebanon's cedars.
6. Maketh them spring — like a calf Lebanon,
And Siryon like to a wild-ox.
7. Yahweh His voice hewing out flames,
[Yahweh] 
8. Yahweh His voice makes the wilderness whirl,
Yahweh makes whirl the wilds of Kadesh.
9. Yahweh His voice starts the hinds to their pangs,
[Yahweh] He layeth naked the woods.
While in His palace all uttereth glory.
10. Yahweh on the flood is enthroned,
Yahweh enthroned, King for ever.
11. Yahweh will give strength to His folk,
Yahweh will bless His people with peace.
1 Cheyne and Baethgen recall the echo of this Psalm in the hymns of the three
archangels in Goethe's Faust, especially Michael's.

LECTURE III 61
' Hewing out flames' may mean 'hewing them out of the clouds' ;
but it is possible to translate ' splitting ' or ' cleaving ' the flames, and
then it refers to the zigzags of the lightning. ' Makes the wilderness
whirl ' seems to describe the dust rising in lofty spirals, as it does in
the van of a storm ; but others refer the phrase to the inhabitants of
the wilderness. ' Layeth naked the woods ' is usually interpreted of
the stripping of the leaves, but it seems to me rather to describe —
and very vividly — the effect of the lightning, the recesses of the forest
flashing naked beneath it. So would the hinds be startled into
premature birth-pangs.
The metre is worth close examination ; it is an instructive ex
ample of the difficulties that attend the analysis of Hebrew rhythm.
Usually this metre is defined as one of four stresses to the line ; but
this is true, true indubitably and past question, of only five of the
lines as they stand : the second, the fifth last, and the last three.
Others meet the requirement only if we give the construct (or genitive)
phrases two stresses instead of one, as for example, in the first, third,
and tenth lines ; while others only if we give the same, or similar,
constructs one accent, as in the eighth and thirteenth lines; while
again other lines cannot upon any arrangement have more than three
stresses each, like the sixth line or the fourth from the end. There
is no doubt about the text of these lines. The only solution of the
difficulty is to accept the irregularities as originally designed to give
variety to the metre, or to suppose that, as with the modern songs of
Palestine, the shorter lines had stresses added to them in the singing
or recitation of the piece.1
The lines divide into six quatrains, but of these only the first three
and the last are complete. The second line of the fourth is missing ;
the first line should have a parallel with the simple ' Yahweh ' as its
nominative. Dr. Cheyne proposes :
The voice of Jehovah hews [the rocks]
[hews them with] flames of fire,
and similarly Dr. Duhm. So, too, there are but three lines to the
fifth verse, and a parallel is wanting to the last of them. But it is
possible, that for the sake of variety both verses were purposely left
as triplets.
The thunderstorm has swept us far from our course of following
the series of poems ascribed to Israel's migration between Egypt to
the Promised Land, and to this series I now return as it crosses
the border of Moab. To the wanderings on the actual desert the
1 See above, Lecture I, p. 18.

62 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
narratives assign, as we have seen, but few fragments of verse.
But when Israel reach the borders of cultivation the songs become as
more numerous in the narrative as the springs do on the line of the
people's march ; and there is a large and lively group connected with
their experiences in Moab. The first, Num. xxi. 14, 15, cited
from the Book of the Wars of Yahweh, is a provoking piece, for it is
the only fragment which Hebrew tradition has preserved of the music
of the march, a music conspicuous and charming in the poetry of the
nomad Arabs. The narrator does not ascribe his quotation to Moses
or any contemporary minstrel, but merely notes : ' Therefore it is said
in the Book of the Wars of Yahweh.' x This may be taken for evidence
that the song appeared in the Book without any statement of its
origin, or as betraying that the lines quoted from it were torn out of
associations of a different kind from those of the present narrative ;
and such a reading is supported by the ragged abruptness of the lines
themselves. The questions thus raised are interesting, but cannot be
answered on the meagre evidence before us. One of the most
interesting of them, that of the narrator's method of quotation, may
be better discussed when we come to the next song but one. In any
case, as we shall see, the lines reflect the actual scenery of Israel's
march through southern Moab.2 The measure is uncertain, but
appears to be of two and then of three stresses to the line ; but
Prof. Holzinger takes verse 15 as a line of seven stresses, and infers
that what precedes it is a broken line of the same measure :
146. Waheb in Suphah
And the valleys, 'Arnon,
15. And the cliff of the valleys,
Which stretches to 'Ar's-seat
And leans on the verge of Mo'ab.
Waheb and the valleys are in the accusative case and require a
verb to govern them. The Greek translators, besides reading Zahab
for Waheb, found instead of in Suphah a verb, he burned.3 The
1 See above, Introduction.
2 Holzinger's contention (in his commentary and in Kautzsch's translation) that,
as the lines are quoted from the Book of Wars, the poem of which they are
a fragment must have celebrated >¦ war of Israel on Moab and therefore cannot
have described Israel's peaceful march under Moses by the borders of Moab, but
was probably a later production celebrating an invasion of Moab from the north
by an Israelite king— is unfounded. For the poem, while mainly about Israel's
previous or subsequent wars, may have included a brief description of the people's
easy passage across the obstacles presented by the valleys of Arnon. These (note
the plural) are in southern Moab, and that was a region which appears never to
have been conquered by Israel in the times of the monarchy. The Israelite border
is always at Aroer on the north bank of Arnon.
3 "Ity Zai>0 (tj>\ujicr(v = eth-Zahab saraph.

LECTURE III 63
verb, however, may have been another ; the Hebrew suggests Saphah,
he swept — up or away, which root in Arabic means also was
swift in going. It is possible, therefore, that the first couplet
originally ran : Waheb he hath swept (or scoured)
And the valleys, 'Arnon.
Waheb or Zahab is quite unknown; we expect rather Zered, the
wady crossed by Israel befoi'e the Anion.1 Valleys not valley,
for the name 'Anion — probably derived, like its modern substitute
Mojib, from the noise of falling streams, — covered a complex of
wadies uniting in the long, deep trench that carries their waters to the
Dead Sea. Their cliffs are conspicuous, especially those of the
main branch, whose north wall was the frontier of Moab —
Leans on the verge of Mo'ab —
and stretches east to the site of the formidable ruins now known as
Mdeyyneh, which Herr Musil has reasonably identified with the 'Ir,
or city of, Mo'ab, and this was certainly the same as the'Ar-Mo'ab,
or 'Ar of our fragment, standing on the extremity of the border.2
We find then in the verse the same qualities as distinguish the
Arab songs of travel : a list of place-names but each set musically
and along with some vivid detail of the scenery in which it lies.
If, however, the subject of the verb be not a man or men, as in the
Arab songs, and this piece, like so many others in the early poetry of
Israel, describes the march of God Himself ; then perhaps those are
right who take the last clause not as a line of the poem but as
a topographical gloss attached to it.3
The next piece is the Song of the Well, Num. xxi. 17, 18.
Like the last it is the only specimen of its kind preserved in the Old
Testament ; though, again, that kind must have been as common in
Israel as we have found it among the Arabs.4 The metre has
two stresses to each of the first two lines and three to each of the rest.
And from thence [Israel came] to Be'er, the B6'er of which
Yahweh said to Moses, ' Gather the people and I will give them
water.' Then sang Israel this song :
Spring up, O Well !
Sing ye back to her.
Well princes dug her,
Delved her the lords of the folk
With sceptres, with their staves.
1 Identified by Musil, Moab, p. 361, with the upper stretch of the Wady es-Sultani,
one of the feeders of the Arnon.
2 See article by the present writer in the Expositor for August, 1908, pp. 138, 139.
3 So Holzinger, in loco. 4 Above, p. 32.

64 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Some have thought to read in these lines the custom of divining
for water by the rod, but the terms delved and dug are too honest
for that fancy ; and Herr Musil has confirmed the obvious sense of
the words by his recent report of the habits of certain Arabs on the
borders of Moab. He says that in the Wady eth-Thamad, the upper
stretch of the Wady Waleh, itself a northern tributary of the 'Arnon,
the Arabs dig out with their hands pits in the gravel of the dry torrent
bed, in which water gathers. 'Such water-pits are called Bir,
Biy ar. Since they are regularly filled up [with gravel] by the winter
rains, they have to be freshly dug every spring. Each tent possesses
its own bir ; those of the heads of families and clans are restored
with special care, and although the chiefs only seldom work themselves
and with their own hands, yet it is always said : This well dug
(h af a r :) Sheikh N.'2
So much for the custom. It is at least a curious coincidence that
Herr Musil should have seen it practised in the very neighbourhood to
which the Hebrew story assigns this song. ' It is ', he says, ' the only
place north of the Arnon where the water comes to the surface in the
manner described in Numbers xxi. 16-18. Eth-Thamad gives
exactly the meaning of the Hebrew Be'er,3 and the terebinths
growing here justify the epithet Elim.' He therefore identifies the spot,
'el-Mdeyyne on eth-Thamad', with the Israelite station B 6 ' e r and with
the Be' er ' Elim of Isaiah xv. 8. The distance, too, from the 'Anion,
presumably Israel's previous camp, is quite suitable. But it is
difficult to believe that such methods of procuring water are not
applicable in other wadies on the desert border, as they certainly are
elsewhere ; and terebinths are frequently found in Moab.
The two words following the song in the text, usually understood
as part of the prose itinerary, Professor Budde takes as an additional
line to the song — From the desert a gift !
This is a suitable close, and in fact gives the needed parallel to the
fifth line. Like each of the first two lines it has two stresses.4
The next piece is given in connection with Israel's war against
Sihon, the king of the Amorites, Num. xxi. 27-30.5 Unlike its
1 The same verb as the first of the two given in the song.
2 Moab, p. 298.
3 Cf. Lane, sub voce Thamad, ' water retained beneath the sand and when this is
removed is yielded by the ground,' and in the plural, ' holes dug or excavated in
which there is a little water.' But note that W. el-Hsa has a similar meaning.
* If the line be adopted the letter waw with which it opens must be transferred to
the end of the fifth line, elongating the suffix there.
6 On the question of the historical value of the prose narrative of this war see

LECTURE III 65
fellows in these narratives, it is quoted neither from older Books nor
with the name Moses or any author, but simply as wont to be sung
by bards : 'Therefore the Moshelim — those that sing mash als —
are wont to say.' The absence of an author's name — as also in the
introduction to the fragment on the Valleys of the Arnon — is evidence
that the narrator or editor did not improve, at least not always, upon
tradition when quoting an older song, but left it, at least sometimes,
as anonymous as he found it. So far as it goes, such evidence is in
his favour and supports the belief that when he did put a name to
a poem he had some tradition for this. Nor does he even say, as in
some other cases, that the piece was composed or sung at the time
of the events to which he attaches it. He may have thought so, as
seems indicated by his ' therefore '. But this somewhat naive
expression, frequently used in these historical narratives to attach to
an event the dubious meaning of a place-name, or the origin of
a proverb, raises the suspicion that he had before him no tradition
which connected our song with the war against Sihon ; and this
becomes more significant when we find that the only unambiguous
verse in the song (30) describes not Sihon and the Amorites but
Moab, the people of Kemosh, as the victims of the conquest cele
brated ; and further, that the course of this conquest is traced not
from south to north, the direction of Israel's advance, but from north
to south (28 and apparently also in 29). Some have therefore taken
the song to be not of Hebrew but of Amorite origin, celebrating not
the victory of Moses over Sihon but the previous victory of Sihon
over Moab. Others support the reference to Israel's war with Sihon
by taking the first couplet (27) as addressed by Israel either to them
selves or, in derision, to the Amorites ; the next verses (28, 29) as de
scriptive of Sihon's previous conquest of Moab from the north 1 ; and
the last (30) as Israel's renewed exultation in their rout of Sihon. This
is somewhat artificial ; and in particular, while the text of verse 30 is
very uncertain, the only reliable words in it, Heshbon to Dibon,
point like the rest to an advance from north to south. Others, again,
read the poem as celebrating an invasion of Moab from the north by
Omri or another Israelite monarch. In this case, however, the words
' to the king of the Amorites ' must be taken as a later intrusion ; and
indeed they form an odd, unmatched line among the otherwise parallel
couplets. The theory also implies that the Sihon of the opening
Gray and Holzinger in their commentaries ; Kittel's History, ii. 228-31 ; and the
present writer's Hist. Ceog. of the Holy Land, Appendix III.
1 In the first line of 28 the position of the verb makes it possible to take it as
a pluperfect ; but this, which would be necessary in the syntax of prose, is not
necessary in verse. F

