36. I. INTRODUCTORY: THE HISTORY AND IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECT

Every Word of God is pure; and His words, like all His works, are perfect. Perfect in order, perfect in truth, perfect in the use of number, perfect in structure.

"The works of Jehovah are great: sought out of all them that have pleasure therein" (Ps. exi. 2).

Those who seek out His works find wondrous treasures; and see perfection, whether revealed by the telescope or the microscope. Neither of these exhaust those wonders. Both are only relative, and limited by human powers of sight.

It is the same with that most wonderful of all His works—His WORD. Use what powers of human intellect we may, we find that we know only "in part" (1 Cor. xiii. 9). Pursue any line of truth as far as our human minds can go, and we come to a wall of adamant, which we can neither mount over, pierce through, nor pass round; we return baffled, but solemnized by the fact that we know "in part."

We shall not be surprised therefore to find literary perfection as well as spiritual perfection. For there is perfection of literary form, as well as perfection of spiritual truth.

The correspondence between parallel lines must always have been visible even on the surface to any one who carefully observed the Scriptures even as literary compositions.

Josephus,¹ Philo Judæus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Isidore, among the Ancients, professed to have discovered metres in the Hebrew original. They were followed by

¹ See the references to the writings of these men in Bishop Jebb's Sacred Literature, p. 10.

others among modern scholars, some of whom agreed with them, while others refuted them.

In spite of Bishop Lowth's Larger and Shorter Confutations, which showed that all efforts to discover the rhymes and metres which characterize common poetry must be fruitless, some few writers have persevered in such attempts even to the present day.

"Bishop Lowth was the first to put the whole subject on a better and surer foundation; reducing the chaos of mediæval writings to something like order. His works were based on one or two who had preceded him, and had laid the foundations on which he built with such effect that he came to be universally recognised and appealed to as the ultimate and classical authority in these matters."

But, as we have said, Bishop Lowth built on the foundations laid by others.

Abravanel, a learned Jew of the fifteenth century, and Azariah de Rossi³ in the sixteenth century, were the first to demonstrate and illustrate the phenomena exhibited in the parallel lines of Holy Scripture.

Azariah de Rossi published, in 1574-5, in Mantua, his celebrated work which he called מאור עינים (Meôr Enayim), or, The Light of the Eyes. It was a remarkable work and almost an encyclopedia of biblical literature in itself. Several of its chapters have been translated and published separately, in Latin and English. One chapter (ch. lx.) was sufficient to kindle Bishop Lowth's enthusiasm; and he translated it in his Preliminary Dissertation to his last great work, his translation of Isaiah (London, 1835). But, before this, Lowth had already used De Rossi's wonderful work to such purpose that in 1753 he published his Proelections on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. This caused quite a sensation in the biblical world, and soon became of European fame.

Meanwhile Christian Schoettgen (born 1687) had published in 1733-42 his Hora Hebraicae et Talmudicae (2 vols.

¹ Bishop Jobb, Sacred Literature, p. 15.

² Rabbi Bon Isaac ben Jehudah, a celebrated Spanish-Jewish statesman, philosopher, theologian, and commentator, born 1437. His commentaries anticipate much of what has been advanced as new by modern theologians (Kitto, Enc. Bib. article by C. D. G.).

³ Azariah Min Ha-Adonim, as the Jews call him, was born in Mantua, 1513.