Open almost any psalm and you will notice that it seems to say things twice. Psalm 19 begins:
The heavens tell over and over how glorious God is; the vault of the sky makes known what his hands have made.
The heavens and the vault of the sky are the same thing. Telling and making known are the same act. God’s glory and the work of his hands are two ways of naming what the sky shows. The second half of the verse says again what the first half said, in different words.
This is not padding. It is the way Hebrew poetry is built. A reader who knows how it works will read the Psalms, Proverbs, Job and the prophets more accurately, and will see why a translation has to make some choices about how poetry looks on the page.
What makes Hebrew poetry poetry
English poetry has traditionally relied on rhyme and on a regular beat. Hebrew poetry uses neither in any consistent way. There are sound patterns, and lines tend to be short, often three or four stressed words each, but no one has found a fixed metre that holds across the Psalms.
What Hebrew poetry does have, everywhere, is the paired line. A verse of poetry is usually made of two lines, sometimes three, and the lines lean on each other. Scholars call a single line a colon (plural cola), and the relationship between the lines parallelism.
The word goes back to Robert Lowth, an Oxford professor and later bishop of London, whose lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews were published in Latin in 1753. Lowth called the pattern parallelismus membrorum, the parallelism of the members, and sorted it into three kinds. His three kinds are still a useful place to start, even though scholars now think they are too tidy.
This is a gift to translators. Rhyme and metre are lost when a poem leaves its language. Parallelism survives.
Lines that echo
Lowth’s first kind is synonymous parallelism, where the second line restates the first. Psalm 19:2 is an example. So is Isaiah’s complaint at the start of his book:
An ox recognizes its owner, a donkey the feeding trough of its master; but Israel does not know, my people give it no thought.
The verse has four lines in two pairs. The ox and the donkey are a pair: each knows where it belongs. Israel and “my people” are a pair: neither knows. The two halves of the verse are then set against each other, the animals against the people who should know better.
Look again at the last pair, though. “Israel does not know” becomes “my people give it no thought”. The second line is not just a repeat. It names Israel as God’s people, which sharpens the charge, and it moves from knowing to considering. The record for this verse notes that the Hebrew verb here means to give careful thought to something. Israel does not even stop to think.
That small movement is typical. Even in “synonymous” lines, the second line usually adds something: a more specific word, a stronger image, a closer focus.
Lines that contrast
Lowth’s second kind is antithetic parallelism, where the second line says the opposite of the first. The book of Proverbs is full of it. Chapter 10 opens a new collection with this pair:
The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son is his father’s joy, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother.
Wise son, foolish son. Joy, sorrow. Father, mother. The record for this verse makes a point that is easy to miss: the two lines are one saying, and it applies to both parents. A wise son is his mother’s joy too, and a foolish son grieves his father. The poet divides father and mother between the lines for the sake of the pattern, not to say that fathers feel one thing and mothers another. Another meaning decision on the verse notes that from here on most of the proverbs set a line against its opposite, and that each pair makes one point.
Psalm 1 ends with a contrast of the same kind:
For the LORD knows the path of the righteous and cares for it, but the path of the wicked ends in ruin.
Here the record points out what does not match. The LORD “knows” the way of the righteous, which in Hebrew means more than being aware of it: he cares for it and looks after it. The psalm does not say that he knows the way of the wicked. That way simply perishes, like a path that fades out and leads nowhere. Sometimes the meaning of a parallel lies in where it breaks.
Lines that build
Lowth’s third kind he called synthetic. It was a catch-all for lines that neither repeat nor contrast but carry the thought further. Later readers have found more precise patterns inside it.
One of the most striking is the “staircase”, where a line starts, breaks off, and starts again, climbing each time. Psalm 93:
The rivers have risen, LORD; the rivers have raised their roar; the rivers lift high their crashing waves.
The record calls it a repeated line that grows each time, like waves rising. Psalm 92:10 does the same thing with the LORD’s enemies (“Look at your enemies, LORD! Look, your enemies are doomed”), and the record there names it as a pattern of Hebrew poetry.
Another kind of building is the movement inside Psalm 1:1:
How blessed is the one who does not walk by the advice of the wicked, or stand on the path that sinners tread, or sit where mockers gather!
Walk, stand, sit. The advice of the wicked, the path of sinners, the seat of mockers. The meaning decision for this verse reads the three lines as three steps deeper in: a life that first goes along with the wicked, then stops among them, then settles down with them. The blessed person takes none of these steps. Three parallel lines, and the parallelism itself tells the story.
“A, and what’s more, B”
In 1981 James Kugel published The Idea of Biblical Poetry, and in 1985 Robert Alter published The Art of Biblical Poetry. Both books changed how scholars think about parallelism.
Kugel argued that Lowth’s categories made the lines sound more alike than they are. The second line, he said, is rarely a mere restatement. Its force is something like “A, and what’s more, B”: the second line seconds the first, carrying it further, making it more vivid, more specific or more intense. Alter traced the same movement and called it intensification, or focusing. Day and night, a general word and then a sharper one, an action and then its result.
Not every scholar agrees with every part of their accounts. But most now read parallel lines with an eye on what the second line adds, and the examples above show why. “My people” adds to “Israel”. The rivers’ “crashing waves” add to their “roar”. The second line is where a Hebrew poet often puts the point.
This matters for translation. If a translator assumes the lines simply repeat, it is tempting to merge them, or to choose the same English words for both. A translation that keeps the two lines distinct lets the reader feel the second one land.
