The chiasm card has been overplayed.

But mostly, in Western church, it is unplayed.

We miss a lot of what the biblical writers intended when we neglect the structural and literary devices that were so common in the ancient world and literature.

For any scratching their head, here below are excerpts from my primary post introducing chiasm and inclusio, with biblical examples( Chiasm and Inclusio)

 

A principle of spiritual warfare is there’s not a demon behind every bush.

But sometimes some bushes hide demoms.
And there’s not a bush behind every demon, either.

So it is with structural techniques like chiasm (definition) and inclusio (definition) Once you are attuned to seeing them in Scripture (and most ancient literatiure) it seems they are everywhere.

Sometimes they are.
Who can argue that “the first shall be last/
the last shall be first” is a chiasm?
A-B-B-A, X pattern.

But often the chiasm is wide enough to spotlight and intended embedded theme in between the endpoints.

And to really help us get what the Spirit is saying…structurally.

People remember how to perform a piece of music by using musical notations on scale. A similar solution to the problem of remembering how to perform a piece of dance has been solved with the use of Labonotation. In antiquity, it seems most written documents were intended to be read aloud, hence to be performed. The purpose of writing was to facilitate remembering how the document went when one read it aloud. But how did one make paragraphs or mark off units in a document read aloud? It seems that the main way to mark off a unit was to use repetition of words and/or phrases at the beginning and end of a unit, either alone (as in Matt 5:3, 10,”…for theirs is teh kingdom of heaven) or in parallel bracketing fashion (as John 1:18). The Greeks called such parallel brackets a chiasmus, after one half of the letter “chi” (our ‘X”), thus “>.”
-Social Science Comementary on the Gospel of John, p. 295, emphasis mine.. a free read online here.

Here is just one of many charts one can find online (click it to enlarge).. This Noah one is classic; most Bible teachers know it’s really there, but we fear showing you stuff like this, as soon you’ll find it even where it is not! (:






















The chart above is found here, and the accompanying article offers several more helpful examples.

Check out the entire gospel of John structured chiastically on p. 295ff of
this click
through
to the book quoted earlier (p 295ff).


And the point being…well, between the points: the midpoint.
God remembering Noah is meant to be seen as the point of the passage.

And inclusio:
Len Sweet is on to something, suggesting a Bible-wide inclusio. How wide and big can these things get? Wouldnt this cue us and clue us in to the heart message of the whole Book?
Check it out.

Ever notice Matthew starts with “His name will be called Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’
And ends…very last sentence…with “I will be with you.”?

No accident.
And neither is the midpoint and message of the gospel: “I will be with you” (18:20).
In Jesus, God is with us.
Jesus is the With-Us God.

Inclusio with chiasm.

You knew God was with us in Christ.. But now you see it as you look at Matthew structurally..

Now, go and do likewise…

but remember, once in awhile a cigar is just a cigar, a demon is not behind every bush.

But more often than not, we miss inclusio and chiasm that have been waiting for us all along.

Everyone has heard “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last,” and will recognize that as a chiasm…but they get much bigger and broader that that in Scripture. That’s when they really become helpful in suggesting themes…and help us “get the (center)point.”

An example I just found on House Church Central:

Eccl. 11:3 A Clouds and Rain Eccl. 11:7 B Light and Sun Eccl. 11:8a C Consider the days of darkness Eccl. 11:8b D All that comes is breath Eccl. 11:9a E Enjoy your Youth Eccl. 11:9b F But know … God will bring you to judgment Eccl. 11:10a E’ Enjoy your Youth Eccl. 11:10b D’ All of youth is breath Eccl. 12:1 C’ Consider God before the days of darkness Eccl. 12:2a B’ Sun and Light Eccl. 12:2b A’ Clouds and Rain

(Here and here are several more. The second link notes, to the delight of fellow INFPs that chiasm is also called “introverted parallelism.”)

I also highly recommend my professor David Bauer’s book, “The structure of Matthew’s gospel: a study in literary design,” most of it free online here.

They get bigger. Bruno Barnhart (an early adopter of new monasticism, by the way, podcasts here):

Peter Ellis, following the doctoral dissertation of John Gerhard, S.J., has presented the structure of John’s gospel…as completely determined by the laws of chiastic parallelism
-“The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center” p. 30,
…emphasis mine

Checking out Barnhart’s charts causes one to grasp why the
temple tantrum (a passage loaded with structural devices) appears early in Jesus ministry in John’s (but no other) gospel, etc..


But here’s today’s story:

Mike “Dissonance is Bliss” Rinaldi, a local filmmaker, told this at the first “Gathering to Bless Christians in the Arts. Blake Snyder, the screenwriter behind the classic “Save The Cat” book (which Mike also introduced us to) became a Christian not long before he died.

Often at this point in such a story, folks ask “Who led him to Christ?”

Go ahead and ask.

The answer is:

Chiasm.

It happened in large part because Mike, not even knowing if such a well-known and busy writer would respond to his email, asked him if he had heard about chiasm.

Turns out Snyder was fascinated with it all, and Mike was able to point out chiastic structure and shape in scriptwriting….and one thing led to another…and then in Scripture.

All roads, and all chiasms, lead to the Center and Source.


—————

James B. Jordan, “Chiasm and Life” in Biblical Theology Basics:

“Very much of human life is ‘there and back again,’ or chiastic. This is how God has designed human beings to live in the world. It is so obvious that we don’t notice it. But it is everywhere. This shape of human life arises ultimately from the give and take of the three Persons of God, as the Father sends the Spirit to the Son and the Son sends the Spirit back to the Father. We can see that literary chiasm is not a mere curiosity, a mere poetic device to structure the text. It arises from the very life of God, and is played out in the structure of the lives of the images of God in many ways and at many levels. It is because human beings live and move so often chiastically, that poets often find themselves drawn to chiastic writing. God creates chiasms out of His inner life, and so do the images of God.

Biblical chiasms are perfect. That is, they are perfectly matched to the human chiasms they address and transform. As we become more and more sensitive to Biblical chiasms, we will become more and more sensitive to one aspect of the true nature of human life under God. We will be transformed from bad human chiasms into good human chiasms. In this way, becoming sensitive to chiasm can be of practical transformative value to human life, though in deep ways that probably cannot be explained or preached very well.

One further thought. We saw in our previous essay that chiasms often have a double climax, one in the middle and the greatest at the end. The food we bought at market is put away in the cupboard and refrigerator when we get back home. Moving forward to a final climax is what all literature does, whether it has a middle climax or not. (Shakespeare’s five-act plays always move to a climax in the third and in the fifth acts.) This is just another way that human life matches literary production, in the Bible as well as in uninspired human literature. Becoming familiar with the shape and flow of Biblical texts will have a transforming effect on human life.”

James B. Jordan, “Chiasm and Life” in Biblical Theology Basics.

-link, Michael Bull’s blog: Theology you can eat and drink

 

Note: Michael Bull himself has his own book on biblical structure, “Totus Christus: A Biblical Theology of the Whole Christ” here; condensed version, “Bible Matrix: An Introduction to the DNA of the Scriptures” is here).

He draws from James Jordan (quoted above and found here), and Peter Leithart,whose posts on chiasm are here)

 

Jordan’s articles on chiasm in Matthew are here and here..

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