Masius and Arias affirm [it]. And the latter [Arias] indeed (page 317) says chiefly four [things]. The first: that all the books of Moses, and all the others which are called by the Hebrews the “former Prophets,” were composed not in loose [prose], but in speech bound by feet and verses. The second: that the Book of the Upright likewise consists of verses. The third: that it is nevertheless different from the foregoing, because the reckoning of the meters is different. The fourth: that these [things] are manifest to those who have joined to the study of the sacred tongue [Hebrew] the knowledge of poetry. But Masius hands down five [things]. The first: he notes three verses here (verse 13) — two indeed in the words which precede those of which [is] the discourse here, “Is it not written,” etc., and a third after. The first is:
Sun, in Gabaon, rest; and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.
The second:
And the Sun rested, and the Moon stood still, until the nation should stand against its enemies.
The third:
And the Sun stood in the midst of heaven, and hastened not to set, as on a complete day.
The second [of Masius’s points]: at this time these meters are scarcely known. The third: in St. Jerome’s time they were still known, as is clear from him, and from the Rabbis of the same time, in the Talmudic tractate Sopherim. The fourth, of himself, thus: “I indeed have put — for why should I not confess my curiosity — not a little study into finding out that matter, but in vain. For without one to point the way beforehand, I see that I perceive nothing sufficiently certain about the numbers of the Hebrew syllables, and therefore nothing about the measures and modes of the verses.” The fifth: in today’s Hebrew [copies] the [reading] of these verses is faulty…
(col. 1037)
…[the reading] is [faulty]; because the two [words] which in [verses] 2 and 3 are redundant ought to be transferred to the first, where they are lacking — so that, namely, in the first there be read haseth mesh & ha-yareach; in the second, shemesh [not tashemesh]; in the third, shamaim [not ha-shamaim].
But I say. First: the verses of the Poets do indeed consist of feet and meters; yet not [everything] which consists of these is [therefore] poetic and verse — as is clear from Cicero (book 3 On the Orator, and from the book entitled Orator [“The Perfect Orator”]), where he teaches that loose prose discourse [too] is rhythmical and built up with certain feet. And St. Jerome (in the preface to Job) hands down that there are certain loose [arrangements] of feet; and likewise St. Augustine, in the books On Music.
II. In Sacred Scripture there are meters and feet, and there are also poetic verses. The former part is clear from what has just been said; the latter is handed down by Josephus (book 1, last chapter), when he says that Moses, at the last time of his life, left to the Israelites a hexameter meter (μέτρον ἑξάμετρον), which he left in the sacred codex. This, then, is either Deuteronomy, or rather that part of Deuteronomy which is [in] chapter 32 [the Song of Moses]. But that Deuteronomy was written in iambic tetrameters, the same St. Jerome says (in the Epistle to Paula of the City), as will appear below; and the Venerable Bede (in the book On the Metrical Art, volume 1, pages 46, 53, & 58). Philo (book On the Contemplative Life) says that ancient trimeter songs existed, made then in various kinds of meters; just as Plato (book 2 On the Laws) said that the most ancient songs of the Egyptians were poems of Isis. Concerning the book of Job, the same St. Jerome [says] thus, in the preface to it: “From the beginning of the volume up to the words of Job, among the Hebrews it is prose. But from the words of Job, in which he says, ‘Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night in which it was said, A man is conceived,’ up to that place where, before the end of the volume, it is written, ‘Therefore I reprehend myself, and do penance in dust and ashes’ — they are hexameter verses, running with dactyl and spondee, and, on account of the idiom of the language, frequently taking in also other feet, not of the same syllables, but of the same times [quantities]. Sometimes, too, a sweet and tinkling rhythm is produced, [though] freed from the numbers of the feet — which the metrically-skilled understand better than the simple reader.” And (Epistle 113): “It begins [as] prose; it glides into verse; it ends in pedestrian [prose] speech.” St. Augustine (book 4 On Christian Doctrine, chapter 20): “That discipline of Music, in which this rhythm is found, was so far not lacking to our Prophets, that the most learned man Jerome mentions even the meters of certain [of them] — only in the Hebrew language; whose truth, that he might preserve it in the words, he did not translate these [meters] from there.” Suidas, on the same Job: “You have the book of this Philosopher singing with much both Homeric and Platonic nightingale-subtlety.” Whether