Budde claimed that this unbalanced stress system held true for every line in chapters 1, 2, and 4, and for a great part of chapter 5. Since Budde’s work, others have found Budde’s unbalanced lines to be balanced with the same number of stresses in both half-lines. They conclude that, while the Qinah meter line is a dominant pattern, the first four chapters have a great mixture of other metric patterns, and that correcting the text on the basis of exceptional meter is not a useful undertaking. In