66 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
couplets was not the Amorite but a king of Moab : of such a monarch
there is no trace elsewhere. One great difficulty is the ambiguity of
the second couplet : it may either mean that the invasion started from
Heshbon and was therefore Sihon's, or first attacked Heshbon and may
therefore have been inflicted by a king of Israel.
The metre is partly of two, partly of three stresses to the line.
27b. Come, let Heshbon be rebuilt,
And restored the town of Sihon !
28. For fire went forth from Heshbon,
Flame from the burgh of Sihon.
It devoured 'Ar — Mo'ab,
It swallowed the heights of 'Arnon.
29. Woe t' thee, Moab,
Perished thou, folk of Kemosh !
He hath given his sons to flight,
And his daughters to exile.
[To the Amorite king, Sihon.]
30. Their offspring (?) is perished,
From Heshbon to Dibon.
The[ir] women are ....
[From ?].... to the desert.
In verse 30 (see the foot-note) the text has become very corrupt
and a certain restoration of it is impossible. The fragments given
are from the versions. It might — but this is pure conjecture — be
completed thus : Their offspring is perished
From Heshb6n to Dibon,
Their women are childless
From the Slopes x to the Desert.
This gives the extent of northern Moab in both directions : from north
28. Swallowed, so Gk. reading bal'ah for the Heb. ba'ale, the lords of.
29. He, i.e. their God Kemosh. The phrases are the same as are used of
Yahweh and Israel.
The fifth line, as remarked above, is the one odd line among parallel couplets, and
probably a later intrusion.
30. Their offspring, so Gk. reading ninam ; Vulg. niram, their lamp (cf.
1 Kings xi. 36); Heb. niram, we shot them, but both the parallelism and the
immediately following verb require a noun. From, so Vulg. [Their] women.
so Gk. nashim or n°shehem, Heb. nashshim, we laid [them] waste. The
Heb. continues unintelligibly to Nophah which [is] to Medeba; and the Gk.
equally so: still kindled fire upon Moab. For the Heb. Medeba the Pesh.
reads Midbar, desert, which has been adopted above.— For other emendations,
based on his theories of Missur, see Cheyne, Critica Biblica and Enc. Bibl., « Sihon.'

1 See note 1 on p. 67.

LECTURE III 67
to south, and from the 'eshed1 or 'ashedoth, the slopes or cliffs
above the Dead Sea in the west, to the Mid bar or Wilderness on the
east. Slopes are elsewhere associated with the Midbar as among the
principal features of the country2; and the particular 'Ashdoth-of-
Pisgah shows that all the western wall of Moab was called the
Slopes. The next group of poems are the Redes or Oracles attributed to
Balaam, a prophet from beyond Israel ; and they occur in the course
of the narrative of his employment by Balak, king of Moab. Alarmed
by Israel's defeat of Sihon, Balak sent for Balaam to ban this people
which threatened to eat up all the rest. But by the influence of
Israel's God Balaam refused to curse, and blessed Israel, acknow
ledging their irresistibleness under divine guidance and predicting
their dominion over their neighbours. The structure of the narrative,
the language and slight historical reflections of the oracles, the rela
tions of these poems to one another and to their prose context, start
questions which it would take a whole lecture to follow. I can deal
with them only so far as to illustrate our present theme.3
The prose narrative is one of the finest in the Old Testament.
Partly from the language, partly from inconsistencies among the
things told, it is clear that the writer has used two different traditions
of the story and worked them with some changes into the finished
form which excites our admiration. His indifference to certain dis
crepancies of detail is the indifference of a powerfully dramatic and
ethical spirit absorbed in representing the conflict of rival religious
influences and the victory, even in a heathen mind, of that purer and
more potential cause with which Israel was identified. Our interest in
so lofty an issue is not disturbed by the facts that Balaam is described
now as an Aramean from as far away as the Euphrates, and again as
an Ammonite riding on his ass from the immediately neighbouring
province; now as convoyed by the princes of Balak, and again as
accompanied by only two servants ; now as receiving God's per
mission to go to Balak, and again as exciting God's wrath by
going. Indeed, the last of these differences may be due, not to two
1 So we might read instead of the Heb. 'asher pointed as doubtful by the
Massoretes themselves.
2 Joshua xii. 8 (cf. x. 40).
' The English student will find an admirable analysis and criticism of prose and
poetry in G. B. Gray's commentary (pp. 307 ff.) in the International Critical Com
mentary (T. & T. Clark), and should consult besides Addis, Documents of the
Hexateuch, vol. i ; Carpenter and Harford-Battersby, The Hexateuch ; Foster Kent,
The Beginnings of Hebrew History. In German see Holzinger's Commentary or the
notes and introduction to his translation of the passage in Kautzsch's Die Heilige
Schrift des A.T.
F2

68 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
distinct traditions, but to the naive effort of one and the same narrator
to convey the first confused effects upon Balaam's mind of a religious
force higher than the spirit in which he was accustomed to
perform his offices. Such an ambiguity would be natural in a man
dazzled by his encounter with a new light, and the narrator would
but follow the method of his age by articulating the ambiguity into
opposite commands from God. This is, however, a subsidiary point,
and does not affect our reading of the writer's treatment of the mind
and character of Balaam. In Balaam himself the writer is interested
throughout. Recently this interest has been ignored, as if Balaam's
character did not matter much in the development of the drama, or
has even been explicitly denied.1 It is true that the religious interests
of the story dominate the psychological. The main issue is between
the irresistible purpose of God with Israel and the human powers
which from Pharaoh to Balak have sought to frustrate it. But this
conflict is described — in detail and with zest — as being waged and
issuing to an assurance of Israel's prosperity within the experience
and the conduct of Balaam himself. I sympathize, therefore, with
the older expositors who have concentrated their attention upon
Balaam's behaviour ; only I agree that some of them have taken the
wrong way with this. They have treated Balaam as the victim of
avarice,2 of which vice there is no imputation to him in the story.
On the contrary, when Balak's promise of reward is repeated,
Balaam becomes only the more decided not to disobey the Word of
God. There is a conflict in his mind, but it is not between obedience
to God and avarice or ambition. It is of a more interesting kind
from an historical point of view : a conflict between the customs
and ideas with which the seers of the heathen Semites usually
worked, and the new religious influence of a higher order which is
represented as coming upon him from Israel's God. The issue is
between that God and the religions of the time, and it is worked out
in the experience of one of their prophets.
Balaam is essentially an Arab kali in or seer of that early type,
which combined the priest's offices of ritual, the diviner's reliance
on omens and lots, and the prophet's experience of ecstasy and
dreams. Some of these men rose to great fame in Arabia, and were
often called, as Balaam was called by Balak, from a great distance
b}- tribal chiefs when in difficulties.3 As we have seen, one of the
1 The latter by Prof. G. B. Gray on p. 318 of his Commentary.
2 For example, Bishop Butler, Sei-mon vii. Newman, on the contrary, says
(Parochial and Plain Sermons, iv, p. 122) that Balaam ' did not make up his mind
for himself according to the suggestions of avarice or ambition '.
3 Wellhausen, Peste des Arab. Ileidentums, 131.

LECTURE III 69
principal functions for which they were paid was to curse the foes of
their employers in the name of God ; and this might naturally be
done to the accompaniment of sacrifices and other religious rites, and
by the reading of omens or the casting of lots. To these practices
the narrative represents Balaam as accustomed 1 ; and up to the end
of Balak's efforts to get him to curse Israel, and to change his
message by changing his site (a characteristically Pagan resource), it
is Balaam himself who directs the building of altars and the prepara
tion of sacrifices. But while continuing to try these, his professional
rites and shifts, he holds true to one thing — that he will only speak
the word which God shall speak to him. In modern terms this is
just to set a man's personal conviction, which he believes to be
inspired by God, against the religious customs and conceptions of his
time, his duty to his employer, and (if you like) his own prejudices and
interests. All the influences of the life to which Balaam belonged, all
the traditions of his office, and the power of the king who engaged him
were opposed to the line that he took from first to last in obedience
to what he believed to be the voice of God. Nor is our appreciation
of the quality of his prophecy to be lessened by the fact that he did
not rise clear of the passion of the primitive seer, but is described
as working under ecstasy or in a trance. In Israel, the beginnings of
the new and higher order of prophecy were in ecstasy ; and un
controllable excitement, to the pitch of utter insensibility to the
material world, has characterized the origins of genuinely religious
movements within Christianity itself. The man has the servile temper
which does not understand the fullness of the truth that is come to
him and staggers beneath the burden of it; but all the same this
inspires him to rebel against the conventions and prejudices of his
day and to overcome them. Balaam grovelled under his convictions,
but he honestly uttered them. So, too, Mohammed behaved beneath
the strength of bis earliest revelations ; but he lived to bring the
whole of Arabia to his feet. For this is the spirit which, though
fallen and blinded as Balaam describes himself to be, God shall one
day call to stand up, and shall send upon its way in full control of
its faculties. This is the spirit which, because it has been true as
a slave, shall at last hear the glad words : Henceforth I call you not
slaves but friends ; for the slave knoweth not what his lord doeth,
but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of my
Father I have made known to you. In Balaam we have the one end
1 xxiv. 1. He went not, as from time to time, to meet omens. The subordinate
clause may either mean as previously (but the narrator has preserved no notice of
this from his sources) or as usually.

70 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
of that long course of gradual revelation of which the other is reached
in Christ and His disciples.
For in early Israel we see Prophecy so clearly rising out of the
same religious environment, and by means of the same personal con
victions of inspiration, that the experience of Balaam may well stand
for a symbol of its origins. The earliest Hebrew seers, like those
among their Arab kinsmen, were entrusted with the conduct of the
primitive religious ritual common to all Semites, with divination by
omens and lot-craft, with blessing the arms of their people and
banning their foes, with the finding of lost property and the
detection of criminals; and the trance and the dream were also
their regular means of discovering the divine will, and of baptism
to its service. But gradually all these things were discarded by
the prophets of Israel. Under Samuel, Prophecy is separated from
the national ritual, with its superstitious and paralysing effects.
From Samuel's time onwards, Prophecy repudiates divination, necro
mancy and traffic with spirits or jinns. With men like Elijah,
Micaiah-ben-Imlah, and Amos it throws off allegiance to political
patrons, and by individual experience and conviction separates itself
— very explicitly in the case of Amos — from the profession which
bears its name. In time it rises free even of ecstasy, and as St. Paul
says, the spirits of the prophets became subject to the prophets. The
temper of these revolts and renunciations, which mark the rise of
prophecy in Israel, appears in the prime of prophecy as a moral hostility
to, and an intellectual scorn of, ritual, magic, ecstasy, the political
ambitions of the kings and the unethical ideals of the people ; all upon
the strength of personal convictions which the great prophets ascribe,
as simply as Balaam does, to the word of God. To the last the
distinction of the true prophets from the false is based on the force
of character with which they stood loyal to this word and refused all
compromises with its demands.
Such analogies between the story of Balaam and the rise of prophecy
in the early kingdom of Israel suggest that the period of the latter
was also that in which Balaam's story grew to its present form. The
atmosphere of both the prose and the verse is agreeable to this
inference : it is an atmosphere of national confidence and rich in the
instincts of growth.1 The period of the early kingdom is also that
to which modern criticism has reasonably assigned the composition of
the two documents of the Hexateuch2 — however much older some of
their contents may be — out of which the narrative has been woven.
1 G. B. Gray takes this as the strongest point in the argument for an early date.
2 The Yahwist and Elohist.

