4. 4nri (l'phirran), is the name of cer tain odes in the titles given to Ps. xvii., Lxxxvi., xc., cii., cxlii., Hab. iii. In Ps. cii. and in Hab. iii. it seems not to denote the ode so much as the general tendency of the sentiment of the poet, and in the other headings it may import merely the use to which these compositions may be applied. It is not therefore so much a term of art as a term of religion. Yet may it be applied to compositions in general, designed for use in divine worship, what ever their form or strain, inasmuch as it regards in a general way the religious element which consti tuted their essence ; and accordingly it is found in Ps. lxxii. 20 applied as a general name to an entire collection of the poems of David—' the prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.' In these four classes we have not pretended to exhaust all the species and forms which lyric poetry took, but merely to present the chief facts. Re specting other kinds little need he said, as the lyrical comprehends the greatest and best part of Hebrew poetry, nor are learned men so much of one mind regarding the compositions to which we allude.
Dramatic poetry in the sense in which the phrase is applicable to productions such as those of Euripides, Shakspeare, or Schiller, had no place in the literature of the Hebrews. This de fect may be owing to a want of the requisite lite rary cultivation. Yet we are not willing to assign this as the cause, when we call to mind the high intellectual culture which the Hebrews evinced in lyric and didactic poetry, out of which the drama seems naturally to spring. We rather look for the cause of this in the earnest nature of the Hebrews, and in the solemnity of the subjects with which they had to do in their literary productions. Nor is it any objection to this hypothesis that the drama f modern times had its birth in the religious mys teries of the middle ages, since those ages were only secondary in regard to religious truth, stood at a distance from the great realities which they believed and dramatised ; whereas the objects of faith with the Israelites were held in all the fresh vividness of primitive facts and newly-recognised truths. Elements however for dramatic poetry and first rudimental efforts are found in Hebrew ; as in the Song of Solomon, in which several dramatis persona' will be discovered speaking and acting by the diligent and unprejudiced reader. Ewald asserts that the poem is divisible into four acts, In the book of Job, however, the dramatic element of the Hebrew muse is developed in a more marked form and a more decided degree. Here
the machinery and contrivances of the drama, even to the plot and the Deus Vindex, lie patent to a reader of ordinary attention. For epic poetry the constituent elements do not appear to have existed during the classic period of the Hebrew muse, since epic poetry requires an heroic age—an age, that is, of fabulous wonders and falsely so called divine interpositions. But among the Israelites the patriarchal, which might have been the heroic age, was an age of truth and reality ; and it much raises the religious and historical value of the Biblical literature, that neither the singular events of the age of the patriarchs, nor the wonderful events of the age of Moses, nor the confused and somewhat legendary events of the age of the Judges, ever degenerated into mythology, nor passed from the reality which was their essence, into the noble fictions into which the imagination, if unchastened and unchecked by religion, might have wrought them ; but they retained through all periods their own essential character of earnest, lofty, and impressive realities. At a later period, when the religion of Moses had, during the Baby lonish captivity, been lowered by the corruptions of the religion of Zoroaster, and an entirely new world of thought introduced, based not on reality but fancy, emanating not from the pure light of heaven but from the mingled lights and shadows of primitive tradition and human speculation,— then there came into existence among the Jews the elements necessary for epic poetry ; but the days were gone in which the mind of the nation had the requisite strength and culture to fashion them into a great, uniform, and noble structure ; and if we can allow that the Hebrews possessed the rudimental outlines of the epic, we must seek for them not in the canonical but the apocryphal books ; and while we deny with emphasis that the term Epos can be applied, as some German critics have applied it, to the Pentateuch, we can find only in the book of Judith, and with rather more reason in that of Tobit, anything which approaches to epic poetry. Indeed fiction—which, if it is not the essence, enters for a very large share into both epic and dramatic poetry—was wholly alien from the genius of the Hebrew muse, whose high and noble function was not to invent but to celebrate the goodness of God, not to indulge the fancy but to express the deepest feelings of the soul, not to play with words and feign emotions but to utter profound truth and commemorate real events, and pour forth living sentiments.