Till recently no one doubted that the three chapters formed a unity. “Nahum’s prophecy,” said Kuenen in 1889, “is a whole.” In 1891[215] Cornill affirmed that no questions of authenticity arose in regard to the book; and in 1892 Wellhausen saw in chap. i. an introduction leading “in no awkward way to the proper subject of the prophecy.” Meantime, however, Bickell,[216] discovering what he thought to be the remains of an alphabetic Psalm in chap. i. 1-7, attempted to reconstruct throughout chap. i.—ii. 3 twenty-two verses, each beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet. And, following this, Gunkel in 1893 produced a more full and plausible reconstruction of the same scheme.[217] By radical emendations of the text, by excision of what he believes to be glosses and by altering the order of many of the verses, Gunkel seeks to produce twenty-three distichs, twenty of which begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, two are wanting, while in the first three letters of the twenty-third, [שׁבי], he finds very probable the name of the author, Shobai or Shobi.[218] He takes this ode, therefore, to be an eschatological Psalm of the later Judaism, which from its theological bearing has been thought suitable as an introduction to Nahum’s genuine prophecies. The text of chap. i.—ii. 4 has been badly mauled and is clamant for reconstruction of some kind. As it lies, there are traces of an alphabetical arrangement as far as the beginning of ver. 9,[219] and so far Gunkel’s changes are comparatively simple. Many of his emendations are in themselves and apart from the alphabetic scheme desirable. They get rid of difficulties and improve the poetry of the passage.[220] His reconstruction is always clever and as a whole forms a wonderfully spirited poem. But to have produced good or poetical Hebrew is not conclusive proof of having recovered the original, and there are obvious objections to the process. Several of the proposed changes are unnatural in themselves and unsupported by anything except the exigencies of the scheme; for example, 2_b_ and 3_a_ are dismissed as a gloss only because, if they be retained, the _Aleph_ verse is two bars too long. The gloss, Gunkel thinks, was introduced to mitigate the absoluteness of the declaration that Jehovah is a God of wrath and vengeance; but this is not obvious and would hardly have been alleged apart from the needs of the alphabetic scheme. In order to find a _Daleth_, it is quite arbitrary to say that the first אמלל in 4_b_ is redundant in face of the second, and that a word beginning with _Daleth_ originally filled its place, but was removed because it was a rare or difficult word! The re-arrangement of 7 and 8_a_ is very clever, and reads as if it were right; but the next effort, to get a verse beginning with _Lamed_, is of the kind by which anything might be proved. These, however, are nothing to the difficulties which vv. 9-14 and chap. ii. 1, 3, present to an alphabetic scheme, or to