VERSE con ; 071X0S, K6ACCR ; ccesum, versus,versiculus). I. Versicular divisions in MSS. —The term verse (versus, from verto, to turn'), like the Greek crrixos, was applied by the Romans to lines in general, whether in prose or verse, but more particularly to the rhythmical divisions which generally commenced the line with a capital letter. The custom of writing poetical books in stanzas was common to the Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and Hebrews. The poetical books (viz. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Canticles), in the oldest Hebrew MSS., as the Paris, Bodleian, Cassel, and Regiomontanus, are also thus divided, and the poetical passages in the historical books are still given in this form in our printed Hebrew Bibles. The Alexandrian MS., and th@se of the Italic version, are equally so written, and this divi sion is found in the Psalterium Turicense, the Verona and St. Germain Psalters, and in Marti anay's edition of Jerome. Athanasius applied the term errixos to the passage in Ps. cxix. 62 : I arose at midnight to praise thee for the judgment of thy righteousness ;' and Chrysostom observes, on Ps. xlii., that each stich (crrixos) suffices to afford us much philosophy.' He also uses the term Picrir in the same sense. The poetical books are called by Epiphanius the five o-rtxwar.
It is not improbable that this division may have come from the original authors, which the nature of the subject, and especially the parallelism of the sentences, seems to require (Jebb's Sacred Litera lure). In the Cod. Alex. are equally divided in' this manner the songs of Moses and of Hannah ; the prayers of Isaiah, of Jonah, of Habakkuk, Hezekiah, Manasses, and Azarias ; the Benedicite ; and the songs of Mary (theotokos), Simeon, and Zachariah, in the N. T., to which is added the Morning Hymn, or Gloria in Excelsis.
A similar metrical division is found in the Latin version. Jerome (Ep. SW211. et Fret.) applies the term versicu/us to the words 'grand° et car bones ignis' (Ps. xviii. /3), assigining as a reason why the Greeks had not this versicle after the in terposition of two verses, that it had been inserted in the Sept. from the Hebrew and Theodotion's version (with an asterisk). He also observes (Pref. to Yob) that the book of Job commences with prose, glides into verse, and again ends with a short comma in prose from the verse Idcirco me repre hendo, et ago pcenitentiam in cinere et favilla' (the form assumed also by the text of the oldest He brew MSS.) He adds that there were 7oo or Soo
verses wanting in the old Latin version of this book, and makes mendon of three short verses' in Ezek. xxi. and Is. lxiii. That a stichometrical arrange ment pervaded the whole Latin Bible is further evident from the Speculum Script:fro, attributed to Augustine, which contains extracts from Psalms, Canticles, Ecclesiastes, Job, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Zephaniah, Malachi, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, the four Evangelists, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Timothy, / John, and Hebrews. The first editors of the Specaum seem to have misunderstood Augustine's meaning (Si mon's Hist. Critique), yet it is beyond a doubt that the verses in the Specuhim (one of which was, Populus ejus et oyes pascu2e ejus'), were of the character which we are now describing. Jerome has not followed any of the divisions of the present Hebrew text, except in those passages where he could not well have avoided it, viz. the alpha betical division in the book of Lamentations, and the alphabetical Psalms, but even here he differs from the present divisions (Morini .Exerc. Bibl. pars. ii. cap. 2).
Jerome introduced a similar division into the prophetical books and the books of Chronicles. To this division he, in the prophetical books, ap plies the terms cola and commata (or stanzas' and hemistichs'), while in the Chronicles he only em ploys the colon, or longer period. No one,' he observes, when he sees the Prophets divided into verses (versibus), must suppose that they are bound by metrical lines, or that in this respect they re semble the Psalms and the books of Solomon ; but as the works of Demosthenes and Tully are divided into colons and commas, although written in prose and not verse, we have, for the convenience of the reader, also distinguished our new version by a new species of writing.' The Chronicles, he says, he divided into members of verses (per versuum cola) in order to avoid an inextricable forest of names.' The following specimens of Jerome's divisions are from Martianay [job ill.] Pereat dies in qua natus sum et nox in qua dictum est : Conceptus est homo.