by Leland Ryken
Thou didst set the earth on its foundations,
so that it should never be shaken (Ps. 104:5 RSV).
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake (Ps. 23:3).
To call this a form of parallelism is inaccurate, since the two lines are not parallel to each other. They are simply two lines that belong together. No other identifying term has gained wide acceptance, however, and it is such a prevalent form in biblical poetry that we need some label for it. “Synthetic parallelism” should therefore be retained.
The Parallelism Is Often Partial
There is a caution we must remember in regard to biblical parallelism: very often it is not whole lines that are parallel to each other but parts of lines. Along with the symmetry, there is typically an element of asymmetry. For example, only the last phrase of the line “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” is echoed in the next line, “the holy place where the Most High dwells” (Ps. 46:4). So, too, with this verse:
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever present help in trouble (Ps. 46:1).
To make the second line exactly parallel, we would have to change it to something like “The LORD is our fortress and shield.” Hebrew parallelism is not a straitjacket. It is a beautiful example of freedom within form. As someone has stated:
It is clear that there is repetition in the parallel lines. But almost invariably something is added, and it is precisely the combination of what is repeated and what is added that makes of parallelism the artistic form that it is. This intimate relation between old and new elements is an important feature of Hebrew composition and Hebrew thought. On the one hand we observe form and pattern; on the other form and pattern are radically altered.5
Parallelism as a Form of Recurrence
The specific types of parallelism can be differentiated, but what they all have in common is the principle of repetition or recurrence or rhythm that is the basis of all verse forms. In English poetry this principle takes the form of rhyme and regular meter, which are lost when something is translated. The repetition of thought or content that we find in biblical parallelism survives in translations. More important than learning to pigeonhole types of parallelism is simply being receptive to the momentum and rhythm that are set up by such parallelism. The general principle is that lines are not self-contained. They belong with at least one other line. When we hear one footstep, we wait for the other foot to fall, as it were.
Parallelism as Verbal Artistry
What purposes are served by such parallelism? Several, but the most important is the artistic beauty of skillfully handled language. C. S. Lewis writes:
In reality it is a very pure example of what all pattern, and therefore all art, involves. The principle of art has been defined by someone as “the same in the other”. . . . “Parallelism” is the characteristically Hebrew form of the same in the other. . . . If we have any taste for poetry we shall enjoy this feature of the Psalms.6
If it is not accepted simply as something artistic, Lewis adds, a reader will either be led astray “in his effort to get a different meaning out of each half of the verse or else feel that it is rather silly.”7 Poetry is an art form, an example of verbal craftsmanship. We should not press the parallelism of biblical poetry at once in a utilitarian direction. It is beautiful and delightful in itself.
Parallelism as a Mnemonic Device
Parallelism is also a mnemonic device (an aid to memorization, recitation, or even improvisation), as well as something that assists listening. What C. S. Lewis says about the parallelism of Jesus’ sayings is equally true of biblical parallelism in general:
We may, if we like, see in this an exclusively practical and didactic purpose; by giving to truths which are infinitely worth remembering this rhythmic and incantatory expression, He made them almost impossible to forget.8
We should note in this regard that the poetic parts of the Bible were originally oral literature, from the Psalms sung in worship to the oral pronouncements of the prophets, who sometimes showed prodigious feats of memory (for a notable example, see Jer. 36). Parallelism makes an utterance oratorical in the sense that its effect is particularly clear when we hear it.
The Meditative Effect of Parallelism
A further result of parallelism is its meditative effect. Parallelism focuses attention on a thought. It resists rapid movement away from an idea and a resultant dissipation of impact. Parallelism, writes a biblical scholar,
has within it a retarding element, stemming the current of ideas. The poet allows himself plenty of time. A scene, before being succeeded by another, is presented twice, in different lights. All the content is squeezed out of it. Its finest nuances are utilized.9
The effect of parallelism is comparable to turning a prism in the light, insuring that we will look at the colors of a statement at least twice. Needless to say, this accords perfectly with the meditative purpose of the Bible and the nature of poetic language.
Parallelism is more than an artistic bonus, though it is that, too. The words in a parallel construction enhance each other, whether through synonym or contrast or completion. It is an important part of interpretation to notice how the parallel members interact with each other, together saying more than either could say by itself.
SUMMARY
Poetry is heightened speech. It compels attention and involvement not only through its special idiom, but also through its distinctive syntax (sentence patterns). Biblical poetry uses the highly patterned structures of parallelism in its various forms.
Further Reading
G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980), is a comprehensive analysis of the resources of poetic language used by biblical writers. The most ambitious classification of figures of speech in the Bible is E. W. Bullinger’s monumental Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (1898; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968). I discuss the specific topic of metaphor in “Metaphor in the Psalms,” Christianity and Literature 3l(Spring 1982): 9–29.
