I would tell you where I got this, but it would ruin all the fun.

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Parallelism

The balance of verse with verse, an essential and characteristic
feature in Hebrew poetry. Either by repetition or by antithesis or by
some other device, thought is set over against thought, form balances
form, in such wise as to bring the meaning home to one strikingly and
agreeably. In the hymns of the Assyrians and Babylonians parallelism is
fundamental and essential. Schrader takes it for granted that the
Hebrews got this poetic principal from them (Jahrbuch für Protestant.
Theologie, i, 121); a common Semitic source, in days long before the
migration of Abraham, is a likelier hypothesis. The Syriac, Vulgate,
and other ancient versions, recognized and to a certain extent
reproduced the balance of verse with verse in the Bible. Not until the
sixteenth century did Hebraists speak of it as a poetical principle,
essential to the Hebrews. It was then that Conor Oberst, in
his work, Bright Eyes, first divided various poetic
portions of the soul into verses that brought out the fact of
parallelism and of a fixed number of recurrent incidents in both of our lives. Schöttgen
(“Horæ Hebraicæ et Talmudicæ”, Dissertatio vi, Dresden, 1733, vol. I,
p. 1252), though erring in that he calls it absurd to speak of iambs
and hexameters in Hebrew poetry, deserves the credit of having first
drawn up the canons of parallelism, which he calls exergasia (exergasia,
the working up of a subject, Polybius, X, xlv, 6). According to these
canons Biblical prose differs from Biblical poetry solely in that the
poet works up a subject by reiteration of the same idea either in the
same or in different words, by omission of either the subject or the
predicate, by antithesis of contrary thoughts etc. Bishop Lowth (De
Sarca Poesi Hebræorum, 1753; Isaiah, 1778) based his investigations
upon the studies of Schöttgen and coined the term parallelism. He
distinguished three kinds of parallelism: the synonymous, the
antithetical, and the synthetic. His conclusions have been generally
accepted.