Parallelism

About a third of the Old Testament is poetry. The Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Lamentations and the Song of Songs are almost entirely verse, most of the prophets speak in it, and poems break into the narrative books at their highest moments: the song at the sea in Exodus 15, Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel 2, David's lament for Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1. If you are going to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, even a little, you have to know how its poetry works.

The Hermeneutics track has already given you the genre lesson. Its lesson Poetry and Wisdom, in the module on genre, introduces Robert Lowth and his three kinds of parallelism, sets out the critique of James Kugel and Robert Alter, and works Amos 5:24 to show that the second line of a pair usually sharpens the first. It also teaches you to read a psalm as a prayer before you read it as a doctrine, and it covers the forms of the psalms and the psalms of cursing. Read it again if you have not done so recently. This module does not repeat it.

What this module adds is the Hebrew underneath. A translation can show you that two lines are related, but it hides much of how they are related, because English needs a different word order, does not like to drop verbs, cannot keep Hebrew sound play, and smooths over places where the poet chose two different words that the translator renders with one. Over five lessons you will look at parallelism in the Hebrew, at imagery and metaphor, at alphabet poems and mirrored structures, at what is peculiar to the Psalms as a Hebrew book, and finally at one whole poem, Psalm 23, worked with the free tools from start to finish.

One label before we start. The Hebrew quoted in this module is from the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the electronic edition of the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, copied around 1008 or 1009. It is in the public domain, and it, or a text closely based on it, is the Hebrew you see in the free tools this track uses. Hebrew is quoted here with its vowel points but without the cantillation marks, the small accent signs the Masoretes added for chanting, except where a lesson is teaching one of them.

Here is the anchor verse, word by word, in the order the Hebrew reader met it. הַשָּׁמַיִם hashamayim, the heavens, with the article ha- attached. מְסַפְּרִים mesapperim, recounting or declaring: a piel participle, masculine plural, from the root ספר (s-p-r), whose basic sense is to count and then to tell. כְּבוֹד־אֵל kevod-el, the glory of God, a construct chain joined by a little hyphen called a maqqef, with El, the short general word for God. Then the second half. וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדָיו uma'aseh yadav, and the work of His hands, where yadav is the dual noun hands with the suffix his. מַגִּיד maggid, proclaiming or announcing: a hiphil participle, masculine singular, from the root נגד (n-g-d). And הָרָקִיעַ haraqia, the expanse, the same word Genesis 1:6 uses when God makes the expanse between the waters, which the BSB here renders the skies.

Now look at what the parallelism is doing, because it works at three levels at once. At the level of meaning, the heavens answer the expanse, declaring answers proclaiming, and the glory of God answers the work of His hands. At the level of grammar, both verbs are participles, which in Hebrew present an action as ongoing: the sky is not reporting once, it is broadcasting all the time. And the grammar agrees with itself in a way English cannot show. Shamayim is plural in form, so its participle is plural; raqia is singular, so its participle is singular. Each half of the verse is internally exact.

At the level of word order, the two halves are mirrored. The first half runs subject, verb, object. The second runs object, verb, subject. Lay it out and you get the heavens, declare, the glory of God; and the work of His hands, proclaim, the expanse. The two subjects stand at the outside edges of the verse and the two objects meet in the middle. That arrangement is called chiasm, after the Greek letter chi, which is shaped like an X, and lesson 3 of this module returns to it at length. For now notice only that it is invisible in the BSB, and in every English Bible that sets the second half back into English order, and that it is plain to anyone who reads the Hebrew words in sequence on a phone.

Verse 2 continues the pattern with different equipment. יוֹם לְיוֹם יַבִּיעַ אֹמֶר yom leyom yabbia omer, day to day pours forth speech; וְלַיְלָה לְּלַיְלָה יְחַוֶּה־דָּעַת velaylah lelaylah yechavveh-da'at, and night to night declares knowledge. Yabbia is a hiphil imperfect of a verb used of springs bubbling up. Day and night are a fixed pair, and together they make what is called a merism: naming two ends to mean the whole. The verse does not mean that day talks and night does something different. It means that all of time talks. The second line is not a repeat; it completes the circle.

You will not see any of this unless you look for it, so here is a habit for every poetic verse you open in the interlinear. First, find where the verse divides. The Masoretes marked the main division of almost every verse with an accent called atnach, a small mark like a wedge or an upside-down v under the last word of the first half; in Psalm 19:1 it sits under אֵל, El. In the three books whose accents follow a special poetic system, Psalms, Proverbs and Job, another accent sometimes outranks the atnach in long verses, so treat it as a strong guide, not a law. Second, read the halves across from each other, partner by partner. Third, ask what changed.

