What is Parallelism?

What is Parallelism?

Robert LO

The main purpose of this essay is to briefly introduce the reader to recent developments in the study of parallelism in biblical Hebrew poetry. Ever since the eighteenth century, parallelism has been roughly analyzed into three categories: synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic. But recent studies have shown the inadequacies of such categorization. It is especially discovered that the last category is too broad to serve any useful purpose in the analysis of Hebrew biblical poetry. 

The author discusses three recent attempts to bring parallelism into sharper focus. These are represented by the studies of James L. Kugel, Adele Berlin, and Robert Alter. Each of them approaches parallelism from a different perspective. Among them, Kugel has the greatest reservation about the presence of parallelism as such. His studies have been the most controversial. Adele Berlin approaches parallelism from the perspective of modern linguistics. And Robert Alter deals with the same phenomenon on the basis of literary theory and semantics.

Each of these studies offers us a different perspective or method to the study of parallelism, and broadens our understanding of this phenomenon. Altogether they serve to remind the reader of ancient Hebrew poetry of the importance of not just extracting messages and applications from the texts but also the need to deal with the texts from an appreciative and aesthetic standpoint.