Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

As a dog returns to its vomit,
    so fools repeat their folly.

• Proverbs 26:11

Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
    or you yourself will be just like him.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
    or he will be wise in his own eyes.

• Proverbs 26:4-5

Ascribe to the Lord, you heavenly beings,
    ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;
    worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.

• Psalm 29:1-2

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it;
for he founded it on the seas
    and established it on the waters.

• Psalms 24:1-2

Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

• Habakkuk 3::17-18

“My enjoyment of the Psalms has been greatly increased lately. The point has been made before, but let me make it again: what an admirable thing it is in the divine economy that the sacred literature of the world shd. have been entrusted to a people whose poetry, depending largely on parallelism, shd. remain poetry in any language you translate it into.’”

• C.S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis

I have started a series of quizzes on every other Saturday morning that shows poetry that is found in most books of the Bible.  I have gone from Genesis through Proverbs, and the closest to not having any poetry is Esther, but even then there is one statement that meets some of the criteria.  Parallelism is one of those, and much of Proverbs has that type of poetry.

Parallelism can be used in many ways.  Synonymous Parallelism is making two statements that are different ways of saying, or thinking of, the same thing.  Proverbs 26:11 is an example of that.

Antithetic Parallelism is two statements that look at opposite views of the subject, or at least different ways of thinking on that topic.  Proverbs 26:4-5 look like they contradict each other, but they are looking at answering a fool.  If you answer a fool in kind, you end up acting the fool yourself.  Paul told Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:23 to not enter into foolish or stupid arguments, but some foolish statements or questions must be answered.  If not, your silence gives the fool the idea that he is right.  So, the wise person knows how to address a foolish idea without getting into a foolish argument.

I taught at a government nuclear site long ago.  There was a misconception about some aspect of measuring some type of nuclear activity.  I had a question on the final exam, letting the class choose the misconception over the fact.  Out of teaching that class to over a thousand employees, I only had one person who got the question wrong.  Sadly, he was an instrument technician that could be assigned to fix that instrument.  He passed the exam, but he would not accept that he got the question wrong.  He chased me down the hall to have me correct his score.  He got in my face, almost to the point of violence.  I calmly explained the nuclear physics issue that he misunderstood, but he screamed even louder.  The superintendent of his division came out from his office down the hall and calmly said that I was correct.  The technician was incorrect.  If the argument continued, especially if it crossed the line into violence, the technician would have to look for new employment.  Then, the superintendent turned to me and thanked me for the work I was doing and the way I was handling such incidents, but I could rest calmly at night.  The technician’s file would be flagged so that he never worked on that piece of equipment again.

Some people can be extremely intelligent, but old wives’ tales that are incorrect are sometimes hard to let go of, and it makes a fool out of us – just for a moment in that one respect.  My job was to convey the truth in a way that was understood, even though the topics could be extremely complex.  But sometimes unlearning a falsehood is harder than learning the truth.

But back to parallelism, although there were bits of parallelism in my example, Synthetic Parallelism is building on the first statement.  There is a bit of that in Proverbs 26:4-5, but it is well represented in Psalm 29:1-2.  Psalm 24:1-2 starts out synonymous, but then the second verse builds on the first, adding an element of synthetic.

But, what if the first half of the parallel statements are repeated in several metaphors until the second half of the statement is made.  If we see what is going on, this type of parallelism builds a tension as we anticipate what all these metaphors have in common.  We see that easily in Habakkuk 3:17-18.  This is called Climactic (or Stair-step) Parallelism.

When I was growing up, and first learning about how poetry had to rhyme and poetry had to have a certain meter, I asked the Sunday school teacher and my parents why the poetry in the Bible did not rhyme and it did not have any distinguishable meter.  The answer was always “It was written in Hebrew and the meter and rhyme got lost in translation.”

But the truth is that it never had it in the first place.  You give one side of the coin and then with a dramatic pause, you can give another statement that means the same thing, or means the opposite, or some combination of things for dramatic effect.

Biblical poetry is used to drive the point home so that our heart changes.  And tugging on those “heart strings” along the way might be a great way to accomplish that.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.