The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

10) This shall they have for their pride,

Because they have reproached and magnified themselves against the people of the Lord of hosts.

Thus the three literary forms, besides the strophic measure, which govern the composition of the prophetic books are—the responsion, the concatenation, and the inclusion.

If the responsion is the expression of the outward and inward symmetry—of substance and form—proper to two strophic organisms which, though they may be far apart, show their relation one to another by similarity of character and structure, and correspond to each other more or less, either by analogy or antithesis, the concatenation may be regarded as the complement and counterpart of the responsion, inasmuch as it unites the two strophic organisms by an outward and inward bond—of substance and form. By this means the two are combined to constitute a greater whole. For this reason the concatenation does not run parallel to the responsion, but joins the end of one strophe to the beginning of a second, and leads from one field of thought to another. The inclusion may be regarded as, in a certain sense, the reverse of the concatenation. As the concatenation brings about the conjunction of two strophes, so the inclusion constitutes the boundary line that cuts one strophic organism off from the next. The concatenation obliterates the distinctive character of two separate strophic organisms, the inclusion rounds off and defines a strophe, or group of strophes, and emphasises its distinctive character.

AN EXAMPLE FROM ISAIAH

I cannot refrain from giving at least one example from Isaiah of a strophe-column, which corresponds with a parallel column of similar structure. I select the famous vision of Chapter vi. for the purpose. It may be regarded as one of the earliest prophecies of Isaiah, in conception perhaps the earliest of all. The Tesetes tradition gives the passage as a single whole, without break or paragraph. In dealing with a prophet of Isaiah’s rank, and one so pre-eminent in the composition of these prophetic discourses, we naturally seek to discover a definite plan in the composition of this vision, and such a plan does, as a matter of fact, become manifest to the critical student. The vision begins, “And I saw the Lord,” and the continuation and complement opens with the words (verse 8), “And I heard the voice of the Lord.” The passage, accordingly, falls into two parts, one describing what the prophet saw, the other what he heard. If we examine the two parts more closely we are struck by the phrase, “Then said I,” occurring in the one after he had seen all, and in the other after he had heard all. Hence it appears that the grand vision consists of two images, which correspond with each other exactly.