parallelism

In rhetoric, parallelism is a stylistic device where similar ideas are arranged in balanced phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. This technique uses repetition of sounds, meanings, and structures to organize, emphasize, and highlight relationships between elements. It can range from simple word pairs like "ordain and establish" to more complex structures, such as Francis Bacon's "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."1

Parallelism is a significant feature in Hebrew poetry and literature from the ancient Middle East. The Old and New Testaments, influenced by Hebrew poetry, contain numerous examples of parallelism. For instance, in the Psalms, one can find lines like "but they flattered him with their mouths; they lied to him with their tongues."1

In biblical interpretation, parallelism is sometimes used as a hermeneutical principle, stemming from the belief in the unity of scripture. However, it's advised to use this principle sparingly. A naive form of parallelism is the "concordant" method, which assumes a word consistently carries the same meaning throughout the Bible.2