Rules for Interpreting Hebrew Poetry, Part 2 | Rapp Report Daily 0062 | Striving for Eternity

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Hebrew Poetry and Parallelism in Biblical Interpretation

This week as we look at how to interpret scripture, we are looking at styles of genres or styles of literature in the Bible, and we're looking specifically at Hebrew poetry. We said yesterday that Hebrew poetry is not based on rhyming, but is based on parallelism.

That is where you have two thoughts that are either going to be contrasting one another, reinforcing one another, different things like that. And that's what we're going to end up seeing. There are many, many different types of parallelism that you are going to find.

But when interpreting poetic literature, you have to look at what type of parallelism do you have. Do you have something that is antithetical, in other words, the first line is contrasting the second line?

Or do you have something that's going to be synonymous, where the first line is saying the same thing, but with a different type of emphasis than the second line? Or are you going to have something where it is building up, it's climactic, and so then you're going to have the second line completes and expands the first line?

Maybe you're going to have a formal parallelism where the two lines together express one thought or theme. But the thing that you have to do when it comes to Hebrew poetry is you must identify what type of literature, what type of parallelism you're dealing with, because that's going to tell you whether the first line is emphasizing, contrasting the other, that's going to tell you what the author is trying to emphasize in the poetry that he's using.

So the parallelism is important to understanding the emphasis.

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