Poetry, Hebrew

Hebrew poetry differs fundamentally from Greek and English poetry in that its primary structural feature is parallelism — the balancing of thought between lines — rather than rhyme or meter. Robert Lowth (1753) identified three types: synonymous parallelism (the second line restates the first, Ps. 24:1), antithetic parallelism (the second line contrasts the first, Prov. 10:1), and synthetic or progressive parallelism (the second line develops or completes the first). Later analysis has refined these categories further.

Hebrew poetry includes three genres: lyrical (the Psalms and much of the Song of Solomon), gnomic or wisdom (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job), and prophetic or elegiac (portions of the prophetic books and the book of Lamentations, which is an acrostic in chapter 1). Much of the prophetic literature was originally delivered in poetic form. The acrostic structure — where successive verses begin with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet — appears in Psalms 119, Lamentations 1–4, and elsewhere as a mnemonic and artistic device.