Proclaimer Blog
When is a chiasm not a chiasm?
When it’s not, of course. OT preachers get obsessed with chiasms. Chiasms are common Hebrew poetic structures which, in very simple terms, put the heart of a passage at the centre – literally – with a corresponding pattern on either side – ABCBA kind of thing. I’m one of those preachers who finds some chiasms helpful (Malachi structure, I’ll save that for another day), but is wary of finding a chiasm under every rock, so to speak.
Some OT preachers seem obsessed with chiasms. And sometimes, this obsession, can lead you away from what you’re trying to see. Take Lamentations. It’s a mostly bleak book with one or two glimmers of hope. But to force it into a chiasm neither does justice to the text, nor retains the focus of the book. It makes the book, as John Mackay puts it, too optimistic. You can actually end up softening the blow by misinterpreting the structure.
All of which is to say that working out the structure of a text or passage, however short, is an important part of any preparation.