Biblical parallelism has received its definitive treatment in James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
One of the best ways to understand how biblical poetry works is to contrast prose narrative and poetic treatments of the same event; Gillis Gerleman provides a model for doing so in a comparison of Judges 4 and 5, in “The Song of Deborah in the Light of Stylistics,” Vetus Testamentum 1 (1951); 168–80.
No consideration of biblical poetry is complete without a recognition of how thoroughly poetic the statements of Jesus in the Gospels typically are; for a good introduction, see the sources excerpted under “Jesus as Poet” in The New Testament in Literary Criticism, ed. Leland Ryken (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984).
1A good preliminary essay to read is C. S. Lewis, “The Language of Religion,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 129–41.
2The best book I can recommend along these lines is Robert Short’s A Time to Be Born—A Time to Die (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), which provides photographic commentary on the Book of Ecclesiastes.
3“Education by Poetry,” in The Norton Reader, ed. Arthur M. Eastman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 412.
4“The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 145.
5James Muilenburg, “A Study in Hebrew Rhetoric: Repetition and Style,” Vetus Testamentum Supplements 1 (1953): 98.
6Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), 3–5.
7Ibid., 3.
8Ibid.,5.
9Gillis Gerleman, “The Song of Deborah in the Light of Stylistics,” Vetus Testamentum 1 (1951): 176. This is an excellent source on the nature of Hebrew poetry in general.
Chapter Five
Types of Biblical Poetry
TO CALL SOMETHING POETRY is to identi
fy the special idiom in which it is written. Virtually any literary genre can be written in poetry. In the Bible we find such diverse forms as poetic narrative (the Book of Job), poetic satire (much of Old Testament prophecy), and poetic discourse (parts of the Sermon on the Mount). Mainly, though, poetry implies various types of short poems, and it is the purpose of this chapter to describe the leading biblical examples.
LYRIC POETRY
A Definition of Lyric
What most people mean by “poem” is a lyric poem. A lyric can be defined as a short poem, often intended to be sung, that expresses the thoughts and especially the feelings of a speaker. Breaking that definition into its individual parts yields the following anatomy of lyric as a genre.
Lyrics Are Brief
To begin, lyrics are brief. They express a feeling or insight at the moment of greatest intensity, and we all know that such moments cannot be prolonged indefinitely. The fact that lyrics are often sung likewise accounts for their characteristic brevity. Because of this brevity, lyrics are self-contained, even when they appear in collections like the Old Testament Book of Psalms. As part of this self-containedness, lyrics usually have a single controlling topic or theme (which may be an emotion rather than an idea). This unifying theme is stated early in the poem and exercises a formative influence on the poem’s development. Unless a reader identifies the unifying theme, a lyric will remain a series of fragments, and nothing can be more disastrous to the unified impact that is a hallmark of lyric.
Theme and Variation
The best means of grasping the unity of a lyric is to recognize that it is built on the principle of theme and variation. On the one hand, there is a unifying idea or emotion that controls the entire poem. The details by which this theme is developed are the variations. This principle places a twofold obligation on the reader: to determine the theme that covers everything in the poem, and to discover how each part contributes to that theme. Some of the Old Testament Psalms are, in fact, very miscellaneous and consist of a series of loosely related ideas. But most of them become unified wholes if a reader exercises patience and creativity in looking for a unifying theme.
Lyrics Are Personal and Subjective
A lyric is also personal and subjective. Lyric poets present their own thoughts and feelings directly, not through a story about characters viewed from the outside. The speaker in a lyric speaks in the first person, using the “I” or “we” pronoun. As readers we usually overhear the speaker, who may address anyone—God, himself, the stars, a group, enemies—but who rarely conveys the impression of speaking to the reader.
Lyrics Are Reflective or Emotional
Whereas stories present a series of events, a lyric presents either a sequence of ideas or a series of emotions. In other words, lyrics are either reflective/meditative or emotional. Emotion, especially, is often considered the differentiating element of lyric. We should not go to a lyric looking for a story; we will find only occasional snatches of narrative to explain the poet’s emotion or to elaborate such feelings as praise or despair. Because lyrics are often emotional, and because even reflective lyrics tend to be mood poems, a good question to ask of a lyric poem is, “How does this poem make me feel?”
How Poets Express Emotion
It is not easy to put emotion into words, and the means of doing so are rather limited. They include use of exclamation, hyperbole, emotive words, vivid description of the stimulus for the emotion (thereby evoking a similar feeling in the reader), projecting a feeling onto external nature, or describing parallels to the speaker’s situation (as when the psalmist in Psalm 102 compares his loneliness to an owl and “a bird alone on a housetop”).
