Message #160122

[Azrael]

mother—in much the same way that Aeschylus in The Persians chose to celebrate the Athenian victory at Marathon through the psychology of the defeated instead of through that of the conquerors.

The same mingling of lyrical and epic quality, with a still stronger stressing of the personal note, is found in the "Song of the Bow," attributed by Jewish tradition to King David:

"The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places:
How are the mighty fallen!
Tell it not in Gath,
Publish it not in the streets of Askelon;
Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph . . .
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
And in their death they were not divided:
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions.
Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
Who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights,
Who put ornaments of gold upon your apparel.
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan:
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women. p. 19
How are the mighty fallen,
And the weapons of war perished!"

When the Prophets should come, they would have but to alter the martial spirit of this early poetry into a still loftier zeal for righteousness and they would find its peculiar rhapsodic form the appropriate medium for their own mature expression.

Truly, the Hebrews seem to have been born old. Their own legends of their great antiquity as a people are countenanced, if not by the known facts of history, at least by the richness of experience embodied in their literature at its first appearance. It is as if they had indeed been the first to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and had assimilated that bitter fruit long before other nations tasted it. It is as if like Adam and Eve they had never known childhood or youth, their gaiety and inconsequence, that lighthearted spirit of play which lurks beneath the gravest meditations of Plato but is found nowhere in the whole of the Old Testament. Jehovah was a jealous deity; he gave his worshipers the strength to survive, he gave them sublimity and tenderness and an exquisite sense of beauty, but all on condition that they should forget that they had ever been children and should devote themselves manfully, seriously, and dutifully to his

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