Hebrew Poetry and the Appositive Style: Parallelism, Requiescat in pace

Abstract

Michael O’Connor (whose 1980 opus, Hebrew Verse Structure, provides a compelling linguistically grounded description of the poetic line) has called the endurance of Lowthian parallelism a “horror” that wreaks havoc on lexical semantics and “is beyond the comprehension of any sensitive student of language.” Why does a model known to be a descriptive failure for a century persist in teaching resources and commentaries? It is because nothing compelling has risen to replace it. O’Connor’s linguistic analysis of the line offered the first piece to replacing the traditional model, but O’Connor’s model was more compelling for the structure of the poetic line than for the relationship of lines. In this study I take up interlineal syntax and offer an analysis that compliments and completes O’Connor’s approach, allowing us to provide a proper burial for the admirable but ultimately unworkable Lowthian parallelism.

Religiosidade E Doença Mental

“…Inquestionável que o isolamento, e a falta de preocupação com outras pessoas tem tornado a sociedade mais fria, angustiada, isolada e propensa a doenças mentais. Amar o próximo tem íntima correlação com amar a si mesmo, dentro do pensamento judaico do paralelismo progressivo e sinonímico (HOLMSTEDT, 2019). Podemos concluir que aquele não ama o próximo também é incapaz de amar a si mesmo.…”

The intersection of syntax and poetry in the first Hebrew acrostic poem of Lamentations

“…Lowth's proposal of semantic parallelism in 1753 as the chief organising principle of Biblical Hebrew poetry persists after more than 250 years (Lowth 1835:204-212). Counterevidence against the theory of parallelism as an explanation for the nature of Biblical Hebrew poetry has led to efforts for its defence (for example, Cross 1983:129-155) or for its replacement with a metric system (for example, Freedman and Von Frange 1996) or syntactic constraints (for example, Collins 1978, O'Connor 1980, Greenstein 1983, Holmstedt 2019and Grosser 2021), whereas Kuryłowicz (1972 argues for a combination of syntax and stress. Kugel (1981) argues that there is no poetry in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament -only a continuum from loosely parallelistic structures in prose sections to more rhetorical parallelistic devices in what is misleadingly labelled verse.…”