This 14th Post accompanies Gospel Doctrine lessons 8. "Living Righteously in a Wicked World", and 9. "God Will Provide Himself a Lamb".
John Welch was introduced to chiasmus on his mission in Germany in 1967, and later published his ground-breaking discovery of this kind of Hebrew poetry in the Book of Mormon. Within a short time, many other people were looking for these parallelisms.
I've spent many years collecting examples of parallelism from more than fifty different authors. I've found some original chiasms myself.
When I was a BYU student I found a remarkable chiasm in 3 Nephi that I'll show you later on this year when we get to Isaiah. In it, Jesus commands the Nephites to study the words of Isaiah on the Plates of Brass.
Some modern sermons by general authorities are chiastic, and if I run out of Old Testament material I may show you some of them.
This post reveals a wealth of Chiasms about Abraham in Genesis. You'll see how different authors have come up with very different ways of diagramming the same material.
After seeing some of these variations, you'll wonder if there is a "correct" structure for a particular set of verses. Well, you can always try to diagram them yourself.
One caveat is that I haven't validated ALL of these things myself. Some of the chiasms in these articles may have errors. If you compare something with the Scriptures and find problems, please comment!
Now, go read your Book of Mormon!
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