A further similarity is to be found in the form of Hebrew poetry. The reader of the English translation of the Bible can comprehend, as well as the scholar, the prevailing characteristic of a great part of its poetical language. This is what is called parallelism, which consists in making the second clause of a sentence answer to the first, either in the way of antithesis, or by the expression of the same idea in different words, or by the amplification of the idea. It is, as it were, a rhyme of the sense, and not of the sound. This peculiar structure of Hebrew poetry has rendered it especially fitted for translation, since it is independent of the tongue in which it is expressed, and can only be destroyed by gross want of taste in the interpreter. Whoever will content himself with a literal rendering of those sublime thoughts, may transfer the Bible to his own language essentially unharmed. The loose paraphraser may dissipate the spirit of the Psalms, or the Book of Job; nothing that is grand or beautiful can survive his incapacity; but the experience of ages has proved that the power of the Hebrew writers has been hardly diminished in the translations which have made them known to the Christian world. This parallelism is the chief though not the only formal rule of Hebrew poetry. Where it is absent we find its place supplied by strophic arrangements of the versicles, by refrains of words, by alliteration, and to some extent even by rhyme. But whatever rhythmical aids the Hebrew poetry may have adopted, we must hold as established that it was not subjected to the laws of what we call prosody. For centuries this has been doubted, and writers of succeeding ages, both Jews and Christians, have sought to discover in the poetical books of the Bible certain rules of versification. The vain efforts of European scholars have been mainly incited by the declarations of Josephus. That so famous and so learned a writer should have erred, is not to be admitted without manifest proof, yet the barrenness of the labours of so many ingenious men seems to leave no doubt that the author of the Antiquities of the Jews misunderstood or misrepresented the genius of what had in his time already become an archaic language. Desirous, apparently, to give the Hebrew literature importance by showing that it was formed on models similar to those of Greece and Rome, Josephus speaks of the hexameter, pentameter, and trimeter measures that are to be found in the Bible. Of the song of Exodus xv. he says: <Greek> Jewish Antiquities, Book II., c. 16. Similarly in Book IV., c. 8, he speaks of the second song of Moses in Deuteronomy as <Greek>. In Book VII., c. 12, he says that David, having overcome his enemies, and given peace to the land, <Greek>. It is fair to Josephus to suggest that he possibly meant that these ancient compositions were of a kind which in the classic languages would have taken the form of heroic, or elegiac, or lyric verse. But modern writers have not so understood him, and the notion that the Psalms and the Book of Job could be separated into spondees and iambuses, dactyls and anapæsts, has haunted Hebraists from the times of the early fathers down to our own day. Even so eminent an Orientalist as Sir William Jones has sought to apply the Arabic prosody to the Book of Job. The malediction of the patriarch on his natal day at chapter iii., he divides into long and short syllables after a method of his own; but, when all is done, he entirely fails in proving to us that there is any metre at all. The more searching criticism of modern scholars has given sufficient negative proof that metre, as it exists in the classic languages and in Arabic, is not to be found in the sacred poets of the Bible.
Nor ought the Arabic scholar to wonder at its absence. Josephus and Jerome were prepossessed by the analogy of the classic languages; the scholars of modern Europe, who came to the study of Hebrew with tastes formed on classic canons, may have thought poetry without metre to be impossible, and hoped that the key which should unlock the secrets of Hebrew prosody would be yielded to persevering ingenuity. But the Arabic scholar is aware that the most ancient, the most popular, the most sublime, and powerful order of poetry in the Arabic language is as little metrical as Isaiah or Job. Among both races the original and primeval type of poetry is the old Semitic unmetrical accordance. Among both the simplest element of poetical speech, the primitive literary unit, is the Versicle, a short and serried sentence vigorously expressing a single idea, and detached from what goes before and comes after it. This, in its original form, as it exists in Hebrew and in a large department of Arabic poetry, is without metre. All poetry in both languages is made up by the agglutination of these versicles to one another; but the Arab type differs from the Hebrew in this, that whereas the Hebrew chiefly confines itself to parallelism, that is to a polarity or dualism between two versicles, the Arabic possesses this dualism, combined with the principle of continuity. The dualism appears in the parallelistic speech, as it was uttered by the orators of the desert, and as it exists in the Assemblies of Ḥarîri. The continuity is more conspicuous in the semi-metrical verse, called rejez, while both are combined in those compositions of a stricter prosody which alone the Arabs dignify with the name of poetry.
When we examine the most ancient legends that have come down to us we find that they contain poetical utterances in the unmetrical form. Ẓarîfeh, of whom we have already spoken, prophesies the bursting of the dyke of Mareb in rhymed prose:—
“By the light and the dark; by the earth and the heaven;
Surely the trees shall perish; and the waters shall return as in the time of old.”
In each of these lines the first and second parts rhyme in their last word, while the whole is unmetrical. In the ensuing dialogue the answers of Ẓarîfeh are in a similar strain and rhythm, and whoever may have been the author of them, they undoubtedly represent the oldest form of Arab poetical speech.
I would, therefore, place the rhymed prose of the
Arabs as the analogue of the Hebrew poetry, and refer
the origin of both to the primeval ages of the Semitic
race. To utter one versicle, and attach to it another
with an antithetic correspondence in sense or sound,
formed the germ of all poetical composition. This
parallelism, which among the Pagan Arabs was generally
applied to a discourse in this style, perhaps
existed before rhyme was introduced, for it is said that
in ancient times the khoṭbah, or oratorical address, was
not rhymed. But rhyme was at a later period universal,
and the rhymed prose to which the Arabs gave the name
of