I am not speaking of, unfortunately, Berlin, Germany. I refer to Adele Berlin’s fantastic work on Biblical Parallelism. I read this book a year ago in Hebrew class. I originally intended to use it as a source for my term paper on OT genre, but Berlin convinced me to pull up a chair and stay a while. Berlin’s work is valuable for any one who desires to know more about Old Testament parallelism. I haven’t finished the book yet, but her chapters on Poetry and Parallelism and Parallelism and Linguistics have made my extended stay worth it.
Berlin defines parallelism as “the correspondence of one thing with another.” Parallelism occurs all over the place in the Hebrew Bible. Even narrative contains parallelism. What differentiates poetry from any other genre is parallelism’s dominance in the text. In narrative portions of the Bible, this key feature is still difficult to detect. Take Genesis 31:36-39:
“What is my offense?
What is my sin, that you have hotly pursued me?
For you have felt through all my goods;
what have you found of all your household goods?
Set it here before my kinsmen and your kinsmen, that they may decide between us two.
These twenty years I have been with you.
Your ewes and your female goats have not miscarried,
and I have not eaten the rams of your flocks.
What was torn by wild beasts I did not bring to you.
I bore the loss of it myself. From my hand you required it, whether stolen by day or stolen by night.
Obviously, Jacob’s speech is elevated and contains parallelisms, but none of the major English translations treat it as poetry. Other sections are much easier to classify:
Simeon and Levi are brothers;
weapons of violence are their swords.
Let my soul come not into their council;
O my glory, be not joined to their company.
For in their anger they killed men,
and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen.
Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce,
and their wrath, for it is cruel!
I will divide them in Jacob
and scatter them in Israel.
Genesis 49:5-7 moves like poetry. Though the parallelism is more obvious in the Hebrew text, the first two lines have the same syntactic feature of being verbless clauses. Even though each element is not parallel to each other (e.g. Simeon and Levi = weapons of violence), the dominance of parallelism compels to compare the two lines. Simeon and Levi are united as brothers, and what unifies them is their attitude of violence (referencing the massacre of Shechem). And on the poem goes…
Parallelism can occur within a line or across lines; it can be as small as a sound or as large as a metaphor. Berlin’s nearly countless examples illustrate that parallelism is semantic (e.g. word pairs) as well as grammatical (e.g. morphology).
All this is to say that I love to rediscover the books that I have either read all the way through at one point or read part of and put down. If it’s a good book, why not pull up a chair and stay a while?
nathanielcooley 
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