Fr. Robert Matheus: Parallelism(2 conferences to the Linguistic department of Madurai Kamaraj University, India, 1994)Anyone who has some knowledge about Hebrew literature knows what parallelism is and can easily identify itat sight, but to offer a definition of the phenomenon is a difficult task. The reason for this is that the term hasbeen used to describe too many things. Synonymous Parallelism and Synthetic Parallelism, for example are re-ally not similar things. The characteristic feature of this style, typically Semitic, used by the writers of the Bible,is a brief, two-part sentence whose second part typically reasserts, strengthens or completes what was said inthe first: "Happy the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in His commandments" (Ps.112,1). The ef-fect of this sentence form is to provide the whole with a feeling of closure and completeness: the second part ofsuch a sentence, strengthening and finishing off the first marks it as complete and polished. It gives to the sen-tence an elegance, gives it sometimes an emphasis or makes of it an epigram. Great variety is observable in therelationship between the two (or sometimes three) parts of these sentences. Sometimes the second part says thesame thing in different words: Ps.146,2: "Let me praise the Lord in my life; let me sing of my God while I live".More often, it carries the first part further, completes it, supplies some grammatically or semantically necessaryconclusion: "Since X ... then Y ..." "By day... by night ...". Or otherwise the second part polishes things off.Parallelism is the juxtaposition of semantically (and frequently grammatically) similar word groups. Most ofthe time these word groups are the hemistichs of a distich or a tristich (called the interlinear or internal Parallel-ism). Parallelism can also be found between two or more verses (the interlinear or external Parallelism). Classi-cally we distinguish three types of Parallelism: synonymous, antithetical, and synthetical....