LECTURE III 71
Some allusions in the poems point in the same direction. Israel has
already a king 1 and the kingdom is not yet divided. In the third
oracle the mention of Agag suggests a date not distant from the reign
of Saul ; the Samaritan and some Greek versions substitute Gog for
Agag, but if ' Agag ' was not the original reading it is hard to see
why a later scribe hit upon it for insertion in a poem assigned to
a date . before Saul. On the other hand, ' Gog ' would be a very
natural substitute to a later generation for the now forgotten or
irrelevant ' Agag '- The only king described as effecting the con
quest both of Moab and Edom, celebrated in the fourth oracle, was
David ; but the text of this allusion is uncertain. In spite of the
uncertainty of some of these details in the evidence, the convergence of
them all is impressive, and I therefore feel it to be very probable that
the poems were composed between the time of Saul and that of the
disruption of the kingdom. It is possible that they are founded
upon shorter oracles handed down under Balaam's name ; but of this
there is no proof, and no allusion appears to Sihon or the events
immediately leading up to the situation on which Balaam acts. The
argument that some of the words and phrases are late and that those
which are old are artificial archaisms is inconclusive.2 It is accompanied
by an interpretation of certain passages as Messianic and eschato-
logical,3 which appears to me forced. The temper and situation reflected
by the poetry, their agreement with Arab feelings and customs, and in
fact the whole incidence of the religious conflict celebrated do not
even faintly suggest post-exilic conditions ; but, as I have argued, they
are suitable to those of the early kingdom. Some lines may of course
be later additions.
The measure is normally of 3 stresses to the line ; but there are
such irregularities as by this time we have learned to expect, and
some lines have 4, others not more than 2. The lines are in couplets,
1 xxiv. 7, 17.
* For example it seems to me very precarious to conclude that words like shur,
to view, and za'am, to damn, are evidence of a late date for verse because else
where they appear only in later writings. Za'am indeed is a common Semitic root
and in Arabic has sometimes the force of a solemn assertion in discommending or
traducing a person. The reduplicated forms har°re and l'badad may have been
used for metrical reasons from an early date. There is no necessity to take
teru'ah in its post-exilic sense of a jubilant cry : it may mean war-cry or challenge
or, more vaguely, sound. Nor even are the parallels Y a' akob-Isr a' el, Yahweh-'El,
'awen-'amal improbable in early poetry: see p. 95. Other terms prominent in
the poems occur in J and E ; and as noted above there are certain archaic forms of
words. The argument that the language of the poems is late and also that the
poems are to be interpreted as Messianic is that of von Gall, Zusammensetzung und
Herkunft der Bileam-Perikope (1900).
3 e. g. the allusions to a king and even the last couplet of xxiii. 9.

72 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
the parallelism of which is very regular. In fact these oracles of
Balaam illustrate more fully than any other of our poems the various
forms of Hebrew parallelism. The only third or odd lines occur in
the third and fourth oracles, xxiv. 4, 8, and 18, where the text is
uncertain. The greater regularity of the verse points, in harmony
with the above arguments, to a date later than the Song of Deborah.
Each oracle is introduced by the formula : And he lifted his mashal
and said.
The first Rede or Oracle of Balaam is xxiii. 7-10,
7. From 'Aram Balak doth bring me,
Mo'ab's king from hills of the East:
' Go curse me Ya'akob,
And go damn Isra'el.'
8. How curse I, whom God curseth not,
And how damn Yahweh hath not damned.
9. For from the rocks'-head I see him,
And from the heights I behold him.
Lo, a people dwelling alone,
Nor reckons itself with the nations.
10. Who hath measured the dust of Ya'akob,
Or counted Isra'el's myriads ?
May I die the death of the upright,
And like his be my end !
The second Rede or Oracle is in xxiii. 18-24.
18. Arise, Balak and hearken,
Give ear to me, son of Sippor !
19. God is not man to belie,
Nor man's son to repent.
Hath He said, and doth not perform,
Or spoken and will not fulfil it ?
20. Behold, to bless I have gotten,
And, blessing, I will not reverse it.
21. I mark nothing wrong with Ya'ak6b,
Nor spy any strain on Isra'el ;
Yahweh, his God is with him,
And the noise of a King is upon him.
7. For 'Aram some propose 'Edom, but the East is no unsuitable parallel for
'Aram. In the next couplets three verbs are used : 'arar, za'am and kabab, all
onomatopoeic. The last two are found with analogous meanings in Arabic and are
imitations of the angry braying or grunting of the camel. But the Arabic derivatives
of Kabab suggest that it meant originally to speak with a hollow voice — ventri-
loquially ; it was therefore applicable to the utterers of spells, as here.
10. The second line is given above after the Samaritan and Gk.- versions. Heb.
Or the tale of the fourth of 'Isra'el. The connection of the last couplet with
the foretext is far to seek, and many take it as the addition of a later scribe.
20. Blessing, or with Sam. and Gk., I will bless.
21. I mark, so Sam., &c. ; Heb. He, or one, marks. King, i. e. God, as the
parallel shows, and not a human king.

LECTURE III 73
22. 'Tis God out of Egypt that brings him,
And his is the strength (?) of the wild-ox.
23. For magic is not in Ya'akob,
Nor lot-craft in Isra'el ;
But duly 't is told to Ya'akob,
To Isra'el, what God hath wrought.
24. Lo, the folk like a lioness riseth,
And like to a lion uprears ;
Nor will couch till he eateth the prey,
And drinketh the blood of the slain.
The third Rede or Oracle is in xxiv. 3-9.
3. Rede of Bil'am, Be'6r's-son,
And rede of the eye-sealed (?) man,
4. [Who heareth the speech of God]
In vision seeth Shaddai,
Falling, yet open of eye.
5. How goodly thy tents, Ya'akob,
Thy dwellings, Isra'el !
6. Like valleys they spread,
Like riverside gardens,
Like cedars God planted,
Like oaks (?) upon water.
7. Streams water from's buckets, (?)
His seed 's on great waters, (?) !
22. Strength (?). The word is obscure: others translate swiftness, others
horns. 23. See G. B. Gray, who takes the meaning given above to the second couplet as
impossible, and the whole verse as interpolated. Others (e. g. Holzinger) translate
the preposition attached in the first couplet to Jacob and to Israel as against,
i. e. magic and lot-craft are of no use against these, and do not stick to them. The
meaning is appropriate to the context. It is only a too rigorous and modern taste
which rejects the next couplet on the grounds of metre. The translation, n o w m u s t
one say of Jacob and Israel, What hath God wrought? is possible and
agreeable to Holzinger's translation of the previous couplet.
3, 4. Rede, ne'um, the usual term used by Hebrew prophets of their oracles.
Eye-sealed (?), if this be the meaning it refers to the trance or ecstasy into which
the seer falls, physically his eyes are closed, and is in intentional paradox to the open
of eye ; with the inner eye he sees God. It was the custom of Mohammed when
he felt his earlier revelations approaching to have himself wrapped up in order to
receive them. Cf. the Koran, Sura lxxiv, beginning ' O thou, the enwrapped one '.
The first Une of verse 4 disturbs the couplet-form and is probably an interpolation
from verse 16, where it has a parallel. If we are to retain it here, we must restore
that parallel.
6. Valleys, wadies, or torrent-beds which even when dry (especially on the
east of Jordan) display long stretches of colour, green and purple, with the oleanders
(Rose-bay, Rose-laurel) and other bushes that fill them. The analogy here lies in
the extent ofthe flourishing aspect and its hidden sources. Cedars, oaks(?), the
two tree-names are transposed from their positions in the Heb. text (Cheyne and
others), as cedars are not found on waters. Oaks is substituted, as by many, for
the doubtful Heb. for aloes.
7. The text is uncertain. The first couplet as it stands celebrates either as in

74 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Higher is his king than 'Agag
And lifted his kingdom.
8a. 'Tis God out of Egypt that brings him,
And his is the strength of the wild-ox.
9a. He hath crouched, hath couched like a lion,
Like a lioness who shall rouse him ?
8b. Let him eat the nations his foes,
And their bones let him crunch !
[Shatter his oppressors ?]
9b. Who bless thee be blessed,
And cursed who curse thee.
The fourth Rede or Oracle is in xxiv. 15-19.
15. Rede of Bil'am, Be'6r's-son,
And rede of the eye-sealed (?) man,
16. Who heareth the speech of God,
And knows what the Highest doth know ;
In vision he seeth Shaddai,
Falling, yet open of eye.
17. I see him — but not now,
I descry him — but not near.
A star has gone up from Ya'akob,
A sceptre from Isra'el rises,
And shatters the brows of Mo'ab,
The skulls of all sons of Sheth(?).
18. And 'Edom shall be dispossessed,
And dispossessed be Se'ir ;
While Isra'el gains in might,
And Ya'akob doth rule them, his foes (?)
[And the rest of Se'ir doth perish.]
similar Arabic figures the bounty of Israel or more probably the fertility of the
people. But some emend the text so as to read, Let people tremble at his might —
and his arm be on many nations. — For 'Agag, Gk. and Sam., read Gog, the
synonym in later Israel for heathen power.
8, 9. I have, following others, transposed the last three lines of 8 and the first two
of 9. The text of the former is uncertain ; the triplet is suspicious, though not
impossible (see above, p. 18). Some emend so as to give two lines, e. g. Volz :
He eateth, he cruncheth his foes — their bones he shatters ; and Holzinger : He
shatters, he crunches his foes— he eats, he devours their bones.
15, 16. See on 3, 4. Heb. Knoweth the knowledge of the Highest, i.e. what the
Highest knows. Cp. the words in the ' Throne-verse ' in the Koran : ' they compre
hend nought of His knowledge.'
17. Gone up, darak, which in Arab. = to rise to the zenith, so perhaps here.
Skulls, Sam. skull, cp. Jer. xlviii. 45. Heb. gives a verb: break down.
Sheth (?) ; it is doubtful if this is a name, or means tumult or pride.
18. Text uncertain. His foes stands at the end of line two, and gives it an
accent too many ; while line four has an accent too few. I have transferred it to
the latter. The fifth line breaks the prevailing order of couplets, but coming at the
end and as a climax is not impossible (see above, p. 20). Se'ir, so by changing
one letter I propose to read instead of Me'ir of the city. For other recon
structions see the commentaries.

LECTURE III 75
There follow three shorter Redes, xxiv. 20-24, which are generally,
and with reason, held to be of later origin than the four preceding.
The first on the Arabs south of the Negeb : And he saw '±malek and
raised his mashal and said :
20. First of nations 'Amalek,
But his end is to perish.
The second on the Arab Kenites : And he saw the Kenite and raised
his mashal and said :
21. Lasting thy seat, Kain,
Fast to the rock thine eyrie;
22. But yet it is to be burned, —
Till when? 'Ashiir shall enthral thee.
The third, according to the Greek version, is upon Gog : And he
saw Gog and raised his mashal and said :
23. Coasts shall . . . from the north,
24. And ships from beside Kittim,
And afflict 'Ashiir, E'ber afflict,
And he in his turn is to perish.
With the conquest of Northern Moab and Gilead, and the con
quest — perhaps in many cases the peaceful appropriation — of the
hill-country of western Palestine, Israel suffered the social and
economic changes which I described in last lecture.1 They ceased
to be desert tribes, more or less nomadic, and settled in villages and
fortified towns to the cidtivation of fields and orchards. The process
of change is very finely described in a poem which, though it conies
next in order in our series, certainly in part and probably in whole
belongs at earliest to the very end of our period ; for it reflects the
troubles which fell on the nation, and implies as imminent, if not
actual, their exile. It is the long ode ascribed to Moses in Deutero-
20. First, usually taken as of quality; the antithesis end proves it to be of
time. 21. Kain, transferred to this line, which is a stress short, from the next, which has
one too many. Thine eyrie, Heb. Kinnekha, a play upon the name Kain.
21. The first line is thus in the text: 'Oi mi yihyeh missumo'el which can
be translated, Ah who shall live after God appoints him, i.e. to death.
But by a slight alteration of consonants and vowels we get 'ilm . . . missem'ol (or
coasts . . . from the north or northwards) ; and coasts stand in parallel in the
later prophets to ships (or to them that go down into the sea), Isa. xiii. 10, lx. 9 ;
and are mentioned with Kittim (Cyprus). They are frequently personified and
stand for their inhabitants ; but what the verb is to which they are the nominative
here, I cannot say. Compare 'the king of the north with many ships' in Dan.
xi. 40, also x. 30. 'Ashur and 'Eber = Across, i. e. the Euphrates, are synony
mous. For other, to the present writer, less probable reconstructions, see the
commentaries. 1 pp. 29, 30.