the Psalms are true songs, Alphonsus Mendoza disputed in a special question. But about these and other [things], let us hear the same St. Jerome. He, in the Epistle to Paula of the City, cited a little before, [says]: “You must know that in the earlier Psalms, by single letters [acrostics], single little verses are appended, which consist of iambic trimeter. But the later ones consist of iambic tetrameter, as also the Canticle of Deuteronomy is written. In the hundred-and-eighteenth Psalm, single letters are followed by eight verses [each]. In the hundred-and-forty-fourth, single letters are assigned to single verses. There are those who think that others also begin in this order [are acrostic], but their opinion is false. You have also, in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, four alphabets [acrostics], of which the two former
are written, as it were, in Sapphic meter — because a heroic comma concludes the three little verses which are connected together and begin with one and the same letter. But the third Alphabet is written in trimeter, and the [verses] begin with [groups of] three letters, but three verses [begin] with the same [letters]. The fourth Alphabet is similar to the first and second. The Proverbs of Solomon, too — their last [section] closes an alphabet which is reckoned in iambic tetrameter, from that place where it says, ‘A valiant woman, who shall find?’” In the Preface to Eusebius’s Chronicle: “What is more melodious than the Psalter? — which, after the manner of our Flaccus [Horace] and of the Greek Pindar, now runs in iambus, now sounds in Alcaic, now swells in Sapphic, now advances with a half-foot. What [more solemn] than the Canticle of Deuteronomy and of Isaiah? What graver than Solomon? What more perfect than Job? — all of which run, among their [own people], composed in hexameter and pentameter verses, as Josephus and Origen write.” In the Preface to Job: “If it seems incredible to anyone that there are meters among the Hebrews, and that — after the manner of our Flaccus, and the Greek Pindar, and Alcaeus, and Sappho — either the Psalter, or the Lamentations of Jeremiah, or almost all the songs of the Scriptures, are comprised [in meter]: let him read Philo, Josephus, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, and by their testimony he will prove that I speak the truth.” [So Jerome] also saw [it], in the prefaces to the Lamentations, to Isaiah, [and] to the books of Kings; [and] Eusebius (book 1 of the Preparation [Praeparatio Evangelica], chapter 11); and the Rabbis, in the place cited from the Talmud.
III. This ancient reckoning of the verses, which is said to be in the Scriptures, is not today thoroughly understood. For although Arias, in his fourth point, seems to censure the ignorance of those who say this, yet among these [admittedly] ignorant — even after many and grave labors put into that study — we have heard Masius candidly professing his own name [admitting his ignorance], in his fourth point. Bellarmine professes [the same] (last chapter of the Grammar); Genebrardus (on Psalm 4); Radak (on the same Psalm); the Talmudists (in the cited tractate On Scribes [Sopherim]); Arias Montano himself (on Isaiah, chapter 5). But let me add the words of R. Moses Habib, as Genebrardus translated and illustrated them (book 1 of the Chronology): “The sacred songs of the ancients,” he says, “as in the Psalms, Job, [and] Proverbs, are distichs. But some are measured by a certain number of syllables, so that the former verse is now longer, now shorter than the latter, as the genius of the composer bore [it]. Others consist of an equal measure — except that sometimes the former verse differs from the latter in the number of syllables, but not of times. For that difference they supply by the consonance of the ears and the motions of the gutturals, or they absorb the inequality of the voice by [its] charm and melody — as when, among the Latins and Greeks, for an iambus a tribrach, for a spondee a dactyl or anapaest, for a dactyl a proceleusmatic, etc., is put.” He afterward illustrates this by examples — as from Psalm 119[, and] 146, Proverbs, and Job 6. But I said that that ancient poetry is not today thoroughly understood, on account of another, more recent [system] now in use among the Rabbis, which R. David Yahya explained in one little book, and Bellarmine in the place cited.
IV. I judge that the Book of the Just either consisted wholly of verses, or [at least] a great part [of it]; because elsewhere too, when it is cited (2 Kings [2 Samuel], chapter 1, verse 18), its language is poetic, and after the manner of verses — painted and sonorous — just as also that which is cited from the Book of Wars (Numbers, chapter 21). Yet I would rather here confess that something in its meters is obscure and unknown to me, than, with Masius, to transfer anything from one place to another, only in order that a verse may at last be feigned [made] known to me.
(col. 1039)