A recent video has been posted featuring John (“Jack”) Welch discussing
chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, particularly in Alma 36:
The Amazing Chiasmus in Alma 36 of the Book of Mormon
For more on chiasmus from Welch and others, see:
John W. Welch, How Much Was Known about Chiasmus in 1829 When the Book of Mormon Was Translated?
Idem, A Masterpiece: Alma 36
Jeff Lindsay, Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon
Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards, Does Chiasmus Appear in the Book of Mormon by Chance? BYU Studies 43/2 (2004): pp. 103-130
A really useful Website is that of Chiasmus Resources
As an aside, in an old email list I used to belong to, Ben McGuire offered the following response to an article by an anti-Mormon ("Mosiah 3:18-19—Ancient Chiasmus or Modern Composition?") which I think is simply excellent and shows how many times this particular critic proves the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect:
>>Hello I don't mean to overwhelm you but I emailed the Executive director of The IRR and talked to him about Chiasmus. He emailed this to me. I see some holes in this, but I want to see what you think of it.<<
First, I want to state the obvious. That is, Welch's material on Chiasmus has been cited regularly since he originally published it (in both LDS and non-LDS works). Bowman isn't considered particularly well informed here. This isn't really the issue. At least in my reading through what you provided (and I don't think this is the first time I have read through this particular discussion), it isn't really about the expertise. Bowman (I don't think) rejects the criteria that Welch provides, he simply claims that it isn't being applied well, or properly (as he notes early on: "However, judged by criteria that Welch himself has set forth for testing the strength of a proposed chiasmus, Mosiah 3:18-19 turns out to be at best a very weak example. "). This is what I am going to address below. I also want to add a note that I am not interested in being a part of a proxy argument with Rob Bowman. We have debated on-line in the past, and I have little interest in that right now.
The first thing that needs to be understood with chiasmus (in all of its variety) is that we define it as a rhetorical device, or a literary figure, or something along those lines. The chiamsus is identified in part because of a structure, but the structure is only a part of the chiasmus. As a rhetorical device or a literary figure, the most important criteria isn't the question of the structure but a question of the way it is used and interpreted. You cannot have a rhetorical figure or literary device that isn't intentionally written into a text by an author. And so, when we examine these chiastic structures, the most important focus is about this question of intentionality. With this in mind, the various criteria that Bowman brings up in his assessment should be understood in this context of intentions. Here is the first:
"Welch has made the excellent point that a chiasmus is weak and even dubious if it does not correspond to a natural literary unit: A chiasm is stronger if it operates across a literary unit as a whole and not only upon fragments or sections which overlap or cut across organizational lines intrinsic to the text.... To the extent that the proposed structure crosses over natural boundaries, unnaturally chops sentences in half, or falls short of discernible boundaries in the text as a whole, the more dubious the suggested chiasm becomes."
"Welch has made the excellent point that a chiasmus is weak and even dubious if it does not correspond to a natural literary unit: A chiasm is stronger if it operates across a literary unit as a whole and not only upon fragments or sections which overlap or cut across organizational lines intrinsic to the text.... To the extent that the proposed structure crosses over natural boundaries, unnaturally chops sentences in half, or falls short of discernible boundaries in the text as a whole, the more dubious the suggested chiasm becomes."
When we deal with the question of intention, we apply this argument to discuss how and where we should never find a chiasm. For example, a chiasm in a book with chapters, shouldn't cross that boundary created by a chapter. If there is some introductory material, it shouldn't exist both in the introductory material and in the main body of the text. In the Book of Mormon, Nephi and Jacob are different authors, and so we would be applying this rule properly if we automatically dismissed a chiasm that started in 2 Nephi and ended in Jacob. You get the idea. There are other sorts of indicators in the text that can more narrowly define this sort of thing. For example, the Book of Mormon likes to use the phrase "and it came to pass", right? That phrase is used as a temporal indicator in the text (that is, it's primary function is to serve as a marker in the text to say "this is what happened next". It occurs quite a bit because, while it takes a somewhat lengthy phrase in English, it can be accomplished in Hebrew with just a few letters. And so it makes a useful bit of material in what we suggest would be the original language version of the text. But, because it is this temporal marker in the text, it creates narrative boundaries that mark off parts of a narrative. And so we would never expect to see a chiasm with a first element of "and it came to pass" and consequently a second element with "and it came to pass" - because that second element isn't associated with any of the text that comes before it, it is associated with the text that comes after it. These kinds of elements happen quite a bit. And I will show you a couple in this text in Mosiah 3 that Bowman is discussing in a moment. So our concern isn't so much about sentences being complete (but this is where Bowman goes) - it's not about the way the grammar fits together, it's about how the author of the text puts his text together. And since we can't have "and it came to pass" as part of a chiasm, then we expect to see chiasms that fairly regularly make up only a part of a sentence. The question is whether it does so unnaturally. Whether something is unnatural or not is something of a judgment call - and it's where I am going to really take Bowman apart in a moment - because that judgment call - the quest of the unnaturalness of the split - has to be based on the idea of what the author intended, and not simply on the way that we want to read it.