76 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
nomy xxxii. The metre is in couplets of normally three stresses to
the line, but the glorious swing of it cannot be rendered in English
by a strict adherence to the rule. Indeed there are the usual irregu
larities. Some lines, generally, be it observed, in climax to a phase
of the song, have four stresses —
7. Remember the days of yore,
Scan the years, age upon age.
Ask of thy sire to acquaint thee,
Thine elders that they may tell thee : —
8. When the Highest gave nations their heritage,
When He sundered the children of men,
The bounds of the peoples He set
By the tale of the sons of Isra'el.
9. For the lot of Yahweh is His folk.
And Ya'akob the scale of His heritage.
10. In a land of the desert He found him,
In the void and the howl of the waste.
He cast around him, He scanned him,
As the pupil of His eye He watched him.
11. As an eagle stirreth his nest,
Fluttereth over his young,
Spreadeth his wings, receives them,
Lifteth them up on his pinions ;
12. Yahweh alone was his leader
And never a strange god with Him.
13. The highlands He gave him to ride,
And to feed from the growth of the hills.
Suckled him with honey from crags,
And oil from the flint of the rocks.
14. Curd of the kine, milk of the sheep,
With the fat of the lambs,
8. Gave . . . heritage: caused them to inherit, enfeuded them, to use an
old law term.
Sons of Isra'el. Two Gk. versions — sons of God.
10. Void, both tracklessness and emptiness: tohu, one of the two terms for
chaos. Cast around: more probably encircled or circled around him than sur
rounded him. Pupil, happier than the A.V. apple. Heb. is 'Tshon (for
'inshon) and Arabic 'insan, little man, the tiny image reflected in the centre
of the eye. Discerned, carefully or anxiously considered him, kept his eye
on him.
11. Eagle or vulture ofthe desert. His, the father-bird, not her as in A.V.
13. Hills, sadi or sadeh, apparently in this earlier sense ofthe word, and not
field : thus parallel to highlands or heights and suitable to Israel's settlement
on a mountain-range. Oil . . . rocks. Of course, not rock or mineral oil; but
the oil ofthe olive, which never yields oil so richly as when planted on rocky lime
stone terraces. In alluvial soil the tree's berries are less rich.
14. The beeves of Bashan were also celebrated for their size; he-goats,
'athudim, in Heb. only here; but also in Arabic. Kernels, Heb. kidneys.
The last line is one of the finest specimens of a climax in a ' swell-verse ' that we
have met with.

LECTURE III 77
Rams of Bashan's-breed and goats
With the fat of the kernels of wheat ;
And the blood of the grape thou drankest in foam !
The origin which we have ventured to describe for Israel could not be
more vividly confirmed: a 'clatch' of desert eaglets, that might have
remained in the desert for ever but for the impulse and guidance of
their God, who guarded them from the dangers of the trackless
wilderness and brought them to the fertile ranges of Palestine. The
great prophets paint similar pictures, but like this ode with gloomy
issues : Hosea, when he describes Israel's idyllic life with Yahweh
alone in the desert, and her wooing of other gods after she reached
the corn and wine and flax and wool to which He brought her ; and
Jeremiah in one of the finest of his earlier lyrics 1 :
For thee I recall the troth of thy youth,
The love of thy bridals,
Thy following of Me in the desert,
The land not sown !
Holy Isra'el to Yahweh,
First-fruits of His income !
Who bit2 him were doomed all,
Evil fell on them.
He then contrasts the very different experience of his own times
when Israel was the prey of every nation.
But our deliberate ode, though it also will travel as far, has not
done so yet. In equally beautiful verse it describes the change to the
fertile ranges of Palestine. Nine packed lines give the material bless
ings to which these desert nomads have been brought by God :
plateaus and hill-sides covered with corn, olives and honey; larger,
richer breeds of cattle than the desert bears; fat wheat, and for a
climax the enjoyment of wine. This is reserved for the last line'— the
ninth wave — a ' swell-verse ', heavier and longer than the others.
The same gift is described more lavishly in ' the Blessing of Jacob '
on Judah, Gen. xlix ; and the lavishness is confirmed by the remains
of ancient vineyards still apparent on his land, and by the reports
of early travellers before the Moslem rule diminished the culture of
the vine in Judah :
11. Binding his foal to the vine,
To the choice vine his she-ass' colt,
1 Ch. ii. 2, 3.
2 Or ate of: the verb is used in continuation of the metaphor that Israel were
first-fruits of Yahweh ; but we may note that the Arabs have a similar figure
quoted by Musil, Ethnolog. Bericht, 345, in the complaint of an Arab against ' my
kinsman who eateth my right', 'ibn 'ammi makel hakki.

78 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
He washes his raiment in wine,
In the blood of the grape his apparel;
12. Dim are his eyes with wine,
And white his teeth with milk.
Other verses in the same blessing describe other features of the land's
fertility : 15. He saw the rest, it was good,
And the land how fair !
22. A fruitful branch is Yoseph,
Fruitful branch by a well,
The twigs run over the wall.
25. Blessings of heaven above,
Blessings of the deep beneath,
Blessings of breasts and womb.
Or these lines from the other edition of the Blessing in Deut.
xxxiii :
13. And of Yoseph he said :
Blessed of Yahweh is his land,
With the bloom of heaven above,
And the deep that crouches beneath,
14. With the bloom of the fruits of the sun,
The bloom of the pulse of the moons,
15. The tops of the ancient heights,
And the bloom of the hills of old.
16. With the bloom of the land and its fullness,
And His grace Who dwelt in the bush.
24. And of Asher he said :
Most blessed of sons Asher,
Of his brothers most favoured,
He dippeth his foot in oil.
Or the conclusion :
28. And Isra'el dwells in peace,
Secluded the fount of Ya'akob,
In a land of corn and wine,
His heavens, too, dropping the dew.
We have seen that Arab poetry shows few reflections of trade : so
too the early poetry of Israel. The infrequent references to com
merce are faint and even doubtful. They all occur in the poems
from which the last quotations are made : Gen. xlix. —
13. Z°bulun dwelleth on the shore of the sea,
And is for an haven of ships,
With his flank on Siddn.
And Issachar: 14. He stoops his shoulder to carry,
Becomes a servant for hire.

LECTURE III 79
And the parallel in Deut. xxxiii :
18. Rejoice Zebulun in thine issues,
In thy tents 'Issachar !
They call the tribes to the hill,
There slay the offerings due.
Yea, the wealth of the seas they suck,
The hidden hordes of the sand.
These tribes, settled in neighbourhood to the Phoenicians, could
not be kept from trade. The last two couplets appear to describe
that combination of worship and commerce at religious festivals,
which was characteristic of the whole Semitic world, and was illus
trated alike at Mecca, at Sinai, at Jerusalem and Bethel, and at
Hierapolis on the Euphrates.
In the narratives of the conquest of Western Palestine only two
poetical pieces are quoted, the fragment addressed by Joshua to the
sun and moon (Joshua x. 12, 13), and the long Ode or Song of Deborah
(Judges v).
The former, you remember, is introduced thus : the people of
Gibeon, on the back of the central range, were besieged by Amorites
jealous of their treaty with Israel, and sent to Joshua for help.
Joshua came up from Gilgal by night, took the Amorites by surprise,
and chased them over the range to its western slopes by the two
Beth-horons. Then spake Joshua to Yahweh, and in the face of
Israel said : O Sun, on Gib'on be thou still,
And Moon, on the vale 'Ayyalon.
The Sun is still, and the Moon hath stood,
Till the folk be avenged on their foes.
Both these couplets are given as 'written in the Book of Yashar'.1
But the second of them has its difficulties. It cannot be scanned in
the measure of the first which has three stresses to the line ; and the
first line of it may be read as a statement that the preceding prayer of
Joshua has been fulfilled: 'so the sun was still and the moon did stand.'
Such a record, however, Joshua could not have uttered at that moment,
nor till the day was over. Some,2 therefore, take the line as a prose
gloss on the verse, and read this as a triplet. But such a gloss, of
exactly the same meaning as the note which the narrator immediately
hastens to give, is improbable, and the line has not only a poetical
syntax,3 but scans with four stresses, just as its successor does. We
must, therefore, take it as part of the poem, but in Joshua's mouth at
1 Above, Introduction. 2 Wellhausen and Budde.
3 M o o n is anarthrous and precedes its verb.

80 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
the very moment he has uttered the prayer ; its verbs must be under
stood not in the past but in the present,1 as is rendered above.
The fragment, then, is a prayer, and the confident expression of its
fulfilment — a prayer for the day to last long enough for the full rout
of Israel's foes. But after quoting it from the Book of Yashar, the
narrator gives its poetical expression a prose interpretation, and says
that ' the sun stood in the centre of the heavens and did not press to
set about a whole day '. The miracle which he assumes (but which is
not asserted by his quotation) he takes as having happened at noon.
But the relative positions given by the verse to sun and moon — over
Gibeon and over Ayyalon — are possible only in the early morning.
They are perfectly suitable to Joshua's standpoint if, as the narrative
implies, he surprised the Amorites just at dawn, and in the pursuit of
them reached the descent by the Beth-horons two or three hours after
sunrise. There is no reason to doubt that this poem, like so many
others, is the tradition of an actual event, but it does not suggest that
this event was a miracle.
The Song or Ode of Deborah not only reflects the various positions
of the tribes after the settlement and the struggles with the Canaan
ites through which they won, and after repeated shocks held to, these ;
but it betrays as well the temptations by which the varied surface of
their new country enticed some of them to sacrifice the national
interests to their own economic advantage. On this a few notes are
necessary. If the tradition of the prophets is true, that Israel upon their
migration from Egypt were alreadj- a national unity, consisting of all
the twelve tribes who were afterwards comprised under the national
name, that unity was gravely imperilled, if not destroyed, by the con
ditions of their settlement in Palestine. The tribal territories were
not only separated by natural and political barriers, but in the various
qualities of their soils impressed their inhabitants with different ideals
of life, or by their positions towards the rest of the world opened to
them different lines of culture. The mountain ranges, on which the
Israelites settled, are divided from each other by the deep Jordan
valley and the broad plain of Esdraelon, both at that time still held
by the Canaanites.2 Nor were the mountains free. A belt of towns
retained by the enemy — Gezer, Ayyalon, Shaalbim and Jerusalem,
with perhaps Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth and Kiriath-Yearim 3 — lay
1 Their forms, the equivalent of a perfect, and a pure perfect, are quite agreeable
to such a rendering, and often occur in this sense in a prayer or a prophecy.
2 Judges i. 27; Joshua xvii. 11, 12.
3 Judges i. 21, 29, 35 ; Joshua ix. 17, xv. 63, xvi. 10.

