Chiasmus and Hebraisms
Inverted parallelism and Hebrew-like syntax are offered as marks of antiquity; both also occur in KJV-imitating English.
What the Church claims
Alma 36 and other passages are deliberate Hebrew chiasms that Joseph Smith could not have composed.
Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. Short chiasms in the text are real and some are unlikely to be accidental. The claim overreaches at both ends: Alma 36, the flagship example, forms a clean chiasm only once the analyst has chosen which elements count, and chiastic structure occurs in English prose and in the King James Bible Joseph knew well. Contested because the phenomenon is genuine while its diagnostic value is not.
The record
- John W. Welch identified chiasmus in the book in 1967; Boyd and Farrell Edwards later calculated that the eight-element pattern they read in Alma 36 is unlikely to have arisen by chance.
- Scripture Central acknowledges that Horne's 1825 Introduction discussed Jebb's work on biblical parallelism, while arguing Joseph is unlikely to have used it.
- Earl Wunderli (Dialogue 38:4, 2005) shows Welch's Alma 36 scheme leaves out most of the chapter, pairs sections of very unequal length (213 words against 48), and counts only some of the available repetitions; the Edwardses acknowledge their statistic sets aside literary merit.
The moving target
The Church has never made chiasmus an official argument. It has been covered approvingly in Church magazines since the 1970s and taught in Church Educational System classes, but no essay, manual or conference talk states that chiasmus establishes the book's antiquity. The claim below is the apologists' to defend, and the Church has never attached itself to the statistics it rests on.
The exchange
Welch; Edwards and Edwards; Scripture Central
The chiasms are too long and exact to be accidental and the form was unknown to Joseph Smith.
The answer: Short chiasms (Mosiah 5:10-12) are real but are a natural by-product of repetitive preaching style and of imitating the Bible; they occur in the Doctrine and Covenants and other non-ancient texts. The long showpiece depends on selecting which repetitions count. Statistics on a pattern chosen after the fact cannot establish intent.
What they get right: Mosiah 5 and Helaman 6:9-11 are tidy, and critics who call all Book of Mormon chiasmus imaginary overreach.
Book of Mormon Central; Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards
Statistical tests put the probability that Alma 36's structure arose by chance at well under one percent, so the chiasm is deliberate rather than accidental.
The answer: Those tests measure whether a chiasm is deliberate, which is a different question from whether it is ancient, and only the second one is at issue. Deliberate chiasmus is common in 19th-century devotional English written by people steeped in the King James Bible, where the form appears throughout, and the same tests find it in the Doctrine and Covenants and in Joseph's own letters. The test also runs only after the analyst has decided which repetitions count as the paired elements, and that is the step Wunderli showed carries the weight: Alma 36's structure requires selecting some repetitions and setting others aside.
What they get right: Alma 36 really is an elegant structure turning on Christ at its center, and skeptics who wave it away as accidental have not read it carefully.
Both cases at full strength
The skeptics' case
Chiasmus is evidence of biblical style, which nobody disputes the book has. It cannot distinguish an ancient Hebrew author from a 19th-century author steeped in the KJV.
The apologetic case
Complex, multi-level chiasm is hard to produce in unrevised oral dictation, and the book's best examples center on the theological turning point of the passage, as Hebrew chiasms do.
What would change this
Blind tests showing long chiasms do not arise in comparable dictated KJV-style texts.
Closely related
Sources
- Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm
- Book of Mormon Evidence: Chiasmus Overview
- Response to Earl M. Wunderli's 'Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm'
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