The next criterion that Bowman brings up is this one: "Another criterion set forth by Welch is that a strong chiasmus is based on “the dominant nouns, verbs, and distinctive phrases in the text,” as opposed to “relatively insubstantial or common words and ideas in the text.”" When we deal with this in the context of chiasmus as a rhetorical figure, what this means is that we should be able to get some sense of what the text is about by looking at the markers of the chiasm. It should be somewhat readable without all the extra words. And it should be something that we might recognize if we were listening to it (as opposed to actively hunting for chiastic structures). Because of this, short, generic words aren't really going to be very helpful (and this is, by the way, especially true in translated texts, where the more generic and common words are often as much a choice of the translator as an indication of any language of the original text). Again, the phrase (to continue my example from above) "and it came to pass" plays a very specific role in the text, but, that role is unrelated to the actual message that the author is trying to give us - it is simply a part of the framework in which he places it.
Then Bowman brings up this criterion: "According to Welch, in a strong chiasmus there is “a well-defined centerpiece or distinct crossing effect”—a clear “reversal at the center point.”6 Alternatively, the center line or lines of the chiasmus will constitute “its focal climax.”" What this means is that usually the center of the chiasmus reflects the major theme of the chiasmus, and this it is easy to recognize. This second part - the easiness of recognition - is particularly important for chiasmus as a rhetorical figure. Whatever value there is in a chiasmus is only created when a listener or reader recognizes it. And the point at which it is recognized occurs most closely to the center (this is why longer chiastic structures - the so-called extended chiasms or macro-chiasms aren't always considered in the same group as these shorter ones, because the beginning isn't always in memory by the time we get to the middle). Normally, a person hears the tight structure of the middle (or reads it), recognizes it for what it might be, and then can predict (if they have been paying attention) what will come next as the chiasm unwinds. When we speak of a focal point (and the center isn't always - this happens much more when the chiasm is part of a poetic text and less often when it is in prose), what we mean is that there is a dominant theme in play, and we are supposed to understand the rest of the chiasm in terms of that dominant theme. Sometimes this means (in particularly clever structures) that we go back and reinterpret the first parts in terms of that theme, and sometimes that notion of reinterpretation actually plays out in the text itself. There is a wide range of this sort of thing in texts that engage chiasmus. One of my favorites in the Book of Mormon comes in alternating statements about God and man, and at the center, the order switches so we get alternating statements about man and God - and this means that in each matched pair of the chiasm (the A and the A') we have both a statement reflecting God's role and a statement reflecting man's role over the same topic. And this creates an entirely different sort of focal shift than does a simple theme. The point though, is that this focal point in the center isn't necessarily the theme. But the focal point is a tool used by an author to help change the way we understand a text - and it is this intentionality, represented in the chiasm that we focus on in our analysis.
Again, a bit later Bowman suggests: "This is one way of restating Welch’s criterion that a strong chiasmus will feature “inverted parallel orders” are “are objectively observable in the text.”" And this goes back to the idea of intention. A chiasmus as a rhetorical figure is useless if readers or listeners don't catch it. If it is so subtle that no one recognizes it, or if the parallels are so vague that they aren't seen, it has little value.
So, it is on the basis of these four criterion that Bowman criticizes Welch. Now one last thing to point out - we can all recognize a potential structure. That part of discussions about chiasm are fairly objective. These are all subjective issues - and a chiasmus doesn't actually have to match all of the criteria. Tthis is part of the poor understanding that Bowman has - if he was really wanting to address Welch, you cannot simply take all of the weakest connections, you also have to explain why the strongest criteria also fail or why they don't lead us to conclude that the chiasm wasn't intentional on the part of the author.