LECTURE III 81
right across the western range, and cut off Judah and Simeon to the
south. Reuben and Gad were settled on the east of Jordan, where
man's wealth consists mainly in sheep and cattle. On the west,
Ephraim and Manasseh succeeded to fields and orchards as rich as
any in Syria ; while Benjamin's and Judah's lands, though suitable
for the vine and olive, were rocky and ran into desert. Asher
and Naphtali shared their fertile soil with numerous enclaves of
Canaanite peasants, while Asher; Zebulun and Issachar touched the
sea-coast and the trading centres of Phoenicia ; and even Dan in his
nook under Mount Hermon heard the call of the sea and its ships.
Thus divided both by nature and culture, the tribes grew callous to
their common interests, lost not only the physical strength but the
moral spirit and order of union, and fell a prey to the jealous reactions
of the peoples whom they had dispossessed.
It is such conditions, and such a crisis, that the Song of Deborah
reflects — reflects, but only to sing of how Israel overcame them
through the faith and eloquence of a few individuals who, in enthu
siasm for the national God, rallied several of the tribes to war and led
them to a victory over the Canaanites upon the plain of Esdraelon.
That the two chief leaders to this victory, Deborah and Barak, are
represented as the singers of the Song, and that one of them was
a woman, will not surprise us after what we have learned of the
authorship of songs of war — and songs of the passions of praise and
of satire — among Israel's kinsmen the Arabs.1 The contemporary
character of the Song is clear, and is generally recognized : it can be
denied only by ignoring the evidence of the language and perverting
that of the substance and spirit of the poetry. The language has no
late features, except possibly in verses 2, 3.2 There are none of those
reflections of subsequent facts and conditions which appear in the
Song of Moses. The situation of the time is faithfully rendered ; no
late writer would have omitted all notice of Judah, but must have
mentioned that tribe either for praise or blame. Also Manasseh or
Machir is still west of the Jordan. Most conclusive, however, are
the force and passion of the poetry ; in a people of the Semitic type
of imagination it is very doubtful whether so natural, so vivid, and so
convincing a representation of the events could have been achieved
except under the immediate impressions of them.3 The very corrup
tions and obscurities of the text, due to long oral tradition, support
the rest of the evidence. The undoubted irregularities in the metre
show a more primitive style than either the Song of Moses or Balaam's
1 Above, pp. 30, 36-38.
2 See Budde's note on these verses. 3 See above, pp. 36, 37.
G

82 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
oracles. Whoever was its author, the Song springs to us from the
heart of the time.
But there is just as little reason to doubt that the author was
Deborah herself. This has been denied on the grounds that the
poem speaks both of Deborah and Barak in the third person (verse 15),
and addresses them in the second (12) ; and that the form of the verb
in the phrase (7) ' Till I, Deborah, arose ', may also be spelt, ' Till thou
didst arise.' None of these things, however, is incompatible with
the authorship of Deborah, which, in the first place, is shown to be
probable from the fact that similar songs are frequently the work of
women among the Arabs, and secondly, is assured by the character
and temper of certain parts of this one. The changes of measure, as
well as the abrupt changes of subject or point of view which coincide
with them, have been taken as implying more than one author; and
they might be read, of course, as corroborative of the double authorship
ascribed to the Song — its ascription to Barak as well as Deborah.
But there can be little doubt to whom we should assign the verses on
Jael and on the mother of Sisera. If Deborah did not make them,
some other woman did.
The names Barak and Deborah belong to a primitive type of
Hebrew names unconnected with that of the national God. Barak
means Lightning, and occurs elsewhere in the Semitic world, notably
. as the name of the father of Hamilcar the Carthaginian ; Deborah is
the Hebrew word for Bee. What may have been the motive for such
a name, when all personal names were still significant, can only be
conjectured. There are several possibilities. ' Bee ' may be derived
from a family totem, or, as still happens among the Semites, from
some accident or omen connected with the girl's birth. But as the
name is given here to a prophetess and elsewhere to another tribal
heroine, the nurse of Rachel, it may be a Hebrew parallel to the Greek
Melissa, which was not only an epithet applied to poets, but the title
of the Delphian prophetess and of other 'humming priestesses' of
such prophetic deities as Demeter, her daughter and Cybele.1 It is
remarkable that the poem should contain what seems an intentional
play upon the name Deborah in the verb dabberi 'utter' or 'speak'.2
1 Prof. W. R. Smith, Journal of Philology, xiv, p. 120, who refers also to the tree
or palm-tree of Deborah and points out that ' the tree of the bee ' is parallel to the
'tree of the soothsayers who hum or murmur hoarsely*, m8'onenim. For the
questions raised by the tree of Deborah, referred to our prophetess in Judges iv,
and by the nurse of Rachel who was buried in the same neighbourhood, see the
commentaries. 2 Verse 12. All this suggests another derivation for dibber, to speak, than that
suggested above, Lecture I, p. 9, n. 2 ; as if the word were onomatopoeic and meant

LECTURE III 83
But all this is uncertain. It is quite possible that a female child was
called the Bee in the hope that she would prove a diligent worker and
good manager.1 For whatever reason our Deborah received the name,
she lived to deserve it. She had a governing instinct for the order
which she emphasizes, and proved a queen-bee in Israel's hive when
many of the men were drones ; nor was she without her sting.
Like others of our poems, the Song opens with praise to God and
with a call for listeners, probably in this case the chiefs of the tribes
whom Israel fought (verses 2, 3) ; and then, like them also, describes
a Theophany in the usual form of a thunderstorm, not that which
took place on Sinai at the giving of the law, but Yahweh marches
from His dwelling on the mountains of the south to help His people in
this fresh crisis (4, 5). Then follows a picture of the weakness and
disorder in Israel before Deborah arose a mother in Israel (6-8) ;
then the inspiration of the new leaders and the readiness of the people
(9-12), and the rally to war of six of the tribes, Benjamin, Ephraim,
and Manasseh from the south ; Issachar, Zebulun, and Naphtali from
the north (11 c, 13— 15), with whom are satirically contrasted the laggard
Reuben, Gad, Dan and Asher (15 c, 18). As has been already
remarked, Judah (with Simeon ?) is not mentioned, shut off in the
far south behind the Canaanite barrier. A brief chant follows on the
battle itself, and mainly on its last rush in which the rain-storm, the
thunder-clouds ridden by Yahweh, complete the discomfiture of the foe
(19-22). Then comes a curse on the unknown Meroz (23), and
the poem closes with its masterpiece, the wonderful passages con
trasting Ya'el and her murder of Sisera (24-27) with Sis6ra's mother
whining for his return and greedily expecting the spoil of the
perished chief (28-30). A couplet has been added for epilogue,
probably by a later hand.2
In parts the text is very bad, but only in parts. The early versions
help us to repair it, but only sometimes, for the most of the corrup
tions are earlier than they, and sometimes they assist the meaning.
The dialect is apparently that of the northern tribes, with which
Barak and Deborah are identified. It is flavoured with Aramaic ; but
originally to murmur, then applied both to human speech, including the murmur of
oracles, and to the bee, the humming or speaking insect ; and that its application
in several Semitic tongues to the herding of cattle came later : ' calling ' the cattle.
1 See the Greek addition to the text of the passage on the sluggard in Proverbs vi.
2 Modern Literature on the Song : National-Gesange der Hebrder, by Dr. K. W.
Justi, 1816, an extraordinarily instructive work considering its date ; the monograph
by Rev. G. A. (now Professor) Cooke, of Oxford, The History and Song of Deborah,
Judges iv and v (1892) ; G. F. Moore, ' Judges ' (1895), in the International Critical
Commentary ; Karl Budde, ' Das Buch der Richter ' (1895) in the Kurzer Hand-
Kommentar zv/m A. T. G 2

84 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910

again, as in other poems, we find a number of words used in the same
sense as in Arabic. There are also some features in the syntax which
it is natural to regard as primitive ; they do not occur elsewhere in
the same meaning as here.1
The following account of the metres must be read under the im
pression of what has been said of the state of the text : bad in parts,
but in parts only.
First we see plainly that parallelism was already in that early age
the prevailing and dominant feature of Hebrew verse, but it is of the
more free kind, as in other early and strong poems, and less artificial
than it became in the latest verse. Remembering our rule,2 we take
it as the principal factor in dividing the lines. So divided these
appear in a considerable variety of measure. For the most part this is
of two or four stresses to the line ; but there is also a considerable
proportion of lines with three stresses ; sometimes a Kinah couplet of
2 : 3, and sometimes a swell-line with five. The changes of metre
sometimes coincide with a change of subject, that is, with the begin
ning of a new strophe, but sometimes happen within what is evidently
the same strophe. On these latter we have three things to keep in
mind ; on the one hand the state of the text, on the other the prob
ability that some irregularities were original to the metre, especially
at so early an age, and that in reciting or singing they could be
removed, as in the folk-songs of Palestine at the present day.3 The
metre of the opening strophes (verses 2-8) is nearly all of two stresses
to the line, which seems to me to be the most primitive in Hebrew.
Verses 9-12, describing the rise of the people's inspiration, have
mostly three stresses to the line, but there are 2's and a 4. The
rallying of the clans (lie, 13-15) is chanted at first in 4's, but this
breaks down before the end. The same, measure prevails in the satire
on the laggard tribes (15c-18), but again with variations. The
last couplet is 5 : 3. The rush of the battle itself (19-21) is mainly
in 3's, and this measure seems to suit the subject. The quatrain on
Meroz (23) has a measure to itself, 4:3, 4:3. Again, with the be
ginning of the passage on Ya'el (24-27) the measure changes to 3's,
but swings between 3 and 4 with the character of the actions de
scribed. In the passage on Sisera's mother it settles again to 4's,
except for the last lines, but here the text is difficult, and the measure
may originally have been steady to the end. The epilogue is 4:4.
1 e.g. the construction b" . . . bar°ku in the opening verse. For some well-
known roots, e.g. hss (11), shrsh (14), gur (17), kedem (21), meanings are given
not known elsewhere and apparent only from their context.
2 Above, pp. 13, 17. s See above, pp. 17, 18, &c.

LECTURE III 85
Besides the textual uncertainties, there is the other usual difficulty of
telling how many accents lay on the construct phrases. The Masso-
retes have pointed these differently, mostly leaving them without
makkeph, and therefore probably with two accents, but sometimes
binding them with makkeph, and so giving them one accent. This
probably represents the usage throughout Hebrew history. In recit
ing or singing, the construct could be given with either one or two
stresses to suit the rest of the line.1 And this, above all, we must
keep in mind : that the Song was to be sung or recited, not read. It
may be right or wrong to do as I have done, and on the ground of the
parallelism print groups of words under four stresses now as two
lines and now as one. But as the song was for the ear, not the eye,
this question does not matter. So too with the difficulties in the pro
nunciation of some single words, especially proper names. I am sure
that Isra'el was often slurred into two syllables, and Megiddo in its
line must be in two, just as we know an Arab can pronounce a name
like Mkeis in one. In singing, the vocal sheva could be pronounced
or omitted. The measure of some parallel lines shows that this must
sometimes have been done.
There are no certain rhymes, but the reader will notice that the
favourite position for sonorous proper names is the end of the line,
and how often this is occupied by the name Isra'el, especially at the
close of verses or strophes. Another point is the infrequent allitera
tion; for example, the double instance in 26. But there is more
assonance. All these peculiarities, and varieties, of the music I have sought to
reproduce in the following translation, along with a literal rendering
of the sense of the poem. But it is impossible to serve both ends
perfectly, and I know I have often failed. In particular, some lines
of Hebrew will not run into lines of English with the same number
of stresses. What I offer is far less a final translation of the rhythm
and the meaning than it is reliable material for this.
Then sang Deborah and Barak ben-Abi-no'am on that
day saying :
2. That leaders took lead in Isra'el,
That the people were willing,
Bless ye the Lord !
2, 3. Parallel lines of two stresses each (according to text which so gives the
constructs) except the first, which may have three. Some translate line 1 : For
the loosing of locks in Israel, the loosing of the warriors' long hair in vow of war.

