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Chiasm in the Book of Mormon

Mormon apologists have made much of the discovery of chiasms in the Book of Mormon. A chiasm (also called “chiasmus”), named after the Greek letter ‘chi’ which resembles the letter ‘X’, is a literary device where a series of statements or phrases is followed by a reversed restatement of the same phrases: A, B, C, D, d, c, b, a.

This literary device was discovered in the Bible in the 19th century, and Mormon apologists discovered it then also in the Book of Mormon. They present this as evidence that the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired, since chiasm had not yet been recognized in the Bible when Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon.

Chiasm loses all of its persuasiveness as evidence for the divinity of the Book of Mormon when one realizes that it is a literary device which can occur quite naturally in non-divine writings as well, and that an author need not be consciously aware of the device, nor know its name, to make literary use of it. Joseph Smith’s diary, for example, does not claim to be divinely inspired nor to be an ancient document, yet the entry for April 1, 1834, is an excellent example of chiasm:

A the Lord shall destroy him
B who has lifted his heel against me even that wicked man Docter P. H[u]rlbut
C he [will] deliver him to the fowls of heaven
and
c his bones shall be cast to the blast of the wind
b [for] he lifted his [arm] against the Almity
a therefore the Lord shall destroy him

I am Sam.
Sam I am.

I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
Would you like them here or there?
I would not like them here or there.
I would not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

Vernal Holley, in his book Book of Mormon Authorship: A Closer Look, 3rd ed., p 26, (on line here) points out that Solomon Spaulding’s “Manuscript Story” (also called “Manuscript Found”), considered by many - including Holley - to be a major source of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, also contains quite a few examples of chiasmus. And yet no Mormon apologist would consider that fact as evidence that Spaulding’s story is actually Hebrew scripture.

http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm#CHIASMUS

http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/utlm?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Chiasmus+&btnG=Search