Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

Parallelism is a prominent feature in Ancient Near Eastern poetry and biblical poetry as such, and is also present in certain cases in biblical prose. The meaning of parallelism is that there is an inherent connection between the two members of a poetic verse: various elements are re-worded and repeated, or changed and re-stated, as part of the stylistic characteristics of the poem. A good example of the simplest kind of parallelism is Deuteronomy 32:1: “(a) Listen, heavens, and I shall speak, (b) and the earth shall hear the words of my mouth”: 1. listening (a) is parallel to hearing (b); 2. heaven (a) is parallel of earth(b); 3. speech (a) is parallel to words of mouth (b). While the first and the third parallelisms listed are obvious, the second teaches us of the types of parallels this style can create: due to the need to have a parallel for each element in the verse, opposites can also serve as parallels when they both come together to convey one and the same meaning: all of creation, heaven and earth, are called to listen to the song.

As part of its stylistic features, the genre of parallelism usually dictates the use of specific word-pairs as parallels: hear-listen, Israel-Jacob, peoples-nations, desert-wilderness, and many more. It is interesting to note that many of the same exact parallels are common in Ugaritic poetry as well.

In terms of the meaning of parallelisms, there are two major types: synonymous parallelisms like the example above, where both members of the verse convey the same meaning in different ways; and antithetic parallelisms, where the two members of the verse convey opposite ideas. Naturally, there are many parallelisms which are hard to classify as either.

From the technical aspect, there are different ways of creating a parallelism: not all the elements in the first member of a verse are necessarily repeated, and often it is the verb or the person addressed which is only stated once and implied in the second member of the verse. The parallel members can either be grammatically identical and organized in the same order (as in the example above), or can be presented in a different order. A common way of doing so is chiastic parallelism, as in Gen 9:6: “One who sheds a man’s blood, by a man shall his own blood be shed.”

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