Robert Lowth was Professor of Poetry at Oxford and later Bishop of London. His Oxford lectures on Hebrew poetry were published in Latin in 1753 as De sacra poesi Hebraeorum, and translated into English by George Gregory in 1787 as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. Lowth returned to the subject in the preliminary dissertation to his new translation of Isaiah in 1778, where he gave the definition that every later discussion starts from: 'The correspondence of one Verse, or Line, with another, I call Parallelism.' He then sorted the correspondence into three kinds.

In synonymous parallelism, the second line answers the first with equivalent sense in different words. Psalm 19:1 is a textbook case. In antithetic parallelism, the second line answers the first by contrast. Psalm 1:6 is the classic example: כִּי־יוֹדֵעַ יְהוָה דֶּרֶךְ צַדִּיקִים ki-yodea YHWH derekh tsaddiqim, for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, and וְדֶרֶךְ רְשָׁעִים תֹּאבֵד vederekh resha'im tovad, but the way of the wicked will perish. In synthetic parallelism, the second line neither repeats nor contrasts but completes or builds on the first, by giving a reason, a consequence or a further detail.

Before you hear the critique, hear Lowth at full strength, because his categories are not a straw man and are still printed in study Bibles for good reason. First, they describe something real. Read any page of the Psalms and you will find pairs whose partners are very close in sense, pairs that contrast, and pairs that run on. Second, Lowth's word was equivalent, not identical. He did not claim that the second line adds nothing; later teachers turned synonymous into same, and that is a misuse of his category rather than his claim. Third, nearness of sense is itself a poetic effect. Saying a thing twice in different words slows the hearer down, fixes it in memory, and in worship gives a congregation two ways into one truth. A reader who insists that every second line must mean something new may start inventing differences that the poet did not intend, which is a trap the Hebrew Myths lesson in module 2 of this track warns you about.

Notice also what Psalm 1:6 shows about the limits of the English. The BSB renders yodea, knows, as guards: the LORD guards the path of the righteous. That is a defensible rendering, because to know in Hebrew often means to care for or to watch over, and the BSB is translating the sense rather than the word. But it means the English reader cannot see that the verse sets God's knowing against the wicked way's perishing, a contrast between a way that is known and a way that is lost. Lowth's antithetic label holds either way. What the Hebrew adds is the exact shape of the contrast.

In 1981 James Kugel published The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History. It made two claims, and it matters that you keep them apart, because scholars who accept one often reject the other. The first claim concerns the second line. Kugel argued that Lowth's synonymous category has misled readers for two centuries, because the second line almost never merely restates the first. It seconds it, and then goes further: it specifies, intensifies, narrows, turns or completes. The Hermeneutics lesson gives you his short formula for the relation, A, and what's more, B. On this first claim, most Hebraists now agree with him, at least in the sense that the reader's default question should be what the second line adds.

Kugel's second claim is more radical and much more disputed. He argued that the distinction between poetry and prose, which Lowth took for granted, does not belong to the Hebrew Bible itself. The Bible has no word for poetry in our sense, and parallelism turns up in passages everyone calls prose. Genesis 1:27 is a fair test: 'So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.' That is a narrative chapter, and the verse is three parallel lines, the first two mirrored in the Hebrew just as Psalm 19:1 is. Genesis 9:6, in the middle of the flood story, is the same. On Kugel's view, what we call biblical poetry is the high end of a continuum of heightened speech, and calling it poetry imports a category from Greek and later European literature that the Hebrew writers did not use.

Robert Alter answered him in The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985). Alter accepted, and developed, the first claim. He described the movement from line to line as one of intensification and focusing: the second line typically makes the first more concrete, more extreme, more specific, or carries it forward in time, so that a series of parallel lines can tell a tiny story. But Alter rejected the second claim. He held that biblical Hebrew has a recognisable system of verse, marked by compression, by the balanced line, and by the regular use of parallelism, and that a reader can feel the difference between that and Hebrew narrative prose, which is terse in its own way but does not move in matched lines. The translations side with Alter in practice: nearly all modern Bibles set poetry out in lines.

Two other contributions from the same years are worth knowing. Adele Berlin, in The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (1985), showed that the correspondence between lines works on several linguistic levels at once: grammar, as when a verb in one tense is answered by a verb in another; word pairs; and sound. What you saw in Psalm 19:1, where the participles agree in number with their own subjects, is exactly the kind of grammatical parallelism she described. And the discovery of the Ugaritic texts at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, from 1929, showed that many Hebrew word pairs, such as day and night, heaven and earth, silver and gold, were shared stock in the wider Canaanite poetic tradition. A Hebrew poet reaching for the partner of a word often had a traditional partner ready.

