Part 2 (2/2)

Or take the broken line added to the regular verse on Rachel's mourning, the sob upon which the wail dies out:-

A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children And will not be comforted- For they are not!(63)

Sometimes, too, a stanza of regular metre is preceded or followed by a pa.s.sionate line of appeal, either from Jeremiah himself or from another-I love to think from himself, added when his Oracles were about to be repeated to the people in 604-3. Thus in Ch. II. 31 we find the cry,

O generation look at the Word of the Lord!

breaking in before the following regular verse,

Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness?

Why say my folk, ”We are off, No more to meet Thee.”

There is another poem in which the Qinah measure prevails but with occasional lines longer than is normal-Ch. V. 1-6_a_ (alternatively to end of 5(64)).

Run through Jerusalem's streets, Look now and know, And search her broad places If a man ye can find, If there be that doth justice Aiming at honesty.

[That I may forgive her.]

Though they say, ”As G.o.d liveth,”

Falsely they swear.

Lord, are thine eyes upon lies(65) And not on the truth?

Thou hast smitten, they ail not, Consumed them, they take not correction; Their faces set harder than rock, They refuse to return.

Or take Ch. II. 5-8. A stanza of four lines in irregular Qinah measure (verse 5) is followed by a couplet of four-two stresses and several lines of three each (verses 6 and 7), and then (verse 8) by a couplet of three-two, another of four-three, and another of three-three.(66) In Chs.

IX and X also we shall find irregular metres.

Let us now take a pa.s.sage, IX. 22, 23, which, except for its last couplet, is of another measure than the Qinah. The lines have three accents each, like those of the Book of Job:-

Boast not the wise in his wisdom, Boast not the strong in his strength, Boast not the rich in his riches, But in this let him boast who would boast- Instinct and knowledge of Me, Me, the Lord, Who work troth And(67) justice and right upon earth, For in these I delight.

Or this couplet, X. 23, in lines of four stresses each:-

Lord, I know-not to man is his way, Not a man's to walk or settle his steps!

Not being in the Qinah measure, both these pa.s.sages are denied to Jeremiah by Duhm. Is not this arbitrary?

The sections of the Book which pa.s.s from verse to prose and from prose to verse are frequent.

One of the most striking is the narrative of the Prophet's call, Ch. I.

4-19, which I leave to be rendered in the next lecture. In Chap. VII. 28 ff. we have, to begin with, two verses:-

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