1 A construct like ben-'Anath, for instance, can only have had one accent,

86 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
3. Hearken, O kings,
Rulers give ear,
I to the Lord,
I am to sing,
I hymn the Lord,
God of Isra'el.
4. Lord at Thy start from Se'ir,
On Thy march from the mount of '^dom,
Earth did quake,
Heaven was swaying (?),
The clouds poured water,
5. The mountains streamed,
Before the Lord,
God of Isra'el.
6. In the days of Shamgar [ben-'-Miath]
Caravans ceased ;
Who would be wayfaring
Fared by the byways.
7. Ceased had order (?),
In Isra'el it ceased;
Till I rose, Deborah,
Rose mother in Isra'el.
8. Sacrifice ceased (?),
Barley-bread failed. (?)
Was shield seen or lance,
In the forty thousands of Isra'el ?
The parallel in verse 9 supports the translation given above. Were willing, lit.
freely offered themselves.
4, 5. The first and probably the second lines have three stresses each ; so certainly
the fifth ; but the rest have two each. Only the text of the last four is very
uncertain. Swaying: reading namotu, Heb. text nataphu, dropped or
p o u r e d, as in the next line. Some Gk. recensions with erapaxOrj and If ecri-dSi? suggest
namotu or namogu, surge off, dissolve. Heb. adds This (is) Sinai, obviously
an old gloss by one who thought that the theophany was that of the law-giving ;
and repeats Before the Lord, which if we retain renders the last line a ' swell ',
Streamed, Heb. naz°lu; Gk. shook down, nazollu.
6, 7. The text adds in days of Ya'el, probably a gloss. Ben-'Anath also
doubtful. The other lines of the two verses except the last have each two stresses.
If ben-'Anath is retained the first couplet is a kinah, 3:2. For '°rohoth,
roads, read 'or°hoth, caravans. The second 'o. seems a dittography. Order
or rule, or authority. So I render pcrazon on its obvious meaning in verse 11 ;
others villages, peasantry, or agriculture. I rose, so the Heb. points ; some
point differently and in agreement with verse 12 read thou; some versions give
she. 8. The reading of the first couplet is very uncertain. As given above the first
line is a conjectural alteration of the text: they chose new gods, of which
there is no trace in the Song. The second is based on the Greek. Seen, perhaps
better shown, come to the light of day (Budde). So, already in 1816, Justi
(National-Oescinge der Hebriier) ' es war nicht Schild zu sehen ', &c.

LECTURE III 87
9. My heart to the leaders in Isra'el,
To the willing of the people !
Bless ye the Lord !
10. Riding roan asses,
Sitting on carpets (?),
Walking the highway — sing (?) them!
11. Hark the huzzahing (?)
Where the herds water.
There are they telling the faith of the Lord,
Faith of His rule in Isra'el.
12. Rouse thee, rouse thee, Deborah,
Rouse thee, [rouse thee,] deliver the song !
Arise, Barak,
Capture thy captors, ben-'Abi-no'am !
lie. [Then to the gates down came the Lord's folk,]
13. Then came down the rest of the great ones,
Down to the Lord came His folk with the brave ones,
14. Out of Ephraim they tore (?) to the valley,
After thee, Ben-yamin, with thy clans !
9. Metre as in verse 2. Leaders, hokekim: perhaps we should read
m8hok°kim as in verse 14, those who give commands : orderers. Willing,
see verse 2.
10. A couplet 3:2; with a third line of 3. All classes of the people are called
to give praise for the leaders or the willing of the people. Roan, sehoroth,
reddish white. A form of the same root in Arabic, 'Ashar is the name for an ass
of a reddish colour ; but other forms of the root are applied to the braying of the
ass. Carpets is doubtful, but supported by the context ; the Gk. has in judge
ment. Sing them, reading shirum— the m being taken from the beginning of
the next line where it is out of place ; Heb. shihu[m], think upon them.
11. Huzzahing, Heb. mehasesim, found only here; by some taken as a.
denom. from hes, arrow, 'the archers'; by others from the Sem. root hasas or
hasi, gravel, 'the gravel-treaders.' The context shows that it has to do with
sound or music, and so the Gk. takes it, 'those who strike up music' Where
the herds water, lit. among the draw-wells or watering troughs. Faith
or good faith, Heb. sidkoth, usually given in Eng. as righteousnesses, may
as a plural mean deeds of good faith, by which Yahweh fulfils His promises ;
but is better taken for the singular. Rule, Heb. p"razon, which others render
peasantry ; see above on verse 7.
12. Four lines, of 3, 3 [or 4], 2, 3. Note the assonance in D8bor£h and
dabberi, deliver or utter. The song, that is not the present song of triumph,
but the previous song to beat up the tribes to battle (see above, pp. 37, 38). Some
versions read the second line as: Arouse the myriads of the people. Captors,
so Syr. and Ar. Heb. thy captives.
11 c, 13-15. The gathering of the clans. The measure changes to four stresses
a line for six lines out of ten : the rest have three each.
11 c. Where it stands in the text (before 12) it seems out of place, both because
it is an odd line there and has four stresses. Here it finds a fellow line of the same
measure ; but does not satisfactorily fit into the rhythm of couplets.
13. The two lines rhyme somewhat— 'addir im, gibborim.
14. Heb. Out of Ephraim their root in 'Amalek. For the last word read
'emek, valley, with Gk. One Gk. reading also confirms root, but takes it

88 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Out of Makhir came down commanders,
And from Zebulun the drawers of batons.
15. Naphtali's (?) lords with Deborah,
As Issakhar so was Barak, —
Into the valley shot at his heels !
In the septs of Re'uben great the heart-searchings !
16. Why satest thou still the wattles between?
To list to them whistling the flocks ?
In the septs of Re'uben great the heart-searchings !
17. GiKad stayed at home over Jordan,
And Dan — why a truant in ships?
Asher sat down on the shore of the sea,
And stayed by his creeks.
18. Zebulun — the tribe spurned life to the death,
With Naphtali on the heights of the range.

as a verb (which the line also requires) with a. suffix : tgepifaoev airovs — uprooted
them. If we accept some form of the root we get an idiom applied to rapid flight
exactly the same as our Eng. tore. Others shullehu, were shot; or sharu,
went. After thee, &c, confirmed by Gk. but difficult, possibly the slogan of
Benjamin (with three stresses) ; the alternative is to take the line as addressed to
Ephraim: Behind thee Ben-yamin among thy clans; or, with change of
reading, his clans. Another Gk. reading gives thy brother, Ben-yamin.
Makhir is Manasseh, still west of Jordan.
15. The text gives Issakhar in each of the first two lines. In the second Gk.
has instead a second Bardk. Both these repetitions are probably clerical errors,
and most critics read Naphtali for the second Issakhar, but its more natural
position is next to Z8bulun in place of the first I. Shot, or let loose, Heb. shullah,
a passive. Heels, Heb. feet. The Gk. reading and division give us two last lines
of four stresses each. This is the same rhythm as the rest and may be original :
And Issachar's lords with Debor£h and Bar&k,
So Barak to the valley was shot on his feet (?).
15. Begins the satire on the laggard tribes : but the measure continues the same,
mainly of four stresses to the line. Septs, Heb. pelaggoth, usually translated
divisions or channels of water, is more probably sections ofthe tribe : cf. Nehemiah's
use of pelek. Read the rest of this line as in the third of verse 16.
16. Sitting between the wattles may have been proverbial like our 'sitting
on the fence '. It was a poor thing to listen to the flocks being whistled for, when
God's call was abroad.
17. Stayed at home or aloof, Heb. shaken which usually means dwell ; but
the context here requires its primitive meaning still found in the Arabic sakan, to
keep quiet. Truant: the original meanings of the verb, gur, seems to have been
to go aside or away, deviate, decline from, and escape (cp. the Arabic),
and it is most natural to take it in some such sense here. But as applied to one
who left his people to settle among strangers it became the technical term for living
as a guest, client, or hireling, among foreigners, and may possibly have that sense
here. Dan was neighbour, and apparently subject, to the Phoenicians. Creeks,
as if in scorn of Asher's poor harbours. Arabic nouns from the same root mean
notches, and inlets in which boats are drawn up.
18. A long ' swell-verse ' of five accents, followed by one of three.

LECTURE III 89
19. Kings came, they fought,
Fought the kings of K'na'an,
At Ta'nak on the streams of Megiddo.
Not a silver-bit took they !
20. From heaven fought the stars,
From their courses they fought with Sisera.
22. Then thudded the hoofs of the horses,
Plunge upon plunge of his stallions.
21. Torrent Kishon swept them away,
Onrushing (?) torrent, torrent Kishon.
Forward, my soul, in strength !
23. Curse ye Meroz, saith the Lord [His angel]
Cursing, curse ye her burghers !
For never came they to the help of the Lord,
To the help of the Lord with the brave ones.
24. Blessed above women Ya'el,
Above women in tents be she blessed !
25. Water he craved, milk she gave,
In a dish for lords she brought the curd.
26. Her hand to the peg she put,
Her right to the workman's hammer,
And Sisera she hammered, she shattered his head,
She smashed, she hacked through his temples,
27. Between her feet he bent, he fell,
Where he bent there he fell — undone !
19-22. The rush of the battle itself with a change of measure to 3 stresses ; with
perhaps a ' swell ' to 4 in the last line of 19.
22. The context indicates that this verse should lie as above between 20 and 21 ;
both because of the S i s e r a in 20 to which alone his stallions can refer ; and because
ofthe pronoun them in 21 which has no reference unless preceded by stallions.
21. Swept or gript, Heb. garaph. The same root is used of torrents in Arab.
Onrushing (?) torrent, Heb. torrent of Kedumim. A form of the root in
Arabic means forward rushes; so here sudden rises or spates may be more
appropriate. The river is subject to these to this day. Others needlessly emending
read graves, &c.
23. A quatrain by itself both in measure and subject, 4:3, 4:3. His angel
gives a superfluous stress to the first line and is deleted by some for another reason,
that it is a later softening of the anthropomorphism. Brave ones, i. e. of Israel
(cf. verse 13). Therefore, Meroz, otherwise unknown, was an Israelite town.
24-7. The changing measure is remarkable. After 3 stresses to the line in
the opening couplet (24) ; we have for a slow action 4 (in 25), for a swifter 3 (in
26), and then 4 : 3 for the deliberate pounding with the hammer, and 4 again for
the bend and the fall of Sisera ; concluding with a ' swell-line ' of 5 on the heavy
undone. 24. The text adds ' wife of Heber the Kenite ', generally recognized as a gloss.
26. The double alliteration and assonance is noteworthy halemah, mahakah,
mah'Vah, halephah.
27. The text adds a long 5-stressed line— Between her feet he bent, he fell, he
lay — which is wanting in eighteen MSS., and all but ' he lay ' in eight others ; and
may be due to dittography. It also makes an odd line.

90 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
28. Out of the window she leans, she whines,
Sisera his mother thorough the lattice :
'Why are his chariots shy to come,
Wherefore tarry the beats of his cars ? '
29. Warily answer to her her ladies,
Yea, she returns her words to herself:
30. 'Are they not finding, dividing the spoil?
A wench, two wenches a head for the men,
Booty of dyes for Sisera,
Booty of dyes with brocade,
Dyes, double brocade, for my neck the spoil ! '
31. [So perish, O Lord, all Thy foes,
But Thy lovers ! like the rise of the sun in his power].
The contrasted pictures of the two women are very powerful ; so
too the undone chief, and his mother watching greedily for the spoil he
is never to bring her : her last thought for her own old neck ! And
yet some doubt whether the poem was written by a woman.
The rest of the pieces quoted in the Book of Judges are of a kind
of verse different in substance from any we have met, and include
a Fable and a Riddle.
The Fable is that on Jotham's address to the burghers of Shechem,
Judges ix. 7-15, when they had made Abimelech king. The rhythm
is little, if at all, removed from that of prose. There is almost no
parallelism in the clauses. The prose syntax prevails throughout,
there are no inversions of the usual order of words in a clause, nor
ellipses nor archaic and purely poetical forms. The measure is mainly
of three stresses to the line, with variations to two and four. One
couplet remarkably divides between a verb and its object (in verse 15).

