Psalms Explorer parallelism analyses

Roy Daniel

Hello to my logos community;

I needed help interpreting the lowercase letters in the parallel analysis. Although when one's cursor hovers over the lowercase letters and it might indicate it being "Synonymous" or "Synthetic" or other, it does not explain the significance of the various lowercase letters within one parallel unit.

In the case of Psalms 46 verse 1(enable Parallelism), you have two lowercase "a" letter and when your cursor hovers over the "a"  it indicates it is Synonymous. But when you come to verse 2 within it's parallel unit and you hover over it's lowercase letters it indicates it is Synthetic; and it's lowercase letters are "abbccbc". Why isn't the lowercase letter "b" not given in front of "Its waters roar and foam". This phrase seems to carry the same idea as the previous phrase in verse 2, "though the earth gives way" , "though the mountains be moved" so in like manner the phrase, "though its waters roar and foam.

I am so confused with the significance of these lowercase letters and the entire parallelism analysis.

I also have question on how the indentation are determined in the structural analysis. Please answer all questions concerning Psalms 46. Thank you! God Bless you all!

Sincerely,

Roy Daniel

Rick Brannan (Logos)

Hi Roy.

The parallelism analysis was done on the Hebrew text; the analysis in the English text is accomplished through reverse interlinear alignment. The order of the lower-case letters in the popup represents the order in the Hebrew text.

So a few questions: Are you asking about the placement of a lower-case letter in the English or Hebrew? If English, which English text? (ESV?) The lines between classifying something as synthetic and synonymous are sometimes slight and overlapping; this may be an instance.

On the structural analysis, have you consulted the 'About' text in the interactive tool? ("About" on the toolbar after the version selector). Here's that text:

Structural Analysis

The structure of each Psalm is identified as either:

• Acrostic — each line, or each line in each strophe, begins with a different letter of the alphabet. These are the simplest structures to identify.
• Chiastic (or symmetrical, concentric) — topical/thematic units are introduced in sequence up to a central pinnacle, sometimes called a pivot or fulcrum. The sequence is then revisited in reverse order, creating a round-trip from a starting point to an emphasis point and back again. In this notation, corresponding units are labeled with a corresponding letter of the alphabet: The “A” unit at the beginning corresponds to another “A” unit at the end. For the identification of these structures, much is owed to Robert Alden’s analysis published in JETS , though we deviated at various points where it seemed good to us to do so.
• Strophic — lines are grouped into thematic units, somewhat akin to paragraphs. This analysis builds on Samuel Terrien’s The Psalms: Strophic Structure and Theological Commentary.

Ps 46 is noted as a chiasm, so the indentations are controlled by whether a section is ABCD, etc.; the headings go with the structural analysis. 

Does this help?