Whose Imagination After All?: Revisiting the Bicolon Parallelism in Hebrew Poetry

Whose Imagination After All?: Revisiting the Bicolon Parallelism in Hebrew Poetry

Samuel TS GOH

This essay examines the relationship between the cola within a bicolon in Hebrew poetry. Robert Lowth's theory of parallelism generated a strong interest in biblical parallelism in the twentieth century. Based on this theory, most scholars had viewed the bicolon as comprising two parallel cola. However , in 1980 James Kugel questioned the idea of parallelism and attempted to offer a more precise description of the relationship between the two cola. He contended that the bicolon is in fact a statement formed by two parts, with the second part normally continues the meaning of the first part. Kugel's criticism raises an issue: are the idea of a bicolon and the so-called “parallelism” the biblical poet's literary creativity, or are they in fact modern scholarly imagination? The studies of the bicolon through the centuries seem to dovetail with Kugel's theory: scholarly discussions have moved from treating the bicolon as two parallel cola to emphasizing the cola's contiguous relationship. By applying Roman Jacobson's linguistic theory to the analysis of the poetic bicolon, this essay will show that Kugel's theory is not completely esoteric, neither is it completely valid.