So where does the argument stand? Some things are settled. Parallelism is the dominant feature of Hebrew verse; the second line must be read and not skipped; and Lowth's word synonymous, if it is taken to mean the same, misdescribes most pairs. Two things are live. Whether the second line always advances the first, or whether near-repetition is sometimes the poet's whole intent, is argued in both directions by careful readers, and a responsible teacher will say which he thinks a given verse is doing and why, without claiming that the theory settles it. And whether poetry and prose are two systems or two ends of one scale is still divided between those who follow Alter and those who follow Kugel. Your task is not to choose a school. It is to read the second line, in the Hebrew where you can, and to say plainly what you find.

Hebrew poetry is compressed, and one of its favourite economies is gapping, also called ellipsis: a word that appears in the first line is understood in the second without being repeated. Isaiah 1:3 is a clear case. יָדַע שׁוֹר קֹנֵהוּ yada shor qonehu, the ox knows its owner, וַחֲמוֹר אֵבוּס בְּעָלָיו vachamor evus be'alav, and the donkey the manger of its master. The second line has no verb. The reader carries knows across from the first. English can do the same thing, and the BSB keeps the gap: the ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's manger. But many verses gap more than English will tolerate, and then a translator has to supply words, sometimes in italics in older translations, sometimes silently. An interlinear will show you which English words have no Hebrew behind them.

Then Isaiah turns the comparison. יִשְׂרָאֵל לֹא יָדַע yisra'el lo yada, Israel does not know, עַמִּי לֹא הִתְבּוֹנָן ammi lo hitbonan, my people do not understand. The verb yada comes back, now negated, and the parallel line answers it with a hithpolel of the root בין (b-y-n), to discern or consider carefully. So the verse has four lines in two pairs, and the second pair overturns the first: the animals know where their food comes from, and God's people do not. This is the kind of movement Kugel and Alter mean. You would miss it if you treated the lines as interchangeable.

Sound is the hardest part of Hebrew poetry to carry into English and the easiest to see in an interlinear once you know to look. Isaiah 5:7 ends with two famous puns. וַיְקַו לְמִשְׁפָּט וְהִנֵּה מִשְׂפָּח vayqav lemishpat vehinneh mispach: He looked for mishpat, justice, and behold, mispach, bloodshed. לִצְדָקָה וְהִנֵּה צְעָקָה litsdaqah vehinneh tse'aqah: for tsedaqah, righteousness, and behold, tse'aqah, a cry. The BSB reads, He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard a cry of distress. That is accurate, and it loses the sting entirely, because the whole force of the line is that the thing God found sounds almost exactly like the thing he looked for. No translator can keep it. A preacher who has seen it in the Hebrew can explain it in one sentence.

These three features, the mirrored order of Psalm 19:1, the gapped verb of Isaiah 1:3, and the sound play of Isaiah 5:7, are all invisible in a good English translation, and all visible on a phone in two minutes. That is the case for this module in one paragraph. It is not that the English is wrong. It is that the English cannot carry everything, and a reader who can look underneath it will see more of what the poet made.

Every practical step in this module builds toward the capstone of this track, the full study of one Old Testament passage in the last lesson. If the passage you have chosen for the capstone is a poem, or contains one, use it now. If it is narrative or law, choose one psalm of six to twelve verses as your practice poem for this module, and work it alongside. Psalms 1, 8, 13, 15, 46, 100, 121 and 130 are all good choices.

Open your poem on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible. On a clean notebook page headed Lines, write each verse out in English as separate lines, one under the other, breaking where the Hebrew breaks. To find the break, look in the interlinear for the atnach under a word near the middle of the verse; if your tool does not show accent marks, use the main punctuation of the BSB as a first guide. Indent the second line of each pair slightly, so the pairs stand out on the page.

Then, beside each pair, write one of four short labels. Echo, if the second line is very close in sense to the first. Contrast, if it states the opposite. Further, if it narrows, intensifies or completes the first. Turn, if it changes direction. For any pair you label Further or Turn, write three or four words saying what moved. Do not force a label; if you are unsure, write a question mark, which is an honest result.

Last, choose one verse from your poem and check its word order in the interlinear. Is it mirrored like Psalm 19:1, or parallel, or neither? Is there a gapped word that the English has supplied? Write what you find in one sentence at the bottom of the page. Keep the Lines page. You will add to it in each lesson of this module, and it will become the poetry section of your capstone study.