Chiasmi in Old Testament Prose

In a previous post, we looked briefly at parallelism as a technique in Hebrew poetry. There are other important structures in the Hebrew scriptures.

For thousands of years, human writing, when it existed, was duplicated by careful one-on-one copying of the text.  Ancient Hebrew scrolls were replicated by schools of copyists and a single scroll or book was expensive and the property of a rich man or a group of people.  The Old Testament scriptures were read aloud in a synagogue or memorized and recited in public. 

Our modern world, with individuals owning one or more books, did not come into being until the Renaissance, after the invention of movable type. (See this Wikipedia article on the history of printing.)

Before the printing press, before books were common, the stories and Scriptures were communicated in  publicly readings. It was likely that stories, like those of Ruth or Esther, were memorized and repeated in common gatherings at certain feasts.

The stories and writings come to us with a variety of interesting structures. These structures may have made the writings easier to memorize; they also added a certain elegance and emphasis to the storytelling.  

One technique for emphasis in a text is to have a statement appear at the beginning and the end of the text, as a bookend or bracket for the passage. For example, Psalm 8 begins and ends with 

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

This is clearly the theme of that song. Psalm 118 is another example, beginning and ending with

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.

The technical term of the bookends is inclusio. An inclusio might set off a certain passage from the rest of the text, as our modern paragraph markings do. (Ancient Hebrew and Greek had no punctuation or paragraph markings.)

https://www.ulbap.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Inclusio-Examples.pdf

Once one is aware of the concept of the inclusio, one discovers double inclusios, brackets within brackets, in the form A B <text> B' A'. For example, in Genesis 39, the story of Potiphar's wife is set off by these statements 

The Lord was with Joseph ... the Lord was with him and ... gave him success in everything he did,

and

 the Lord was with him...  the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.

These bookends set aside the episode of Potiphar's wife and provide a counterpoint to the abuse and defeat Joseph appears to be suffering.

Chiasmi

The concept of inclusios and double inclusios can be generalized and the ancient Hebrew writers did this. Some text would involve a series of concentric circles, in the form
A
    B
        C
<some text>
        C'
    B'
A
and so on. This structure is a chiasmus, a text in which a sequence of concepts or words is then inverted at the end. This seems to have been a fundamental concept for the ancient Hebrew writers and Hebrew scholars have enjoyed discovering these chiasmi (chiasmi is the plural of chiasmus) throughout the Old Testament. 

In Genesis 1:27 there is a chiasmic structure, concentric circles. The poem displays an A B B' A' form, 

 God created ... 

in his own image ... 

in the image ... 

he created 

in which the first and last lines repeat, and then the second and second-to-last lines have the same concept, and so on. (This is in addition to the parallelism there noted in last Sunday's essay!)

This structure of "concentric circles" can become quite complicated. Here is an analysis of the Flood Account as a chiasmic structure.

(This is from a BioLogos forum. Various versions of this chiamus can be found by searching on the title of the slide.  I learned about chiasmi in the previously recommended Exodus course by Carmen Imes.)

Note that the center statement of this chiasmus is the emphatic statement that "God remembered Noah". In some cases, the chiasmus has a central concept and that is the most important concept of the prose.

Resources

If you wish to obsess over chiasmi in Scripture, someone else has already done that. Look at this website, the chiasmusexchange that explores this in depth! (Anytime I "nerd out" on some concept, I discover there is someone that has been there before me!)

Here are notes by Robert Utley on Hebrew poetry that include discussion on forms such as inclusio, chiasmus and others.