Lyrics Are Concentrated
Lyrics are concentrated and compressed. They are moments of intensity, very different from a drawn-out story with highs and lows of feeling. Stories have occasional moments of epiphany (heightened insight or feeling), but lyrics are moments of epiphany, without the surrounding narrative context. They are intense and packed with meanings. We must therefore emphatically not expect a lyric to cover the whole territory on a given topic. Lyric captures a moment and does not give a reasoned philosophy on a subject. It would be foolish to take such statements as “whatever he does prospers” (Ps. 1:3) or “no harm will befall you” (Ps. 91:10) out of their lyric context and treat them as absolutes.
Lyrics Are Abrupt in Movement
Because lyrics are heightened speech, they often contain abrupt shifts and lack the smooth transitions of narrative. C. S. Lewis speaks of “the emotional rather than logical connections” in lyrics.1 Such abrupt jumps of course demand tremendous alertness and even interpretive creativity on the part of the reader.
The Voice of Response
Lyric is preeminently a poet’s response to a stimulus. In the lyric poetry of the Bible the poets are always busy responding to something that has moved them—God, their enemies, a personal crisis, nature, victory, defeat, a beloved, and so on. One of the most helpful things to do with a lyric is to identify the exact stimulus to which the poet is responding.
Three-Part Structure: 1. Statement of Theme
The overwhelming majority of lyrics are built on the rule of three-part structure. They begin with a statement of theme, which is also the idea or emotion or situation to which the poet is responding. Ways of stating the theme are varied: a description (Ps. 121:1), a situation that is hinted at (Ps. 2:1), an invocation (Ps. 3:1), an address to an implied human audience (Ps. 107:1), an idea (Ps. 19:1). Regardless of how the theme is stated, it alerts the reader to what will control the entire poem.
2. Development of the Theme
The main part of any lyric is the development of the controlling theme. There are four ways of doing this, and many poems combine them:
Repetition, in which the controlling emotion or idea is simply restated in different words or images (Ps. 32:1–5).
The listing or catalog technique, in which the poet names and perhaps responds to various aspects of the theme (Ps. 23 or any of the praise psalms).
The principle of association, in which the poet branches out from the initial emotion or idea to related ones. A common pattern in the Psalms is movement from God’s character to his acts, or vice versa. In Psalm 19, the poet moves from God’s revelation of himself in nature to his revelation in the moral law.
Contrast, in which the poet is led to consider the opposite emotion or phenomenon as he develops the main theme (Ps. 1).
3. Resolution
In the last, brief part of a lyric, the emotion or meditation is resolved into a concluding thought, feeling, or attitude. Lyrics do not simply end; they are rounded off with a note of finality. In the Psalms this is often a brief prayer or wish.
Explicating a Lyric
The key to a good discussion or explication of a lyric is to have an orderly and discernible procedure, so a reader or listener knows what is going on. The best plan of attack is to move from the large to the small, according to the following fourfold procedure.
Identifying the topic, theme (what the poem says about the topic), underlying situation or occasion (if one is implied). This part of the explication should produce an understanding of what unifies the poem.
Laying out the structure of the poem, including the following considerations (using whichever ones are appropriate for a given poem): Identifying whether the primary controlling element is expository (a sequence of ideas or emotions), descriptive (of either character or scene), or dramatic (an address to an implied listener).
Dividing the poem into its topical units from beginning to end, thus showing the sequential flow of the poem.
Identifying underlying contrasts that organize the poem.
Determining whether a given unit develops the theme through repetition, catalog, association, or contrast.
Applying the framework of theme and variation.
Progressing through the poem unit by unit and analyzing the poetic “texture” (in contrast to the “structure” a
lready discussed). This means identifying and exploring the meanings of the figures of speech and poetic devices discussed in the previous chapter of this book. We should isolate whatever unit lends itself to separate consideration; it might be an individual image or figure of speech, a line, a verse, or a group of verses.
Techniques of versification (in biblical poetry, parallelism) or patterning that make up part of the artistry and seem worthy of comment. For example, the imagery in Psalm 1 is organized around an envelope pattern in which the metaphors of the assembly and the path appear early and late, with harvest imagery occurring in the middle. After we have said all that we wish to say about the structure and meaning of a biblical lyric, there tends to remain a residue of artistic beauty that simply deserves comment and admiration.
Most Short Poems Are Types of Lyric
It is by now apparent that when we speak of “a poem,” we usually mean a lyric poem. In fact, most of the additional categories I am about to describe are subtypes of lyric. The further traits of each of these subtypes may provide a supplemental framework for organizing an analysis of them. But even in such cases it is necessary to make use of the lyric considerations that I have noted. A lament psalm or praise psalm, for example, does not bypass the general features of lyric but rather builds on them.
