Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew verse

Abstract

Parallelism is one of the best known features of Biblical Hebrew verse, yet, until recent years, work on this topic was usually content to repeat or elaborate Lowth's analysis. This paper explores the phenomenon of parallelism as a feature of rich potential implicit in all writing and fully activated in literary discourse, especially poetry. After a linguistic analysis using the seminal work of Jakobson on the syntagmatic (chain or sequence axis) and paradigmatic (choice or overshadowing axis) dimensions of text, the insights of a variety of artists are used to identify the dynamics of the device.