Parallelism In Arabic Prose

ANCIENT Near Eastern literatures - Egyptian Accadian, Ugaritic, Aramaic etc., and above all the Hebrew Old Testament - employ a style of elevated diction which European Scholars have not hesitated to call poetry. The linguistic structure of this style, however, differs greatly from European concepts of verse or for that matter the Arabic concept of shi9r; these being dominated by the purely acoustic phenomena of a highly structured pattern of rhythmical recurrences i.e. metre, and in some cases, rhyme or alliteration. Contrasted with this, Hebrew poetry is dominated by parallelism in the field of meaning. In simple terms, this has been described by Eissfeld thus : « The poetic texts consist of verses formed from two - or more rarely three - stichoi combined in which the stichoi or members are in some way 'parallel' to each other, in that they offer variations on the same idea. This may come about by the second member repeating the content of the first in different words (synonymous parallelism), or it may be that it sets it off sharply with contrasted thought (further and completes it (synthetic parallelism) »,