AS IS well known, the Hebrew language belongs to the Semitic group of languages, and in its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary it is vastly different from the Indo-European languages, to which English belongs. For this reason it is extremely difficult to translate the one into the other, and more difficult still for the Indo-European to discover just what constitutes Hebrew poetry and in what specific ways it differs from prose. Hence there have been long years of study and research in the effort to determine the constituent elements of Hebrew poetry, more particularly since the time of Robert Lowth, who in his De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753) was the first to approach the problem in any systematic or scientific manner. Since his day a voluminous literature has come into being and many points of view have been expressed ranging from one extreme to the other, from those who like Ehrlich discount almost completely our knowledge of Hebrew poetry to those who like Sievers would reduce the whole of the Old Testament to poetry of the most regular type. Among scholars there still remain great differences, but in recent years real progress has been made toward a consensus of opinion. Although many problems still remain unsolved, enough has been accomplished to give us considerable confidence in the result.