Therefore, the tales of early Israel and the songs of her prophets were handed down through the family generations by word of mouth and long passages of the Torah were committed to memory. Not only were manuscripts and scrolls scarce, but there were also few who could read them. The Hebrew tradition, unlike the written Greek tradition, was oral. There are plenty of good reasons why a literary form of this peculiar type was attractive to the ancient Hebrew mind. A simple illustration of this, which uses five elements in an inverted parallelism, is found in Psalms 3:7–8: Psalms 3:7–8 Save meĪ second example of this, which is even longer, comes from Isaiah 60:1–3: Isaiah 60:1–3 Arise,įor behold, dimness shall cover the earth These structures may be several verses or several chapters long. A chiasm in Hebrew may be expanded to include any number of terms written in one order and then in the exact reverse order, i.e. Whereas in Greek, Latin and English, chiasms are rarely, if ever, composed of more than two elements, in Hebrew there appears to be no limit to the number of terms or ideas that can be employed. This is a significant factor in differentiating the chiasmus known for some time in the West from the chiasmus characteristic of ancient Hebrew. The reader, however, will notice that all these chiasms contain only two elements whose order is then reversed. Thus, “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he,” is charming and “He who fails to prepare, prepares to fail,” sounds solid and convincing. Thus in Pope’s “Essay on Man” this short chiasm appears:Įven in our modern nursery rhymes and maxims, the natural rhythm and immediate appeal of chiasmic lines is apparent. Some English authors, who had been thoroughly trained in the classics, naturally turned to chiasmus as a poetical form. Several centuries later Cicero used chiasmic lines as a rhetorical device for placing emphasis: Heraclitus, one of the early pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, used chiasmus to accentuate his notion of eternal flux and opposition: Thus, once the term chiasmus had been coined, it appropriately stuck.Īnd just as the name stuck, the idea of chiasmus also has stuck in the back of Western minds. (Matthew 10:39)įormulating this empirically, the simple chiasm takes on the apparent form of an X: a (Isaiah 55:8)Īnd from the New Testament: Matthew 10:39Īnd he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. Neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. As an example is the following verse: Isaiah 55:8 If the second line of a parallelism is inverted, that is to say, if its last element is placed first and the first, last, then a chiasm is created. Proverbs 15:1īut grievous words stir up anger.
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There are numerous examples of direct parallelism among the Proverbs, e.g. Two lines of poetry are said to be parallel if the component elements of one line correspond directly to those of the other, so to speak, in a 1:1 relationship. The name was derived from chi (X), the twenty-second letter in the Greek alphabet, and the Greek chiazein (to mark with an X), for the following reasons. The name chiasmus is descriptive of the form itself. Their works indicate that, although some chiasms appear in Greek, Latin and English, the form was originally Hebrew and dates at least to the eighth and tenth centuries B. Since that time in the mid-nineteenth century, there have been several reputed scholars, mostly theologians, who have published on the subject. Nevertheless, the awareness of such a form, except in isolated cases, remained a part of the intellectual subconsciousness of modern Western Europe until frequent chiasmal passages were discovered in the Bible. What Is Chiasmus?Ĭhiasmus appears to have begun as a structural form which then developed into an intriguing rhetorical device which has been used sporadically in prose and poetry by many authors for nearly three thousand years. The phenomenon which makes that possible is the presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. However, a recently recognized phenomenon in the Book of Mormon has now made it possible for us to cite many specific examples of passages in the Book of Mormon which bear the distinct stamp of an ancient Hebraic literary form. Actually, the only thing that became obvious was the fact that neither the believers nor the unbelievers were citing very many specific examples. Those who were not so credulous insisted that it obviously read like anything but a Hebrew text. Practically since the day the Book of Mormon rolled off the press in 1830, those who believed in the book asserted that it obviously read like a Hebrew text.