Refiner's Fire Ministries

Apparently I slept, or daydreamed, or zoned out in some other way through the classes that covered chiastic structure when I was in college. I am embarrassed to admit that the first time I became aware of the term was in a living room in Las Vegas less than eight years ago. I was listening to a Book of Mormon scholar, who shall remain nameless, describing chiasmus, and the technique he used in presenting it convinced me that this pattern was the exclusive property of the BOM. Shame on me for sleeping through those classes. But, in my defense, college was a long time ago. There’s not a lot of literary discussion in nursing homes, where I have spent the better part of the last twenty or so years pedaling pills and engaged in other activities which we’ll not go into now.

This was one of the reasons I was so enraptured by the story of the “simple” farm boy and his Golden Bible. How could he have done all that neat stuff if not by the power of God? After I left the Restored Church I tucked chiastic structure away. Far away. So I’m not sure what compelled me to dust it off a few days ago and “Google” it.

I love Google. It lets you type in any outrageous combination of words and it will nearly always give you at least a piece of what you’re looking for. Whether or not the information it feeds you is accurate is for you to determine. You must be circumspect to a fault when dealing with the Internet, particularly with Google. In the case of “chiasmus” it gave me 293,000 references. While I realize this doesn’t quite measure up to the numbers we have been exposed to in the past sixteen months, it certainly provided me with enough fodder in which to muck around for a long time. For example, it took me to Wikipedia, where I learned that chiastic structure was used in the Bible, the Torah, "Paradise Lost" (which I studied in college) and "Beowulf" (which I also studied,) among dozens of obscure and extant works dating back to the early Greek or Hebrew, depending on your perspective or political bent. The word itself is Greek, but the LDS insist that Joseph Smith’s Golden Bible is Hebrew. Not to be contentious, but I thought it was English.

Google also took me to quite a large number of Mormon web sites, all of which claim that the Book of Mormon is undoubtedly authentic simply by virtue of the presence of so many chiastic arrangements. And therein lies the rub. One of the sites I found, maintained by one Jeff Lindsay, tells us: “In the late 1960s, a young Latter-day Saint discovered that an ancient form of Middle Eastern poetry was found throughout the Book of Mormon, suggestive of its ancient Semitic origins. This poetical form, chiasmus, a type of inverted parallelism, reaches highly artistic heights in the Book of Mormon and is difficult to ascribe to chance. Yet the information available to Joseph Smith when the Book of Mormon was translated provided nothing to guide him in crafting such structures.” Then the hook: “Could this be part of a growing body of evidence for ancient Semitic origins for the text?”

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Any scholar worth his salt knows Joseph Smith grew up absolutely steeped in the Bible—a self-inflicted activity, and one which certainly gave him a leg up when it came to writing, translating, reciting or regurgitating the Book of Mormon.

Chiasmus is “a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second.” From Answers.com

A An so they traveled onward
B Ever searching
B Always seeking
A As they journeyed onward

A The overarching theme is love God with all your hearts
B Never forgetting He made you and He loves you.
C Therefore keep His commandments,
D Looking to Christ our savior.
D With Jesus as our savior
C We will obey the commandments
B Of the One who made us and loves us,
A And we will love God the Father with all our hearts.

I will be the first to admit the above examples are pretty crude. But I’m simply trying to make a point. I made these up in about two to three minutes. Couldn’t Joseph Smith sit with his face in his hat and do the same thing? On the other hand, with all the words he used—around 275,000 of which 27,000 (nearly 10%) were direct quotes from the King James Bible—could not someone of John Welch’s ilk find a chiasm behind every tree? Remember, Smith was not stupid. He had an amazing capacity for memorization. He had read extensively. He was far from the naïve farm boy that the LDS propaganda machine has been so successful in presenting. Although he was no mental giant, I submit that he had “gifts” from a malevolent source, just as Mohammad and Pearl Curran had.