Parallelism as a key to meaning
Parallel lines also help with hard words. When one line is clear and the other is not, each can explain the other.
Psalm 19 is an example. Verse 3 says that “day to day pours forth speech, and night to night makes known knowledge”. The record for that verse reads it as a message passed along a line, each day telling the next and each night the next, so that it never stops. Then verse 4 says that there is no speech and no words. The record marks this verse uncertain. Most likely the sky speaks in silence: its message is seen, not heard. Some read it instead as saying there is no language in which their voice is not heard. The parallel lines on either side are the main evidence each reading uses.
Parallelism can also keep a reader from pressing a detail too hard. Proverbs 26:4 and 26:5 are a pair of verses that say opposite things in nearly the same words: do not answer a fool according to his folly, and answer a fool according to his folly. The record for verse 4 says they stand side by side on purpose. Neither cancels the other. Wisdom is knowing which one the moment calls for, and the pair shows that proverbs are not rules to apply mechanically.
Poems from A to Z
Some Hebrew poems are built on the alphabet. In an acrostic poem each verse, or each group of verses, begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from aleph to taw.
Psalm 119 is the longest. The record for its first verse describes it: twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and each of the eight verses of a stanza begins with that letter. The psalm opens with אֶשֶׁר (ʾašrê), “how blessed”, which begins with aleph, the first letter. Verse 9, the first of the second stanza, begins with beth, and its record says so. Nearly every verse names God’s law with one of eight words, and Open Word Bible gives each of the eight the same English wording throughout the psalm, so that a reader can follow them.
Lamentations is another. The record for Lamentations 1:1 explains that each of the chapter’s twenty-two verses begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Chapters 2 and 4 follow the same plan, chapter 3 gives each letter three verses, and chapter 5 has twenty-two verses but does not follow the alphabet. The record adds a reading of why: the form gives grief an order and a fullness, from the first letter to the last.
Proverbs ends with an acrostic too. From 31:10 to the end of the book, each verse begins with the next letter, and here Open Word Bible puts the fact in a footnote, so that readers who never open the records still meet it. Psalms 111 and 112 are acrostics as well, and several other psalms, among them 25, 34 and 145, follow the alphabet more loosely.
No translation can keep an acrostic. The letters are Hebrew letters, and the words that begin with them in Hebrew begin with other letters in English. What a translation can do is tell the reader, so that the shape of the poem is not lost without a trace. That is what these notes are for.
How Open Word Bible sets poetry out
Most modern Bibles print poetry in lines, and Open Word Bible does too. The question is where the lines break.
Our answer is to follow the Hebrew text itself. The medieval scribes known as the Masoretes (see The Masoretes) marked every word of the Hebrew Bible with accents. The accents guide chanting, but they also show how a verse divides. In each verse a main dividing accent splits it into its halves, and lesser accents split those halves again. The Psalms, Proverbs and Job use their own system of accents, with one more dividing mark ranked above the usual one.
The project’s style guide sets the rule: at the Literal and Balanced levels, break the line at the main division in every poetic verse. Lesser divisions are used for a clear three-line verse, such as Psalm 1:1 or 1:3, or where a line would otherwise run long. A small script in the project reads the accents from the Hebrew data and prints, for each verse of a chapter, where the cola fall beside our English, so that whoever places the breaks can see both.
A few further rules follow from the principle that meaning and wording are separate:
- Lines change no words. Setting a verse in lines only inserts line breaks. If the English would need different words to fall into lines, that is a change of rendering with its own decision, made separately.
- Break at an English phrase. A line ends where the English clause or phrase ends. The English line holds what the Hebrew colon holds, but in English word order.
- Each level places its own lines. Literal and Balanced follow the cola closely. Readable may use fewer lines where it joins clauses. In Psalm 1:2, Literal and Balanced each have two lines, and Readable has one, because its single sentence says both halves at once. Readable never has more lines than the Hebrew has divisions.
- Titles. A psalm title that shares its verse with the poem, as in Psalm 23:1, becomes the first line. A title that is a verse of its own stays as prose.
In the reader’s reading, study, parallel and interlinear views, poetry is set with a hanging indent: the second line of a verse sits one step in. Where text is shown on one line, as in search results, shared quotations and the quotations in this article, a line break simply reads as a space.
The work is not finished. Many books are already set in lines, among them Proverbs, Job, Lamentations and most of Isaiah, but the Psalms are being done a group at a time. Where a record has no line breaks, the reader shows it as prose.
A note on verse numbers
Readers comparing Open Word Bible with other Bibles will notice that some psalm verses are numbered one higher. Many psalms have a title, such as “For the director of music. A psalm of David.” The Hebrew Bible counts that title as verse 1, or as part of it. Most English Bibles print the title without a number and start counting with the poem.
Open Word Bible follows the Hebrew numbering. That is why Psalm 19:2 here is the verse most English Bibles number 19:1. Where a short title shares its verse with the first line, as in Psalms 23 and 24, the numbers come out the same either way, and the records say so.
For more on how a single sentence can be given at three levels without changing what it means, see Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning. Two related articles look at other features of Hebrew that are hard to carry into English: Verb tenses that aren’t tenses and Wordplay that can’t be translated. The headings at the top of many psalms have an article of their own, Selah and the psalm headings.
Open Psalm 1, Psalm 19, Proverbs 10 and Lamentations 1 to see the records.