История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 100 стр.

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those occasions. Chronicles always appears at either the beginning or the end of

the corpus. Its final position is remarkable because the narrative of Ezra and

Nehemiah follows that of Chronicles. The final position may have resulted from an

attempt to place the books of the Hebrew Bible in a framework (Genesis and

Chronicles both begin with the origin and development of the human race, and

both conclude with the theme of the return to the land of Israel), but it was more

probably the result of the late acceptance of Chronicles into the canon.

Psalms

The Psalms (from Greek psalmas, “song”) are poems and hymns, dating

from various periods in the history of Israel, that were assembled for use at public

worship and that have continued to play a central role in the liturgy and prayer life

of both Jews and Christians. Known in Hebrew as Tehillim (Songs of Praise), the

Psalter (the traditional English term for the Psalms, from the Greek psalterion, a

stringed instrument used to accompany these songs) consists of 150 poems

representing expressions of faith from many generations and diverse kinds of

people. These unsystematic poems epitomize the theology of the entire Hebrew

Bible.

Hebrew poetry has much in common with the poetry of most of the ancient

Near East, particularly the Canaanite poetic literature discovered at Ras Shamra. Its

main features are rhythm and parallelism. The rhythm, which is difficult to

determine precisely because the proper pronunciation of ancient Hebrew is

unknown, is based upon a system of stressed syllables that follows the thought

structure of the poetic line.

The lines present various kinds of parallelism of members, whereby the idea

expressed in one part of a line is balanced by the idea in the other parts. The

classical study on Hebrew parallelism was done by Robert Lowth, an 18th-century

Anglican bishop, who distinguished three types: synonymous, antithetic, and

synthetic. Synonymous parallelism involves the repetition in the second part of

what has already been expressed in the first, while simply varying the words.