This is particularly true because we are talking primarily about chiasm in prose here in this example. In poetics, chiasms are much easier to find because they stand out. If we have a series of poetic lines that goes:
A
B
A'
B'
C
D
C'
D'
And so on, and then suddenly in the middle we get a switch to a chiastic form:
E
F
F'
E'
Then we have little doubt that there is a chiasm there, that it is intention, and that it may well be purely aesthetic in value (it may also be there for emphasis - but it doesn't require us to evaluate it so stringently). In a sense, chiasms stand or fall on their strongest arguments and not on their weakest, because a strong argument of one sort for intentionality on the part of an author over-rides a host of weak arguments that are inconclusive. In this case, I cannot review how Bowman handles those strongest arguments because he doesn't. He makes the assumption that all of these arguments are in some way equal, and that the weakest arguments cause the overall question to fail. Now one final example, and then I will get into some of his arguments. Here is a well known piece of text that can be easily fitted into a chiastic pattern:
A Hickory, Dickory, Dock
B The mouse ran up the clock
C The clock struck one
B' The mouse ran down
A' Hickory Dickory Dock
And there we have it. A picture perfect chiastic structure. The problem is that it is also a picture perfect example of a limerick (the right phrasing, the right rhyming pattern, and so on). And if you say it out loud, I bet that you would naturally fall into the cadence of a limerick (perhaps without even knowing you were doing so) - because we are also all familiar with the tune that it usually goes with and so on. And if we start to look at this in terms of the criteria that Bowman provides us with here we can see that it fits well into a natural boundary, it uses strong parallels, it has a clear and easy to find center, and it is easy to see (by any objective measure), and yet we can say with absolute certainty that it was never written as a chiasmus, that it isn't intended to be a chiasmus. It was written as a limerick, and it was clearly written to be read as a limerick. And so we can meet these criteria reasonably well, but, the criteria themselves are not useful without asking that question about the intentions of the author that sits behind every single one of these criteria. So on to the discussion (and I am only going to cover the first one in detail here, since this is taking a lot of space).
For the first criterion that Bowman engages we read this:
"If we apply this criterion to Welch’s “suggested chiasm” in Mosiah 3:18-19, a problem immediately becomes apparent, since his chiasmus begins in the middle of a sentence. The passage begins with the following words: For behold he judgeth, and his judgment is just; and the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy; but men drink damnation to
their own souls.... The next word, “except,” is clearly not the beginning of a distinct literary unit and is not even the beginning of a sentence. In this instance, the proposed chiasmus “unnaturally chops” the sentence “in half.” This is just what Welch says a good chiasmus should not do. The problem remains even if we re-punctuate the text in order to begin the sentence with the words, “But men drink.” The proposed chiasmus also ignores the last third of the second sentence, in effect cutting off or making irrelevant the 28 words that follow the word humble in verse 19: ...patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. The omission of so many words at the end of the sentence from the proposed chiasmus severely undermines its credibility as an authentic literary feature of the text."
Before we get into this, I need to point out two things of major importance. The Book of Mormon claims to be a translation of an ancient text (that is the fundamental issue behind this whole discussion). Translation introduces a number of things where we format the text and provide language that make it conform to our standards. And it is against these standards that Bowman is going. In particular, we know that the original manuscripts of the Book of Mormon came without punctuation (and it was added by the printer). Versification wasn't added until much later (by one of the Pratts). The Book of Mormon for this reason has a lot of sentences that are put in as clauses. The text of these two verses reads:
18 For behold he judgeth, and his judgment is just; and the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy; but men drink damnation to their own souls except they humble themselves and become as little children, and believe that salvation was, and is, and is to come, in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.
19 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.
18 For behold he judgeth, and his judgment is just; and the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy; but men drink damnation to their own souls except they humble themselves and become as little children, and believe that salvation was, and is, and is to come, in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.
19 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.
