I just put up that first essay (#29 in a series) because I’d made some math goofs in the version mailed out, and I thought some other people would be interested. If this kind of study does not interest you, that’s fine. The Kingdom is a big place. Also, as a postmil, I confess that we are still in the early days of the Great Conversation, so perhaps everything I mooted in that essay will prove inadequate. But that won’t happen unless people put stuff out there to be dealt with, which is what I’ve done.

I guess I can see that it might bug you to be told “go see what else I’ve written,” but surely you see that I can’t just put up on this blog several 20-30 page essays. At least the essays in Rite Reasons are fairly short and are on-line. For chiasms, see the books of Dorsey and Breck, and for that matter, anything done in Biblical studies in the last 20 years since literary analysis has found a place.

Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance.

Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as “new creation” passages.

The fact that scores of passages and numerous whole books have this 7-day chiastic pattern surely invites us to employ that template on other passages just to see if it might fit. It may or may not. There are 39 whole psalms in Book 1, so clearly it is not a complete set of 7s. To date, however, my studies have suggested to me (and to other readers) that Book 1 may well start with four sets of 7. Psalms 1-7, for instance, are about evenings and mornings, over and over. It points (or MAY point) the reader in a direction….

There’s nothing esoteric about literary structuring by chiasms and by numerics. It is all over the ancient and medieval world. The Bible is written in hieratic scribal Hebrew, not in parole Hebrew. It is written by men in a company of people almost always completely at odds with their society, which we know from the Bible was mostly idolatrous. The various writers in this tradition are extremely referential of one another, and self-consciously so. I reject the modernist view that the Bible grew like Topsy with writings from here and there just coming together by the mysterious work of the Spirit.

An ancient trained priestly scribe was like someone with a Ph.D. in physics today — not like a newspaper reporter. Their works are complex in the way a Bach quadruple fugue or a Beethoven symphony are complex. I myself enjoy admiring that musical beauty, and I do think that over time, the things we bring out of the Bible will prove helpful to the church.

This article was originally published at the Biblical Horizons WordPress blog.