Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell you that you need to learn Hebrew to do Bible study. (I’m admittedly biased in that direction, but I have to be honest).
There’s a lot of poetry in the Old Testament. Hebrew poetry doesn’t work like poetry as we think of it. The kind of poetry we’re exposed to in school or maybe on greeting cards rhymes in sound:
Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.
Hebrew poetry, on the other hand, rhymes in thought. That is, the second (or successive) line in Hebrew poetry will echo the first in some way. That’s very handy to know for Bible study in books like Psalms and Proverbs. Modern English translations do a nice job of aligning Hebrew poetry in such a way that the English reader can tell what lines immediately relate to one another. If we can discern that with the eye, interpretation can proceed to how the lines are echoing each other. Scholars typically express this phenomenon with the advice, “Line A. . . . What’s more, Line B.” Line A says something; then line B elaborates. The only trick is that the thought-rhyming can be accomplished in a wide range of ways. Some examples will illustrate this.
Psalm 119:105 (A and B are synonymous thoughts)
A—Your word is a lamp to my feet,
B—and a light to my path.
Psalm 1:6 (B echoes A, but in opposite terms)
My son,
A—The Lord knows the way of the righteous,
B—but the way of the wicked will perish.
There are over a dozen options for understanding the relationships between lines of Hebrew poetry. The lines reinforce each other in thought. Parallelism helps us to see elements that are meant to be understood in tandem. Sometimes that’s handy for word study—parallelism is a context for a word’s usage. Having an eye for line relationships in poetry helps Bible students understand the biblical writer’s intended idea and weed out unintended interpretations.