28-30. Eleven lines of which the first eight are of 4 stresses to the line, except
possibly the fifth, which may have 3. The next two are in 3 each, and the passage
closes with a swell-line in 4 (or 5 ?).
29. Others render : ' the wisest of her ladies.'
30. By changing the position of two words and eliding one Prof. Budde renders
the lines more regular —
Booty of a wench, two wenches, each man,
Booty of a dyed thing, two dyed things, for Sis'ra,
Booty of brocade, two brocades, for my neck.
G. A. Cooke suggests Are they not finding, dividing the spoil,
A wench, two wenches, for every man,
Spoil of dyed things for Sis'ra,
A brocade, two brocades, for my neck !
My neck, Heb. neck of the spoil; Gk. his neck. For the final spoil,
shalal, Ewald and others read shaghal = lady (for the neck ofthe lady).
31. This couplet in epilogue is perhaps a later addition.

LECTURE III 91
And Yotham went and stood on a headland of Mount Gerizim —
the Hebrew has a head, which is not the top, but one of the pro
montories that run out from the hill over the vale and town of
Shechem — and lifted his voice and called, saying :
7. Hearken to me, lords-of-Shekem,
That God may hearken to you !
8. The Trees went their way,
To anoint them a king,
And said to the Olive, Reign o'er us.
9. But to them said the Olive,
Should I leave my fatness
Which gods and men prize,
And go, sway1 o'er the trees?
10. Then the trees said unto the Fig,
Go thou and reign o'er us !
11. But to them said the Fig,
Should I leave my sweetness,
And my goodly fruit
And go, sway o'er the trees?
12. Then the trees said unto the Vine,
Go thou and reign o'er us,
13. But to them said the Vine,
Should I leave my wine,
That cheers gods and men,
And go, sway o'er the trees ?
14. Then said all the trees to the Thorn,
Go thou and reign o'er us !
15. But to them said the Thorn,
If in troth ye anoint
Me to reign over you,2
Come trust in my shadow,
But if not, fire shall break from the Thorn,
And consume the cedars of Lebanon.
Of the Riddle, the Hidah,3 we have one specimen in Judges xiv. 14,
set by Samson to the Philistines for a wager. This has always
been a favourite amusement, and a form both of friendly and bitter
contests, among the peoples of the East. ' To drive the evenings in
our now thin and silent company, the old man Nejm propounded
riddles over the coffee-hearth. The Arabs were ready, they said
1 Heb. nu'a, to wave, or swing.
2 This couplet perhaps ought to be written as one line.
3 Usually derived from the root hid, which in Arabic means to turn from, decline,
as if an indirect or 'perverted' or twisted saying in opposition to direct, open
speech. Cf. above, p. 55, on Num. xii. 8, where the antithesis of speaking in
hidoth is mouth to mouth, and openly : mare'ah, what is plain ' at sight '.

92 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910

theirs, and we guessed round ; when the word fell to me, I set them
the enigma of the sphinx, saying this was the most famous riddle
in the world. . . . When they could not unriddle that dark word-
binding of the sphinx, they were delighted with the homely inter
pretation. Twice again I was taken in riddlers' company in Arabia,
and have propounded my riddle since I knew none other : a Beduin
weled, son of Oedipus, sitting amongst the second wiseacres,
unriddled me at the moment; this kind of parabolical wisdom
falls to the Semitic humour and is very pleasant to the Arabs.' x
It must have been as common among the Hebrews ; and as in the
cases quoted, so with Samson and with Solomon and the Queen of
Sheba, it appears as a natural form of conversation among strangers
from different tribes, and between travellers and their hosts.2 I have
heard that riddles are still often set for a wager.
Samson had seen a hive of honey-bees in the dried skin or skeleton
of a lion and put his riddle thus — in two lines of three stresses each
and with a double alliteration or assonance that is hard to reproduce
in English : Meha'okel yasa ma'akal
Ume'az yasa mathok;
but the folk-tongue in English woidd have added the obvious rhyme :
From the eater came forth meat,
And from strong came forth sweet.
Delilah gave away the riddle, and when the Philistines answered it
in the same measure with the same alliteration in m :
Mah-mathok middebash
Umeh 'az me'ari —
What sweeter than honey,
What more strong than a lion ? —
he set them another hidah (verse 18) :
Had not ye ploughed with my heifer,
Ye had not hit on my riddle.
In chapter xv. 16, another verse is attributed to Samson when he
slew the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, lehI-hamor, and it
is offered as the origin of Lehi, the name of the place where he did
so. The lines have each two stresses :
With the jaw of an ass,
Heaps upon heaps,
With the jaw of an ass
I slew a thousand of men.
1 Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. 197.
2 Ezekiel in xvii. 2 ff. gives a more elaborate hidah, developing it into an
allegory.

LECTURE III 93
So the Hebrew text. With different vowels the Greek translators
read a verb in the second line, and after them one may render
With the jaw of an ass,
In heaps I huddled them.1
But the savage humour of the verse lies in this, that the Hebrew for
ass and for heaps and huddled have the same consonants ; and
that from the Aramaic and Arabic as well as from the context these
last two would appear to mean heaps of ruins and heap into ruin :
Bilehi ha-hamor
h'mor hamartim,
which may be faintly imitated by rendering the whole thus :
With the jaw of an ass
I smashed them in mass ;
With the jaw of an ass
Slew a thousand of men.
The last of the Samson verses, ch. xvi. 24, with which the Philis
tines praised their God when the blinded giant was brought into his
temple, has been already given both in Hebrew and English.2
In the First Book of Samuel the verses quoted are at least the
following :
The Oracle of Samuel to Saul in ch. xv. 22, 23. This must not be
overlooked in any appreciation of the early religious distinction of
Israel ; it holds in germ one of the main principles of later prophecy.
The structure is two quatrains of which the couplets are of a longer
and a shorter line in the general proportion of 4 : 3 ; but those of the
second quatrain are — in a doubtful text — less regular than those of
the first. To reproduce the exact rhythm of the Hebrew is im
possible in a language which has no metrical equivalents for the
principal terms of the piece. Many must prefer the noble, if some
what paraphrased, prose of the Authorised Version.
22. Hath Yahweh delight in things burned and slain
As in obeying the voice of Yahweh ?
Lo, to obey than a slain thing is better,
And to give heed than the fatness of rams.
23. For as the sin of lot-craft is rebellion,
And to presume is as guilt of the idols ! 3
As thou hast spurned the word of Yahweh,
Thee doth He spurn for a king !
1 Heb. hamor hamorathaim, a heap, two heaps = heaps upon heaps. Emend
after the Greek h'mor (or homer) hamartim.
2 Lecture I, p. 24.
3 Heb. ' and the vanity (or wrong) and Teraphim to push ' or ' press forward '. But
a Greek version reads as the guilt of Teraphim, the household or ancestral

94 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
Again in xv. 33, the couplet 4 : 3 —
Just as women thy sword made childless,
So among women childless thy mother !
The women's acclamation of David in xviii. 7, xxi. 12, xxix. 5 ; the
measure is 3 : 2. Sha'ul his thousands hath slain,
But Dawid his thousands ten !
The proverb in xxiv. 14 (Eng. 13), a couplet in 3 : 3. As the ancient
proverb saith : From the wicked wickedness must out,
But never my hand against thee!
We are now almost at the last stage of our survey, the poems
ascribed to David or his generation in the Second Book of Samuel.
These are the two elegies on Saul and Jonathan and on Abner, the
Cry of the Tribal Revolt from the Kingdom, the great Ode of which
Psalm xviii is another edition, and the Rede of David entitled his Last
Words. I have already quoted part of the Ode, and will take now
the Cry of the Tribes and the Last Words, reserving the elegies to
the close as they illustrate one of the striking features of both Arab
and early Hebrew poetry, with which it will be most fit to conclude.
The summons to the Revolt of the Tribes from the Kingdom,
ch. xx. 1, was given by a Benjamite — bitter, with all the native bitter
ness of his clan, at their loss of the crown — one Sheba ben-Bechri,
described as a man of Beliyyal, anglicized Belial, that is a worthless
fellow, who blew a trumpet and called to the northern tribes :
Not to us any share in Dawid,
Nor heritage ours in son-of-Yishai !
Every man to his tents, Isra'el !
The call is not to war — to take the tents as those of soldiers in the
field is a modern inference — nor to an individual anarchy, for it says
not his tent but his tents, and is a call to the chiefs of the clans
each with his camp. It is the voice of a reaction against the mon
archy on the part of that tribal autonomy which Israel brought with
them from their desert days. How the habit and the music of the
deserts still last in Israel !

images, the family-idols worshipped at that time, 1 Sam. For haphser, to push
forward, not found elsewhere, some would read hephes ra', evil desire. But
besides being an awkward phrase this is both against the rhythm and the
parallelism.

LECTURE III 95
The e swan-song' of David, ch. xxiii. 1-7, is a rugged primitive
piece carrying no symptom of a late date in its dialect. It is note
worthy that it has the same name of Rede or Oracle, and strikes
the same parallel Ia'akob-Isra'el, as we found in the Redes of
Balaam, which there are other grounds for attributing to this time.1
But the author can hardly be David himself ; the first two couplets
are plainly against this. The measure is mostly of three stresses to
the line, with occasional variations to two and here and there a four.
There are five stanzas, mainly of two couplets of parallel lines ; but
there is a remarkable and almost regular occurrence of an odd line.
1. And these the words of Dawid, the last ones —
Rede of Dawid, son of Yishai,
Rede of the yeoman lifted on high,
The christ of the God of Ya'ak6b,
And darling of Israel's chants.
2. Breath of Yahweh it speaketh by me,
And His the word on my tongue.
3. Hath spoken the God of Ya'akob,
To me said the Rock of Isra'el :
Who righteously rules over men,
Who rules in the fear of God,
4. Like morning light he ariseth,
The sun of a cloudless morn,
With the shine and the rain, O the fresh green earth !
5. Is not my house so (?) with God ?
Yea, of old He made me a pact,
Ordered throughout and secured.
Yea, all my safety and joy,
Shall He not make it to spring ?
1. Darling, Heb. na'im, H. P. Smith, joy. Such is the more probable
meaning, the passive. But others prefer the active, sweet singer. The decision
turns not so much on the alternative quality of the form (a-I) as on the question
whether there were two words in Hebrew na'im with a slightly different pro
nunciation of the middle consonant, as in Arabic na'im = is pleasant, but nagham
= to speak softly. This is possible, but both here and in the only other alleged
instance of the second sense, Ps. lxxxi. 3, the former meaning is as possible as in
other examples of it.
4. By a different division of the lines and the change of one word we get
Like morning light at sunrise,
A morn without clouds and shining,
After the rain, O the greenness of earth !
5. In its context the first line must be read interrogatively. So, some read
sure. The last line must also be read as a question : perhaps ki-lo' should be
ha-lo.

1 Above, pp. 70, 71. But Budde and others take the date as very late.

96 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
6. But the worthless are all as thorns abhorred,
Not to be taken by hand,
The man that would strike them
Must arm him (?) with iron and spear-shaft,
Till in fire they burning be burned . . .
The only general remark necessary about the two Dirges — the sole
specimens of their class among our poems — is that neither breathes
the name of God nor hope of another life. In the Dirge on Saul
and Jonathan this is most impressive. For there we find a keen
relish of life and a most passionate lasting of love, an appreciation of
the virtues of the dead and a magnanimous forgiveness of the injuries
which one of them had wrought — every instinct proper at the thought
of the great dead except the instinct of hope. It may be said, of
course, that in the abandonment of grief — grief which is nobly and
splendidly passionate in the Dirge on Saul and Jonathan — God and
the life to come are naturally forgotten. Yet the silence of these
dirges is also the silence of all the narratives and poems through
which we have passed ; and but illustrates that weird absence of hope
which is characteristic of the pagan Arabs and of early Israel even in
their mourning for virtuous and beloved men.
The Dirge on Abner, ch. iii. 33, 34, is in six lines of which the first
two and the fifth have 2 stresses each, the rest 3. The introduction
gives the proper term for making or singing a dirge, konen : and the
noun is Kinah: how near to our keening! And the king sang a
dirge for Abner and said :
As dieth a fool
Must Abner die ?
Thy hands unbound and thy feet,
Nor thrust into gyves.
As falleth a fool,
To the lawless fallen art thou !
It is possible that thy feet should be removed to the next line.
In the last couplet a fool — necessary both for the rhythm and the
sense — is restored from the Greek ; the Hebrew text omits it.
The Dirge on Saul and Jonathan, ch. i. 17-27, which is taken from
the Book of Yashar, may have suffered like the Song of Deborah from
a long oral tradition ; or the irregularities of the metre may be original
and due to the strong, sobbing passion of the poet. The lines are
mainly of 4 stresses each, and here and there a shorter follows
a longer as in the true Kinah rhythm. Neglecting the parallelism,
6. Worthless, beliyya'al, see above, p. 94. Abhorred, Heb. thrust away
or to be thrust away. Arm him, Heb. fill, i.e. load, himself. The last
word given in the text to the verse belongs to the following prose.

