OLD TESTAMENT SCIENCE 543 



Relations of the Old Testament to Literature 



The most important literary phenomenon of the Old Testament 

 is the fact that Hebrew literature began and ended with poetry, 

 and that its most precious burden of thought and feeling was con- 

 veyed to the world through poetic channels. The Hebrews were not 

 merely exceptionally endowed poetically, but poetry was to them the 

 natural and spontaneous expression of all deep and earnest feeling. 

 And it was in artistic forms, however simple, that the individual 

 poet gave voice to his own convictions, and bodied forth his own 

 ideals in the one undivided sphere of religion, patriotism, and practical 

 life, or gave voice to the inarticulate impulses and desires of his 

 community or his nation. Thus the poetry of the Old Testament is, 

 as far as it goes, an accurate register of the moral and intellectual 

 history of the Hebrew people, of its progress from primitive rudeness 

 in thought and speech to ideal sublimity and beauty; from the rugged 

 simplicity of the "Song of the Well" to the artistic symmetry and 

 rhetorical splendor of the "Ode" on the fallen Babylonian, or the 

 sustained reflectiveness of the Book of Job; from the barbaric 

 vengefulness of the Song of Lamech or the Song of Deborah to the 

 chivalric altruism of the allegory of Jonah. 



To bridge over the transition from the previous topic to the present, 

 it may be pointed out that as far as the relations of the literature of 

 the Hebrews to their own history is concerned, the literature is in 

 a very real and profound sense itself the history. With the ancient 

 Hebrews, even more than with the Ionian Hellenes, the word was the 

 deed and the idea the fact. The known events of the career of 

 Israel are a mere mutilated and disjointed skeleton. But the body, 

 the flesh and the blood, of a human history are provided by the 

 ideas and sentiments of the moral and religious leaders of the race, 

 and it is to the literature that we must resort if we are to be true his- 

 to.rians or interpreters of Israel. 



But our chief present interest is with the literature viewed com- 

 paratively. According to what has been said, we must consider 

 mainly the poetry of the Old Testament. And we have to use this 

 term in the most comprehensive sense. It should be made to embrace, 

 not merely what is demonstrably metrical in form, such as the Psalms, 

 Proverbs, Job, Canticles, and Lamentations, most of the prophetic 

 writings, and the lyrical and elegiac poems scattered through the 

 narrative literature, but also what is less artistically composed and 

 yet just as clearly poetic or idealistic in spirit, the emotional as well 

 as the imaginative passages in the tradition's and chronicles. What 

 remains, graphic as it often is, and always realistic, is usually prosaic 

 and commonplace. The points of most importance in comparison 

 with other literatures are perhaps the following: 



