One of the core features of Hebrew poetry is parallelisms structured as couplets. In its simplest form, this is two lines of poetry in which the second line echoes the meaning of the first. Consider Psalm 25:4
Make me to know your ways, O Lord;
Teach me your paths.
And Numbers 23:8
How can I curse whom God has not cursed?
How can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced?
Generally, this repetition of meaning is not accompanied by any phonological similarities between the two lines. The second line needn’t sound like the first line in order for the couplet to qualify as an example of Hebraic parallelism. Indeed, in the majority of examples, the second line usually doesn’t sound like the first.
Readers who are familiar with, e.g., poetry in English or German will need to unlearn the habit of counting syllables and looking for metrical patterns, or listening for rhymes. Those features are rare in Hebrew poetry.
The authors of the New Testament carried this structure into Greek. Parallelisms can be found in many of the NT books, e.g., Matthew 6:24
For either he will hate the one and love the other,
Or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
Surprisingly, Luke, in his Gospel and in Acts, shows traces of this habit, even though many scholars hypothesize that he was a gentile.
If indeed Luke was a gentile, he may have unconsciously picked up the habit of parallelism through immersion in Semitic linguistic environment; or perhaps he deliberately used the structure in his writing.
Other scholars suggest that Luke was not a gentile, but a Jew raised in a Greek-speaking community, perhaps in Syria. Many of these Hellenized Jews adopted lifestyles quite different from the Jews in Israel, and lifestyles quite similar to the Greeks and Romans. Yet they were exposed to the Tanakh, i.e., to the Old Testament, as they read the Septuagint. In this scenario, Luke would have picked up the habit of parallelism from the LXX.
Whether Luke was a Jew or a gentile, and whether his use of parallelism is intentional or unwitting, clear examples are found in his Gospel and in Acts. Different editions and translations are inconsistent in whether they mark these parallelisms as poetry by line breaks. Often, the parallelisms are printed as normal prose, hiding the fact that they are poetic.
These verses from chapter one (1:32-36) of Luke’s Gospel, in which the angel Gabriel speaks, are printed as prose in many editions, but they are clearly Greek clauses which follow the rules of Hebrew poetry:
He will be called the Son of the Highest;
And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever,
And of his kingdom there will be no end.
And
The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
And the power of the Most High will overshadow you.Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age;
And this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren.
In the same chapter (1:1:46-55), Mary replies to the angel, and her words are likewise often constructed in parallel couplets:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Mary also expresses herself in another type of parallelism, in which the second line in the couplet is not a direct repetition of the idea in the first line, but rather an extension or development of the first line, or a re-framing of the first line’s idea by showing this idea from another perspective:
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
God has “shown strength” in the first line; this “strength” is detailed and amplified when we learn that it was shown in the course of scattering.
The couplet which immediately follows shows parallelism by a sort of double negation:
He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estates.
To “bring down the mighty” is to “exalt the humble” — the two are mirror images of each other; they are complementary shapes, like a bronze casting and the mold in which it was cast. The next couplet has the same schema:
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
Each couplet speaks of God’s action toward the powerful and the vulnerable. The two couplets themselves form a sort of meta-parallelism and a chiastic structure. The first couplet begins with God’s action toward the powerful and moves to His action toward the vulnerable; the second couplet treats the two in reverse order.
Chiasmus on the level of a two-line couplet, as well as larger chiastic structures which can include many lines, work well with Hebraistic parallelism, and are often found in Scripture generally, but not often in Luke.
Even if Luke was a gentile, and even if he composed his text in Greek, both of which seem likely, his composition is still shaped, consciously or unwittingly, by the Semitic literary structures which he must have frequently encountered.