Furthermore, there have been more than 3,000 changes to the Book of Mormon manuscript since 1830. Surely some of these changes could or would have enhanced any number of the chiasms which pepper the entire book. John Welch, the man who discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon in 1967, states in a FARMS article ("How Much Was Known about Chiasmus in 1829 When the Book of Mormon Was Translated?" FARMS Review 15/1 (2003): 47–80) it was unlikely but not impossible that Smith had heard of chiasmus. Before you say, “Hey, you didn’t know about it!” keep in mind I had hardly cracked the Bible, and I wasn’t on the brink of writing a “Golden” one when I was in college. To say these activities couldn’t have been further from my mind would be an understatement of biblical proportions.

Finally, after more rooting around I stumbled across a debate among three Mormon scholars along these same lines, concerning John Welch’s obsession with Alma 26 and the Great Chiasm. In “Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm” Earl M. Wunderli has this to say about Welch’s preoccupation with the chiastic structure in the Book of Mormon:

“Although Welch and others have found a number of extended chiasms in the Book of Mormon, including the entire books of First and Second Nephi and Mosiah, I will limit myself in this paper to a critique of Welch's Alma 36 chiasm. He calls it a "masterpiece of composition," one of his favorites, and "one of the best" from among hundreds he has evaluated. He has written about it at least four times. It reflects most of the problems with all of his extended chiasms. My argument is that he has imposed chiasmus on the Book of Mormon where none was intended.”

Not to be outdone, a father-and-son team, Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards wrote a response to Wunderli, with the imaginative title: "Response to Earl M. Wunderlin’s ‘Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm’":

“While valid statistical results do not require adherence to these particular literary standards, they do require careful attention to identifying and strictly accounting for all of the important elements in a passage, both those paired elements that participate in the basic chiastic structure of the passage, called chiastic elements, and those that do not.

“We developed six rules to ensure adherence to this requirement and to enable a uniform comparative analysis of various texts. We used these rules to identify and account for all chiastic and non-chiastic elements in each passage studied. We then used elementary statistics to calculate the likelihood that random rearrangements of these elements would be chiastic. In other words, this is the likelihood that chiastic structure could have appeared by chance rather than by design.

“Welch's and Wunderli's literary standards are largely irrelevant to this process. We validated our approach by confirming that it yields very small likelihoods for well-known deliberate chiasms such as Leviticus 24:13-23 and that it yields moderate or large likelihoods for spurious chiastic structure such as that found in the computer manual. Although authors do not select words at random as if from a hat when composing passages of text, the actual composition process yields passages having likelihoods that are comparable to those for random word selection when the author has no intention of writing chiastically. This observation further validates our statistical approach.”

Let’s be honest here: with all the repetition in the Book of Mormon—and it’s the most redundant book I’ve ever read—how could it not be possible to find a plethora of chiasms? Remove a book at random from your book shelf and chances are you will find more than one chiasm. Hint: Hawthorne or Poe.

To add to the confusion, Wunderli wrote a response to the Edwards and Edwards response in which he states: “With respect to the literary merits of Alma 36 as a chiasm, the Edwardses do not challenge any of my data but only my misapplication of Welch's proposed criteria. Welch's criteria are useful in determining the presence of chiasmus but are explicitly neither finished nor authoritative and should not be made the issue.”

I’m not making this up when I tell you that Edwards and Edwards responded to Wunderli’s response. Fortunately for all of us, I’m unable to locate it right now. And since this is a blog, not a scholarly journal, I feel I can get away with it. But I’ll depart the dueling academics and leave you with my personal favorite: Hebraicisms, Chiasmus, and Other Internal Evidence for Ancient Authorship in “Green Eggs and Ham.” If you don’t click on any other link, click on this one.

In His Amazing love

Jan

(Note) A word about copyright: The website gives permission to copy and share one page, but not use it for commercial purposes. I have simply copied and pasted a few excerpts and provided a couple of links, giving credit to Dialogue: Journal of Mormon thought from which the long quotes came. Obviously I am not using any of this for commercial endeavors.