A brief intro about chiastic structure in biblical literature – 2 Samuel 22, Part 2

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the USA, and we are studying 2 Samuel 22 / Psalm 18, a wonderful passage to help us express gratitude to God. As I studied this passage, I relied on my seminary professor David Dorsey, as I often do.  He was such a gifted bible translator, interpreter and teacher.  In his book The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, he provides a seven-part parallel structure for Psalm 18, and because 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18 are identical, I’m going to rely on Dorsey’s structural interpretation. 

As he identifies the structure, Dorsey observes matches in the Hebrew text.  The literary term for this kind of matching writing style is chiasm.  Or chiastic structure.  Chiasm is from the Greek letter chi, which is our English letter X.  Look at the letter X. Do you see how it is a mirror image? Whether you are looking top to bottom or side to side, the letter X, or the letter chi, is a mirror. So chiastic writing is mirror writing.  Here’s how it works. 

In school you likely learned how to create outlines in the process of writing essays.  Think about standard literary outlining. It looks like this:

A. Main Point

1. Subpoint
2. Subpoint

B. Main Point

1. Subpoint
2. Subpoint

That is a linear structure.  The outline proceeds from start to finish. 

Chiastic structure in not linear.  It has a mirror outline. Here’s what it looks like:

A. Subpoint

B. Subpoint

C. Subpoint

D. Main Point

C’. Subpoint

B’. Subpoint

A’ Subpoint

See how the points mirror each other, like one half of the letter X?

Psalm 18 (and thus 2 Samuel 22), Dorsey claims, uses this structure.  You might ask, “Why would they write like that?” Dorsey explains that in ancient oral cultures, where hardly anyone had access to writing or literacy, people learned through listening. In a chiastic structure, you only need to remember half of the points, because there is so much repetition. Also, the main point of the author is abundantly clear. Thus chiastic structure greatly aids the teaching and learning process.

But our English Bibles don’t format the text so you can see chiastic structures.  For a shorter passage or psalm, maybe they could print the text using indentations just as I did above, and then you could see the parallelism.  But 2 Samuel 22 / Psalm 18 is a long one.  You would need a fairly large sheet of paper to see the structure, and thus it is not conducive to just about any Bible.

Because you cannot open your Bible and see the parallel structure, Dorsey summarizes the main points, and then prints the main points formatted as a chiastic structure. In the next few posts, we are going to follow Dorsey’s interpretation, and you will be able to see the structure. 

At the end of the week, then, we will arrive at the central point, and that will be our concluding focus and application. We get started on the structure in the next post.

Photo by David Paschke on Unsplash