THE PULPIT COMMENTARY, EDITED BY THE VERY REV. H. D. M. SPENCE, D.D., DEAN OF GLOUCESTER; AND BY THE REV. JOSEPH S. EXELL, M.A. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY THE VERY REV. F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., DEAN OF CANTERBURY. VERY REV. PRINCIPAL J. TULLOCH, D.D. REV. CANON G. RAWLINSON, M.A. London: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD THE PULPIT COMMENTARY, EDITED BY THE VERY REV. H. D. M. SPENCE, D.D., DEAN OF GLOUCESTER; AND BY THE REV. JOSEPH S. EXELL, M.A. EXODUS. Exposition and Homiletics BY REV. GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., CAMDEN PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, AND KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD. 220.7 S зр 1883 V. 3 THE BOOK OF EXODUS. CHAPTER XV EXPOSITION. Vers. 1-21.-THE SONG OF MOSES. Full of gratitude, joy, and happiness-burning with a desire to vent in devotional utterance of the most fitting kind, his intense and almost ecstatic feelings, Moses, who to his other extraordinary powers, added the sublime gift of poesy, composed, shortly after the passage, a hymn of praise, and sang it with a chorus of the people as a thanksgiving to the Almighty. The hymn itself is generally allowed to be one of transcendent beauty. Deriving probably the general outline of its form and character of its rhythm from the Egyptian poetry of the time, with which Moses had been familiar from his youth, it embodies ideas purely Hebrew, and remarkable for grandeur, simplicity, and depth. Naturally, as being the first outburst of the poetical genius of the nation, and also connected with the very commencement of the national life, it exerted the most important formative influence upon the later Hebrew poetic style, furnishing a pattern to the later lyric poets, from which they but rarely EXODUS-II. deviated The "parallelism of the members,' which from the middle of the last century has been acknowledged to be the only real rhythmical law of Hebrew poetry, with its three forms of "synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic (or verbal) parallelism" is here found almost as distinctly marked as in any of the later compositions. At the same time, a greater lyrical freedom is observable than was afterwards practised. The song divides itself primarily into two parts:-the first (vers. 1-12) retrospective, celebrating the recent deliverance; the second (vers. 13-18) prospective, describing the effects that would flow from the deliverance in future time. The verbs indeed of the second part are at first grammatical preterites; but (as Kalisch observes) they are "according to the sense, futures"-their past form denoting only that the prophet sees the events revealed to him as though they were already accomplished. Hence, after a time, he slides into the future (ver. 16). The second part is continuous, and has no marked break: the first sub-divides into three unequal portions, each commencing with an address to Jehovah, and each termi B |