Customer Reviews

The Shape of Biblical Language: Chiasmus in the Scriptures and Beyond Edition 2

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This book mainly centres on chiasms in the new testament. While it does not take the thorough approach of Dorsey's excellent book on chiasms in the old testament Literary Structure of the Old Testament, The: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi, it is full of examples from the new testament and elsewhere and supplements them with useful and interesting analysis. The author shows how there can be an increase in meaning as the chiasm develops the matter in hand.
For those who do not know what a chiasm is, a simplified explanation. Let's say a passage has five points. They form a chiasm if the first and last points have some correspondence (either because they are similar or because they are contrasting), and if the second and the second last correspond, and the middle point is either the key point or a kind of turning point. You can have a chiasm in one verse, and even a whole book can form a chiasm.