LECTURE III 97
some print lines of as many as 5 and even 7 stresses and so
make six quatrains with a couplet to open and a couplet to
close the series. This is possible but we have not yet met with lines
of so great a length. I prefer, as in previous poems, to hold to the
parallelism and break up these long lines. But again let us remember
we have not to do with a written but a chanted song, and the way
we arrange the lines does not matter for the music. The title or
introduction is unusually long. There is no reason either in the
language or the substance of the Dirge to doubt the ascription to
David. And David sang this Dirge — keened this keening — upon Sha'ul
and upon Yehonathan his Son ; lo ! it is Written in the Book of the
Valiant, to teach the sons of Yehudah hard things, and he said :
19. The Beauty, Isra'el, on thy heights is slain,
How fallen are the heroes !
20. Tell it out not in Gath,
Nor proclaim in 'Ashkeion's streets ;
Lest the Philistines' daughters rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
21. Hills of Gilboa, neither dew
Neither rain be upon you, fields of disaster !
For there flung to rust are the bucklers of brave ones,
Shield of Sha'ul, arms of the Anointed.
22. From the blood of the slain,
From the fat of the mighty,
Bow of Yehonathan turned not back
Nor clean came home the sword of Sha'ul.
23. Sha'ul and Yehonathan, the loved and the dear ones,
In their lives and their death undivided,
They were swifter than eagles,
Than lions more strong.
24. Daughters of Isra'el weep for Sha'ul,
Who clothed you in scarlet with jewels,
Who brought up adorning of gold on your raiment.

17, 18. So transposing the order of the text partly in conformity with similar titles.
For the Heb. text kesheth, Bow, whi6h gives no sense (some have taken it as
the name of a tune), read, by only altering the vowel-points, kashoth. Hard
things or hardness (the plural for the abstract as often in the O.T.). (.Cf.
St. Paul, Thou, therefore, endure hardness ; lit. suffer evil with.)
19. Beauty or ornament : also the Hebrew name for the g a z e 1 1 e.
20. First line : Al-tagldu b°gath, with a play upon the name ; cf. Micah i. 10.
21. Fields of disaster, reading mehumoth for the frumoth of the text ;
offerings; various conjectures; maweth, death; r8miyah, deceit, &c.
Arms reading keIe for b'li. For other readings see the commentaries.
H

98 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1910
25. How fallen are the heroes
In the thick of the battle!
Yehonathan on thy heights |thou art] slain,
26. Anguish is mine for thee !
O my brother, Yehonathan !
Dearest thou wert to me,
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.
27. How fallen are the heroes,
And perished war's weapons !
Of the material for our subject, as defined in the Introduction to
these Lectures, there remains only the fragment attributed to Solo
mon at the opening of the Temple.1
This has come down to us in two forms : one in Hebrew (1 Kings
viii. 12, 13), and one in Greek, inserted out of place after verse 53 of
the same chapter, with the addition : Behold, is it not written in the
Book of the Song; the Hebrew for which was Sepher hash-Shir
— perhaps an inversion of the name hay-Yashar.2
The Hebrew is in three lines, 4:4: 3 —
Yahweh 'amar lishkon ba'araphel
Banoh banithi beth zebul lak
Makon leshibteka 'olamim,
which literally translated runs thus :
Yahweh decreed to dwell in the storm-cloud ;
Building I've built Thee a lofty house,3
Seat for Thy dwelling for ever.
The Greek edition gives four lines, of which the first is new, with
probably this Hebrew behind it :
hash-Shemesh hekin bash-shamaim Yahweh,
and the other three are based, with variations, on the Hebrew, the
whole running 4:3:4:2 thus :
The Sun in the heavens Yahweh hath set,
Decreed to dwell in the storm-cloud [Himself].
1 The Cry of the Tribes in Revolt from David's Dynasty, 1 Kings xii. 16, has
already been treated on p. 94 ; its use by a Benjamite, 2 Sam. xx. 1.
' So Wellhausen. See above, Introduction.
3 Beth zebul. In late Heb. z°bul = Temple. Some take it to mean simply
a dwelling, but others compare the Assyr. bit zabal = lofty house. (Schrader,
Cuneiform Inscr. and the 0. T., 174, 175.) Cf. Isa. lxiii. 16, where it is used of
Yahweh's dwelling, as if high or sublime abode ; and Hab. iii. 11, where it is the
lofty stations of the sun and moon.

LECTURE III 99
Build thou my House, eminent House for Thyself ' (sic)
To dwell in for ever.
The last two lines, however, are finer in the Hebrew text ; they
yield a more regular metre, and the Greek itself bears evidence to
their originality.2 We may, therefore, take the whole in this form,
4:3:4:3— The Sun in the heavens Yahweh hath set,
Decreeing to dwell in the storm-cloud [Himself].
I have built now for Thee a lofty abode,
A seat for Thy dwelling for ever.
If Wellhausen's emendation of the Greek appendix to the lines
he accepted, and if they were taken from the Book of Yashar —
the same source to which we owe Joshua's address to Sun and
Moon and David's Dirge — then their high antiquity is assured.
If not Solomon's own, they cannot be much later than his time.
As such they are very valuable : Israel's Creed, when the nation had
built their Temple and assembling in the court before it under the
heavens, directed their worship not to the open glories of these but
to Him who having created all things visible, Himself remained
unseen and inscrutable, the Inhabitant of the darkness of the storm-
cloud, as their fathers had told them, for whose dwelling among them
selves they had therefore prepared that dark and empty chamber in
front of them.3
1 OTkov iicTiptirij aavTtf (so Cod. Bj, evidently a translation of the Hebrew beth
?.ebul lak. But Cod. A has the reading eiirpeirij, seemly, Heb. na'weh, which
may be taken as a misreading for naweh, dwelling ; and the line translated, Build
Me a house, a homestead for Me. So virtually Wellhausen ; but this requires the
reading iy-oi (Heb. II) instead of aavrZ (Heb. lak), which conflicts with the first
clause of the same line. By its preservation of oavrw (lak), in spite of the pie-
ceding clause, the Greek affords striking testimony to the superiority in the last
two lines of the Hebrew edition.
2 See end of preceding note.
3 See further the author's Jerusalem, vol. ii, 74, 75.

INDEX OF PASSAGES
%* A list of all the poetical pieces treated in the Lectures is given on the
first and second pages of the Introduction.

PASES

PAGES

Genesis iv. 23 ff. .

. 21, 24, 44

Deuteronomy i. 28

40

v. 29 .

21,24, 25, 45 f.

ii. 12

50

vi. 5 .

10

vi. 10, 11 .

41

viii. 21

10

ix. If.

40

ix. 6 .

28, 46 (n. 3)

xxxi. 21

10

ix. 25, 26-27 .

. 46-49

xxxii. 7-14

. 76f.

ix. 27 .

25

xxxii. 11 .

22

xi. 6 .

10

xxxii. 14 .

. 20, 22

xvi. 11, 12

49

xxxii. 16 .

22

xxiv. 60

49

xxxii. 21 .

22

xxv. 23

49

xxxii. 23 .

22

xxvii. 27, 29 c .

. . 1, 24

xxxii. 24 f.

. 20,22

xxvii. 27-29

. 49f.

xxxii. 29-32

22

xxvii. 39-40

49 f .

xxxii. 34 .

22

xxxvii. 25-28

29

xxxii. 36 .

22

xlix .

43

xxxii. 39 .

22

xlix. 8

2

xxxii. 41

22

xlix. 11 .

22

xxxii. 42, 43

20

xlix. 11, 12

77 f.

xxxiii. 2 .

57

xlix. 13, 14

22, 78

xxxiii. 3

22

xlix. 15

78

xxxiii. 8 .

25

xlix. 16

25

xxxiii. 9, 10

22

xlix. 17

22

xxxiii. 13-16

78

xlix. 19

25

xxxiii. 16

. 56, 78

xlix. 22

78

xxxiii. 18 .

. 22, 79

xlix. 25

78

xxxiii. 24

78

xxxiii. 25 .
22
Exodus iii. 1 ff.
56
xxxiii. 26 .
2
xv. 1-10
. 50-53, 57
xxxiii. 2S .
78
xv. 3 .
22
xv. 20-21 .
50, 53 f.
Joshua ix. 17
80 (n.)
xvii. 15-16
54 f.
x. 12-13 .
. 79 f.
xx. 22
8
x. 40 .
67 (n. 2)
xii. 8
67 (n. 2)
Numbers x. 35-36
55
xv. 63
80 (n.)
xii. 6-8 .
55, 91 (n. 3)
xvi. 10
80 (n.)
xiii. 28-33 .
40
xvii. 11, 12
80 (n.)
xxi. 14-15.
. 62 f.
xxi. 16-18 .
21, 22, 63 f.
Judges i. 21, 27, 29, 1
55. . 80 (n.)
xxi. 27-30 .
64-67
iv-v
80-90
xxii-xxiv
67-75
v
79, 81-90
xxiii. 7-10.
72
V. 1 .
22
xxiii. 9
71
v. 3 .
20
xxiii. 9, 10
22
v. 4 .
24
xxiii. 10
22
v. 4-5
56
xxiii. 18-24
'. '. 72 f.
v. 6 .
22
xxiii. 24
22
v. 8 .
. 2, 20
xxiv. 1
69
v. 10 .
2, 20
xxiv. 3-9
. 73 f.
v. 12
. 20, 25, 38
xxiv. 5
22
v. 18 .
24
xxiv. 7
. 22, 71
v. 19
20, 22
xxiv. 15-19
74
v. 22
6, 19 (n.)
xxiv. 17
71
v. 23 .
20
xxiv. 18-19
22
v. 27 .
20
xxiv. 20-24
75
ix. 7-16 .
90 f.
102

INDEX OE PASSAGES

PAGES

PAGES

Judges xiv. 14, 18

24 (n.), 91 f.

Psalms xviii. 7-15

. 57-59

xv. 16

. 92 f.

xix. 2 (A.V. 1) .

9

xvi. 24

24 f., 93

xxiii. 1, 2 .

3

xxix .
59-61
1 Samuel xv. 22-23
93
xiii. 5
.  ~6
xv. 33
94
xliii. 3, 5
3
xviii. 7
. 22, 25, 94
xc. 15
6
xxi. 12
22, 94
cxl. 2
10
xxiv. 14
94
xxix. 5
22, 94
Proverbs vi. 18
10 (bis)
xii. 20
10
2 Samuel i 17-27
. 96-98
i. 19 ff.
23
Isaiah xvii. 12, 13
7
i. 21 .
23, 24
xl. 1 .
3
i. 21-23
24
i. 25, 26
23
Jeremiah ii. 2-3
77
iii. 33-34
23, 96
XX. 1
. 94, 98 (n.)
Lamentations iii. 60, 61
10
xxiii. 1-7 .
. 95 f.
Ezekiel xvii. 2 ff .
92 (n. 7)
1 Kings viii. 12-13
98 ff.
xii. 16
98 (n.)
Amos iii. 3-8
34
1 Chronicles xxviii. 9
10
Mieah i. 10
97 (n.)
xxix. 18
10
Matthew xii. 43 f.
32
Psalms ii. 1 .
10
x. 2 .
10
Luke xi. 24 .
32
YALE UNIVERSITY

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