So he is right, that we do interrupt a sentence. But, anyone can see that we could reformat this text and replace the semi-colons with colons, without losing any meaning at all - that is, "For behold he judgeth, and his judgment is just. And the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy. But men drink damnation to their own souls except they ..." And so on. And so what we see first of all is that final complaint that "The omission of so many words" following the structure of the English translation is a problematic sort of issue. More to the point though, the insistence that it has to fit into the sentences is a challenge. And so we can see that the chiasmus does begin with where we see a sentence starting (at a suitable place in the text) even if it isn't entirely punctuated that way. And the chiasmus itself follows to some extent the way that the sentence comes out:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150212194822/http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1087&index=13
3:18 x for behold he judgeth and his judgment is just y and the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy z but men drink damnation to their own souls
In the larger context (that we can see in Welch's article), he actually lays out a formatting for the entire sermon in Mosiah 1-4. And in doing this, he presents a larger literary unit (the entire sermon) which is broken up into sub-units (Welch's sections), wich are then subdivided into two more subgroupings. What this means for this particular issue is that Welch isn't overly relying on sentences to define his literary units because he has explicitly laid out in diagram form exactly how he sees those literary units coming together and working together. His argument is far more complex than Bowman shows us. Bowman, in dealing almost exclusively with the sentence issue (something he could focus in on in Welch's discussion of methods to the exclusion of everything else) has effectively ignored everything that Welch is trying to say about the structure of the sermon, the intentionality that it represents, and how his proposed chiasm fits into the larger discussion of literary structure. This is a major problem for Bowman's response, and effectively makes his entire discussion meaningless.https://web.archive.org/web/20150212194822/http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1087&index=13
3:18 x for behold he judgeth and his judgment is just y and the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy z but men drink damnation to their own souls
| T Putting off the natural man and becoming a saint | ||||||
| a except they humble themselves | ||||||
| b and become as little children | ||||||
| c and believe that salvation was and is and is to come in and through the atoning blood of Christ the Lord Omnipotent | ||||||
| 3:19 | d for the natural man | |||||
| e is an enemy to God | ||||||
| f and has been from the fall of Adam | ||||||
| f and will be forever and ever | ||||||
| e unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit | ||||||
| d and putteth off the natural man | ||||||
| c and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord | ||||||
| b and becometh as a child | ||||||
| a submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father | ||||||
This doesn't mean that you couldn't argue effectively about the structure in some ways (but I am not sure Bowman had any interest in really trying to take on a literary analysis). For example, one of the things that stands out in verses 18-19 is the almost liturgical statement/title used in verse 18:
"in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent."
"in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent."
This is obviously associated to a string of phrases scattered throughout the text. It is almost immediately preceded by this one in verse 17:
"only in and through the name of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent."
"only in and through the name of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent."
They are clearly related. And we have these:
through the atonement of Christ the Lord (v. 19)
through repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ (v. 12)
through the atonement of Christ the Lord (v. 19)
through repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ (v. 12)
And so on. These continued references point to an overarching structure (and Welch tries to egnage this), but I am not certain how successful he is, or that I wouldn't do things a bit differently were I to be producing his essay. At any rate, this sort of parallelism on the larger scale through the entire sermon tells us that the parallels here are intentional, and perhaps significant. The question would be about whether or not it terribly chiastic. But by isolating the argument from the context that Welch builds (deliberately and carefully), we miss all of this in just reading Bowman.
As a final side note, as often happens with academically styled material, there is often a building on past publications. Bowman writes this:
"The next word, “except,” is clearly not the beginning of a distinct literary unit and is not even the beginning of a sentence. "
"The next word, “except,” is clearly not the beginning of a distinct literary unit and is not even the beginning of a sentence. "
Welch dealt with this a year earlier in another essay titled "What Does Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon Prove" in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited:
https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/book-mormon-authorship-revisited-evidence-ancient-origins
https://ldsseminary.files.
"King Benjamin turns to chiasmus in driving home his final abstract alternatives, consistently using words like unless, except, and therefore as important warnings in the structure. For instance, he says, "except they humble themselves . . . ; unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit" (Mosiah 3:18–19) and "except it be through transgression; therefore take heed . . ." (Mosiah 5:11)."
So this provides a bit of insight into how I read and view both Welch and Bowman. And I think that this sort of thing takes a bit of time. While a lot of material is aimed at easy consumption, these back and forth aren't always as transparent. And if you really want to get a feel for some of these ideas, the best thing is to get some of the books and essays that are used as references and spend some time with them. And once you understand what Chiasmus means, then you can start looking at what finding it might mean for the Book of Mormon and the question of its authenticityhttps://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/book-mormon-authorship-revisited-evidence-ancient-origins
https://ldsseminary.files.
"King Benjamin turns to chiasmus in driving home his final abstract alternatives, consistently using words like unless, except, and therefore as important warnings in the structure. For instance, he says, "except they humble themselves . . . ; unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit" (Mosiah 3:18–19) and "except it be through transgression; therefore take heed . . ." (Mosiah 5:11)."