The Book of Mormon Site
Chiasmus and Antimetabole in History
Chiasmus is found in “Hebrew, Greek, Latin and K’iche’ Mayan literature…. Many long and complex chiasmi have been found in Shakespeare and the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible. Chiasmus is also found throughout the Quran and the Book of Mormon.” It seems like a very broadly independtly rediscovered form, if it was used in the New World independently of infuence from the Old World.
Robert Lowth
Robert Lowth rediscovered chiasmus / inverse parallelism in the Bible, for the English-speaking world, in 1753.
According to William L. Davis, 2005, Structural Secrets: Shakespeare’s Complex Chiasmus:
In 1753, Robert Lowth, D.D., Bishop of London and the former Professor of Poetry at New College, Oxford, published a series of lectures on biblical Hebrew texts that permanently altered the fundamental approach to modern biblical interpretation.
A search of the term parallelismus membrorum in books published before 1829 yields over 200 uses of the term, mostly in German and in Latin works, showing how widely it was discussed, including some of the earliest (1758, in print), with Robert Lowth’s explanations of Ps. 139:20 and Ps. 22:31.
(Yet, it appears William Shakespeare (1564–1616) rediscovered or reinvented chiasmus for his own use, independently, and included the structures repeatedly in his plays, long before Robert Lowth’s work.)
Robert Lowth was very influential in Hebrew Bible studies. Vol. III (1825) of Adam Clarke’s commentary of the Bible mentions the work of Robert Lowth. Specifically, the introduction of the Book of Isaiah says “See Lowth.” (p. 782, scanned page numbers, not actual page numbers) In fact, Bishop Lowth / Dr. Lowth is mentioned 40 times in this one of six volumes of Adam Clarke alone (actually more, because he references him so often, in Isaiah commentary alone Clarke simply uses “- L.” — 126 times!)
We know JS Jr. had access to Adam Clarke’s commentary of the bible, demonstrated by BYU professor Thomas Wayment and his student Hayley Wilson-Lemmon. But Clarke is not the only way the work of Robert Lowth was carried into the 1820s English reading world.
1820s
In the 1820s, there was a revival of interest in Robert Lowth’s study of chiasmus in the English KJV Bible.
In The Album, 1823, a reviewer covers John Jebb’s “Review of the Principles of Composition laid down by the late Robert Lowth” in John Jebb’s 1820 work Sacred Literature where Dr. Jebb explains the forms of Hebrew parallelism in the Old Testament as well as the New, including Antithetic Parallelism and Introverted Parallelism.
Book of Pslams in Metrical Verse by Richard Mant, 1824 mentions Lowth and parallel clauses.
Similar mentions of and explanation of parallelism (“parallel clauses”) in the New Testament in Sermons on the Mission and Character of Christ by John Farrer, 1804.
Thomas Boys 1824, 1825, 1827
Introverted parallelism explained by Thomas Boys in Tactica Sacra 1824, and A Key to the Book of Pslams , 1825.
In 1827, Thomas Boys wrote a letter to the Editor, printed in Critica Biblica, which was printed along with a four-page explanation of inverted parallelism or introverted parallelism, specifically naming chiasmus in great detail, with numerous New Testament examples, p. 214-217. At the end of this detailed explanation, 1 Cor. 13:5 is presented as an example of a four-pair chiasmus.
To say that chiasmus could not have been understood and/or imitated, in the 1820s, in the English speaking world, by readers of the Bible, is straight up hogwash tapirwash. At this point, repeating this claim can no longer be done in ignorance, merely in malice and bad faith.
Alma 36
Alma 36 is one chapter-long 16-pair chiasmus / antimetabole. So does this prove that Alma 36 is ancient? If you start with the idea that the Book of Mormon is ancient, you would probably see a long chiasmus as evidence of that, practically expected, right? (However, if the Book of Mormon is ancient, we would also very much not expect to see even one notable anachronism, much less dozens or hundreds of them. So if we are keeping score, and grant this one point to the theory of ancient Book of Mormon origin, but then we count anachronisms as points against, how do all the points add up?)
However, if you adhere to a naturalistic assumption, then several plausible explanations are possible:
- JS Jr. independently rediscovered the form (as Shakespeare appears to have done), or noticed it somewhere else in English, such as Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Mary Leapor, or Lord Byron, or perhaps English Christian hymns or poetry.
- JS Jr. noticed this strucutre in the Bible, on his own, and copied it, since we know he was not above copying entire chapters of Isaiah (for example) into the Book of Mormon, as well as hundreds of phrases and ideas throughout the entire Book of Mormon—reminding us how intimately he knew the Bible.
- JS Jr. was tipped off to this by reading a Bible Commentary, or hearing a sermon, by someone in the know, between the time Robert Lowth published his lectures on Biblical Hebrew texts in 1758, and 1820–1827 when John Jebb and Thomas Boys ensured that Lowth and various forms of parallelism were on the radar for anyone who cared about the Bible. (See above.) This evidence from Jebb and Boys is not meant to prove that JS Jr. learned about chiasmus from these specific tomes, but only that it is plausible that those ideas could have made it from Lowth in 1758 to New England by 1820 (or earlier!), as so many scholars leaned so heavily on Lowth in their work.
- It is totally plausible that JS Jr. was exposed directly to John Jebb (1820) Thomas Boys (1824, 1825, 1827), who explain these parallelism ideas clearly the way we understand them today.
Evidence of What?
If chiasmus is evidence of ancient provenance, then Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus makes his plays ancient and not written by the Bard himself. Can there be no other explanation? Or 1572’s Wilhelmus, the national anthem of the Netherlands, a 7- or 8-pair thematic chiamus, must be more ancient than it is—what would that even mean, that Wilhelmus must have been translated from ancient Hebrew and could not have been composed in Dutch?
Finally, if you want to go to the length that I cannot prove that JS Jr. had access to such and such information by such and such time, I can say you can’t prove that JS Jr. translated anything from an ancient record, without producing the ancient record itself. These claims are both stupidly obvious. Maybe instead we can play the plausibility game. Which is more plausible? 1. The idea that the concept of chiasmus made it to New York by the 1820s, especially given the above evidence? or 2. That a physical, ancient record on gold plates containing this lovely 16-pair chiasmus made it to New York by the 1820s? This latter claim means: that New World ancient prophets Mormon / Moroni mined/hoarded, smelted, and hammered out enough gold (and carried the raw gold around during wars and so forth, and physically secured it from theft, etc.) to engrave a 270,000-word record, carved manually, character by character, during a protracted war that saw the end of their civilization, mind you; these same prophets then had to carry this eighth-of-a-ton behemoth to upstate New York to bury it (or their battle at the single Hill Cumorah happened to be in JS Jr.’s back yard); then Moroni died, resurrected 1400 years later, and handed it over (?!) to a young lad, who then never even used the physical plates in his translation work, but used a seer stone / peep stone in a hat (the same one he had used to defraud people looking for buried treasure which he never once found), and then the young lad gave the literal solid-gold book back to the resurrected Moroni. Which is more plausible?
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