Understanding of biblical poetry is enhanced by the study of its structure. In this book Adele Berlin analyzes parallelism, a major feature of Hebrew poetry, from a linguistic perspective. This new edition of Berlin’s study features an additional chapter, “The Range of Biblical Metaphors in Smikhut,” by late Russian linguist Lida Knorina. Berlin calls this addition “innovative and instructive to those who value the linguistic analysis of poetry.” It is a fitting coda to Berlin’s adept analysis.

Top Highlights

“The real contrast, however, comes when the same noun (or same root) appears in two different genders” (Page 41)

“Morphologic parallelism involves the morphologic equivalence or contrast of individual constituents of the lines. Many lines contain more than one type of grammatical parallelism; and sometimes the boundary between morphologic and syntactic parallelism is indistinct.” (Page 31)

“The evidence seems to indicate that any word classes that serve the same syntactic function can be paired in morphologic parallelism.” (Page 35)

“In syntactic parallelism, the syntax of the lines is equivalent” (Page 53)

“There are two basic sentence types in Hebrew: those without a finite verb (nominal) and those with a” (Page 54)

"Adele Berlin writes felicitously, and she is a reliable Old Testament scholar. In this newly reprinted edition of The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism, Berlin probes the linguistic phenomenon of parallelism. . . . I am confident that the reader will readily agree with Berlin herself that the study of parallelism is, above all else, fun.
—David Noel Freedman

The twentieth century has seen important breakthroughs in many fields of the humanities. Roman Jakobson offered us creative and fascinating explorations at the interface of linguistics and poetics. Building on his work, Adele Berlin showed us how pervasive and many-sided the phenomenon of parallelism is in biblical poetry. It was a delight to follow her extensive array of well-chosen examples. We are lucky now to have Berlin’s lucid language back in this revised edition.
—Jan Fokkelman, Leiden University

I have used Adele Berlin’s Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism in both my teaching and my research for twenty years, and I still find it fresh and enlightening. Berlin examines parallelism through a linguistic lens, showing it to be a system of forces that combine to give biblical poetry its special powers of communication. Her book is lucid, closely argued, and based on linguistic erudition and literary sensitivity.
—Michael V. Fox, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Berlin starts out writing like most academics when she discusses the history of parallelism: stuffy language, convoluted sentences, rare words instead of plain language. But once she gets into the subject of the book, the types of Biblical parallelism, the writing relaxes a bit, unfortunately, only a little bit. Nevertheless, this is a good volume on the types of parallelism from grammatical to syntactical to morphological. ( )

Berlin starts out writing like most academics when she discusses the history of parallelism: stuffy language, convoluted sentences, rare words instead of plain language. But once she gets into the subject of the book, the types of Biblical parallelism, the writing relaxes a bit, unfortunately, only a little bit. Nevertheless, this is a good volume on the types of parallelism from grammatical to syntactical to morphological. ( )

The author uses developments from the field of linguistics and applies them to what can be understood about Old Testament parallelism. The author demonstrates the functions and interplay of different forms of parallelism, including grammatical, lexical, syntactical, and phonetic parallelism. Well-argued and replete with examples. ( )