An Introduction to Job...Continued from page 3

POETRY.--In all countries poetry is the earliest form of composition as being best retained in the memory. In the East especially it was customary for sentiments to be preserved in a terse, proverbial, and poetic form (called maschal). Hebrew poetry is not constituted by the rhythm or meter, but in a form peculiar to itself: 1. In an alphabetical arrangement somewhat like our acrostic. For instance, Lamentations 1:1-22 Psalms 42:1-11 ; 107:1-43 n of the previous verse is resumed and carried forward in the next ( Psalms 121:1-8 characteristic of Hebrew poetry is parallelism, or the correspondence of the same ideas in the parallel clauses. The earliest instance is Enoch's prophecy ( Jude 1:14 ( Genesis 4:23 which the second is a repetition of the first, with or without increase of force ( Psalms 22:27 ; Isaiah 15:1 ( Isaiah 1:15 clause is the converse of that in the first ( Proverbs 10:1 synthetic, where there is a correspondence between different propositions, noun answering to noun, verb to verb, member to member, the sentiment, moreover, being not merely echoed, or put in contrast, but enforced by accessory ideas ( Job 3:3-9 d," that is, desolation by famine, and destruction by the sword. Introverted; where the fourth answers to the first, and the third to the second ( Matthew 7:6 the interpretation. For fuller information, see LOWTH (Introduction to Isaiah, and Lecture on Hebrew Poetry) and HERDER (Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, translated by Marsh). The simpler and less artificial forms of parallelism prevail in Job--a mark of its early age.