Psalm 121:4

In following along (in German) with the readings on Worship Anew last week, I found an-other instance where the German emphasizes parallelism by using alliteration (only after which did I realize that this is also true in the English).  Psalm 121:4 is "Siehe, der Hüter Israels schläft und schlummert nicht."  In the ESV, this is "Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep."  Schläft and schlummert (and slumber and sleep) both mean pretty much the same thing, and the repeated schl (or sl) highlights this.

Luke 16:19-31 (The Rich Man and Lazarus)

One of the readings for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels last month was Luke 16:19-31.  That's not the reading from the lectionary, but it's an appropriate text because after Lazarus died, he "was carried by the angels to Abraham's side."

This reading reminded me of the song "Dives and Lazarus" (drawn from this text), which I wrote about here.  After writing that, I kept thinking about the Biblical text, and I realized that while the song provides a fitting name for the rich man, it's significant that he's not named in the text.

In John 10, Jesus says that the Good Shepherd "calls his own sheep by name" and that "I know my own and my own know me," and in Matthew 10, He says, "So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven."  Because of his faith, Lazarus' name is known; because of his lack of faith, the rich man's name isn't.

Ezekiel 4:16

I read Ezekiel 4 a couple weeks ago, and I noticed something interesting about verse 16:  "Moreover he [God] said to me, 'Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem.  They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay.'"  At first, I noticed only that the second sentence features zeugma:  while "by weight" and "with anxiety" are both adverbial prepositional phrases that modify "eat," "by weight" describes how in a physical sense and "with anxiety" describes how in an emotional sense.  Same for "drink water by measure and in dismay" because the sentence also features structural parallelism.

When I lookt up the definition of zeugma to confirm that I'd correctly identified it, Merriam-Webster's observation that "Zeugma... is economical: it contracts two sentences into one" made me realize something else.  This verse describes how people will have to ration their food and water, and zeugma's reuse of sentence elements illustrates this saving in a grammatical way.  Rather than two clauses ("They shall eat bread by weight, and they shall eat it with anxiety"), they're combined into one.

Then I started wondering whether this structure is in the original Hebrew.  I've been reading The Lutheran Study Bible, which uses the English Standard Version.  The New International Version has the more prosaic "The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair."  When I referenced the STEP Bible, I discovered that the Hebrew text does have zeugma:

וְאָכְלוּ־לֶחֶם בְּמִשְׁקָל וּבִדְאָגָה וּמַיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה וּבְשִׁמָּמוֹן יִשְׁתּֽוּ׃

Here's a link to the interlinear.

Jeremiah 4:9

I've been following along with the weekend edition of The Daily Dose of Hebrew as it goes through Jeremiah.  Yester-day, the verse was Jeremiah 4:9.  I always read the verse in my Bible before watching the video, and I noticed a slightly interesting thing in the ESV:  "'In that day, declares the LORD, courage shall fail both king and officials.  The priests shall be appalled and the prophets astounded."

In the second sentence, where the Hebrew has a chiasm, the English translation has parallel structure (with the ellipsis of "shall be," even).  As if to emphasize that parallel structure, there's consonance between priests and prophets and assonance between appalled and astounded.