Visual Representations of Biblical Poetic Parallelism

Within a broader context of visual and musical symmetry patterns, we explore biblical parallelism, the poetic symmetry patterns of the Bible. We present six frequently occurring parallel forms – simple, chiastic, elliptical, sequential, unequal length, and repeated words. These six forms are broad enough to include many known examples of biblical parallelism. Our major contribution is a system of visual representation based on four attributes column position, shading, use of blanks and caps. The visual representation system compactly represents and indicates diverse parallel styles at a glance. Many illustrations are presented including a complex parallelism using four parallelism methods Symmetry – in Sight, Music and Speech The purpose of this paper is to give an introductory expository description of biblical poetic symmetry patterns and also, to provide a visual representation system for these patterns. Prior to outlining our approach and novelties, we lightly review visual and musical symmetry patterns. Visual Symmetry. The literature on visual symmetry is extensive, comprehensive, formulated abstractly, and contains many beautiful theorems as well as intriguing applications [2] [11]. In a very rough sense, symmetry refers to sameness. More specifically, a visual pattern is said to possess symmetry if it remains the same under some length preserving transformation. Mathematicians have enumerated all possible one, two and three-dimensional symmetries. Although, initially, the application of these results was a technical scientific application, to crystal structures in chemistry, in the last 20 years results on symmetry have fruitfully been applied more broadly, for example, anthropological studies show that distinct cultures typically use distinct visual patterns [11]. We will see below this relationship between distinct cultures and distinct patterns in poetic symmetry also. Musical Symmetry. The application of symmetry to music is well established and is skillfully used by both composers and researchers. Some have studied musical symmetry in the context of a single composer (e.g. [10]), while others have comprehensively studied musical symmetry generally (e.g. [8], who in footnote 3, gives an excellent snapshot of the vast literature on the subject). Although there is no purely abstract mathematical classification of musical symmetry starting out from theoretical definitions and then deriving all possible symmetry types, there are powerful automated symmetry formalisms which allow machine identification of the representative melodies of a piece [1]. [4] presents a recent, interesting, theoretical approach by showing a one-one correspondence between each visual onedimensional symmetry pattern and a corresponding musical symmetry. Bridges 2011: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture