Hebraic prose

Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is biblical in imitating biblical rhythms and parallelism, and in its frequent use of biblical phrasings.

But it’s also Hebraic in its intensity: “this style is inseparable from Hebraic earnestness and sublimity. Longinus long ago, and Coleridge more recently, have taught us that sublimity is a mark of the Hebrew genius, and sublimity is that quality which so often distinguishes these ‘Hebraic’ prose writers of the mid-seventeenth century from earlier Ciceronians.”