Kōlon. Perhaps the most widely used term today for the verse line in bib-
lical scholarship is colon (pl. cola; also bi-/tricolon).48 S. Mowinckel, writing in
the early 1960s, credits the rise of the term to the ambiguity caused by the use
of both “stichos” and “hemistichos” (lit. a “half-line” and “half-verse”; from
Gk. hēmistichion)49 to designate a “line of verse.”50 And certainly one of its key
virtues is the clarity of reference that it provides with respect to biblical verse—
there is no question as to the entity so designated, or as to the grouping of two
or three such entities (bicolons and tricolons, respectively). Nonetheless, the
term harbors within itself its own potential for ambiguity.51 Like stich (and the
like), colon is of Greek derivation (kōlon “limb, member”).52 The Greek term
most concretely designates a literal limb or member of a body (especially a
leg) but gets extended early on in Greek rhetoric (e.g., Aristotle) to designate a
clause (member!) of a periodos and then as a subpart—a single prosodic com-
ponent—of a particular meter. 53 Certain kinds of cola are even “capable of
being used as verses (short periods)” in their own right,54 and with Aristo-
phanes of Byzantium, as noted, the practice of lineating lyric poetry according
to the shorter metrical cola begins. Sometime prior to Jerome (ca. 347–420 ce)
the latter writing practice was applied to the prose works of rhetoricians, such
as Demosthenes and Cicero, 55 and then Jerome used this “new style of writing”
in his translation of Isaiah (and also of Ezekiel) as an aid for reading—though
he made sure to annotate his writing practice lest there be confusion as to the
(posited) underlying medium of Isaiah:
Let no one who has seen the Prophets written down in stichs (Lat. versi-
bus) judge them to be in verse (Lat. metro) among the Hebrews and at all
similar to Psalms or the works of Solomon. But, because it is customary
to write Demosthenes and Cicero per cola et commata (even though both
of them wrote prose and not verse [Lat. versibus, lit. “in verses, stichs”]),
we too (out of concern for a usable text for readers) have used the new
style of writing to make divisions in the new translation.56
Subsequently (esp. from the fifth through ninth centuries ce), 57 other scribes
would emulate this “new style,” extending its manner of layout to other books
of the Bible. Hesychius of Jerusalem (ca. 433 ce) is a good example. He treats
the Greek text of the Book of the Twelve in this way, writing them out per cola
et commata. 58 And M. B. Parkes exemplifies the practice with a folio page from
the eighth-century Latin Codex Amiatinus in which the Psalms have been
copied (per cola et commata) like a prose text: “Here the Psalms are laid out per
cola et commata: each new verse, and each of its constituent parts, begins on a
new line close up to the margin. When the unit of sense is too long to be ac-
commodated in a single line the remainder is inset on the next line and the
insetting is continued until the end of the unit.” 59 Jerome distinguishes his
new practice of copying from the stichic layout of verse in the Bible (e.g.,
Psalms), and Hesychius of Jerusalem, too, knew of manuscripts in which
some poetic books of the Bible (e.g., Psalms, Job, Song of Songs) were divided
into stichoi (outō meristhenta tois stichois). 60 The lengths of the verse lines in the
poetical books in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, for example, are such that the
scribe could only manage two columns of writing instead of the usual three or
four (see fig. 17).61
