The Chiasm Course

Finding hidden chiastic gems in the Scriptures There are literary patterns embedded in the text throughout the Bible, and with a little patience and careful reading, you can find them and add new dimensions to passages that used to seem flat! You don't need a degree in ancient languages or any other college or seminary degree for that matter. This short course will teach you how to find and connect related statements within a Bible passage to reveal new facets of meaning and make your Bible study more meaningful, more fascinating, and even more fun! Have you ever been reading the Bible and think to yourself, "Hey! Didn't I just read that a couple of verses up?", again and again in the same passage, like a literary déjà vu? God's Word doesn't waste words, so you can be sure that there's a reason for that repetition. Do any of these questions sound familiar? • Why is this guy saying the same thing that guy just said? • Why does it feel like this same series of events just happened to someone else in the story? • Why is this weird statement in the middle of a completely different topic? • Why is one story sandwiched in the middle of another one? • Why does this story seem to end up in the same place it began? • Why does this one phrase keep repeating in a passage? If you've asked yourself some of these questions while reading your Bible, there's a good chance that you were in the middle of a chiasm! What's a chiasm? A chiasm is a literary device used to highlight connections between different events or ideas or to highlight a central point in a story. Many ancient cultures used chiasms in their literature, but they are especially prevalent in the Hebrew Bible. Since we know that everything in the Bible is there for us to learn something, we can also know that these structures aren't there just by accident. The original readers of the Biblical texts could probably see them immediately and knew exactly why they were there, but that knowledge has been obscured by time, translation, and cultural amnesia. Chiasms are like special gems hidden in a diamond mine, just waiting to be revealed! You could just keep wondering what you missed in that one passage or you could learn how to spot a chiasm and decipher its intended meaning in a self-paced course that could take you as little as a few days. Imagine that God led you to write a long document that would be read and treasured by hundreds of generations in the future...but you weren't allowed to use fonts, bold, italics, underline, punctuation, or even capital letters. You'll also have to write small and avoid whitespace, because it has to be written using parchment and ink that will cost you a year's salary! Ancient writers and copyists had to overcome all of these obstacles, so they developed some creative literary devices to make a single passage of text do double or triple duty. They used metaphor, puns, and poetry for emphasis and to say multiple things with the same words. They also used chiasms and parallelisms to highlight relationships between different lines in the text without having to spell it all out in whole paragraphs. In The Chiasm Course I'm going to show you how to identify the presence of a chiastic gem, map out all the facets, and discover the depths of meaning that the original authors meant for us to see.