From a recent facebook post by Rick Capezza (reproduced with his permission):
I’m trying to figure out the structure of the miracles of the two daughters in Mark. I looked in a half dozen commentaries for structures, but found nothing. I have yet to try a hierarchical structure, but I took a quick shot at a chiasm using Eric [Pyle]’s KAYAK tool. [1]
If you feel spiritually barren, that is a good thing. It is because you are, and because God has shown it to you. However, a barren heart cannot praise God. So often we rock up to church with empty hearts and attempt to feel “worshipful.” Well, we are commanded to worship, but must we draw water from dry wells?
My friend Pastor Albert Garlando has internalized the matrix. He spotted one without even looking for it.
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Psalm 11 seems a simple one to break down. As usual, once the structure is parsed, the author’s allusions are allowed to shine. The odd progression of the subject matter of the song suddenly makes sense. Now, remember we are dealing with poetry. All those silly rules you learnt at Bible college don’t apply. But all those good rules you learnt in English class do apply. The context is the Covenant, and Covenant breakers, and all the allusions are drawn from the history of the Covenant so far. It all takes place inside the tent of God and the Land of God, because that is where judgment begins.
Genesis - Creation - Day 1 - Sabbath
In the LORD (Transcendence)
…..I put my trust; (Hierarchy)
……….How can you say to my soul, (Ethics)
…..“Flee as a bird (Sanctions)
to your mountain”? (Continuity)
An analysis of the literary structure of Day 5 of Creation and passages that are apparently parallel.
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My new friend Moshe Kline has put together these brilliant presentations on the literary structure of the Torah. He deals with the Creation week in a way I was familiar with: aligning Days 1, 2 and 3 with Days 4, 5 and 6, like the columns and rows in an Excel worksheet or on a train timetable.
But wait and see what he does with the 10 Plagues and the 10 Words.
“…he will remove her veil, then hand her the barley offering, and say, ‘If you have been faithful to your husband, this water won’t harm you. But if you have been unfaithful, it will bring down the LORD’s curse — you will never be able to give birth to a child, and everyone will curse your name.’”
The content of this post has been revised and included in Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.
See Jesus With Long Hair and Trinitarian Complexity in Samson.
“Very much of human life is ‘there and back again,’ or chiastic. This is how God has designed human beings to live in the world. It is so obvious that we don’t notice it. But it is everywhere. This shape of human life arises ultimately from the give and take of the three Persons of God, as the Father sends the Spirit to the Son and the Son sends the Spirit back to the Father. We can see that literary chiasm is not a mere curiosity, a mere poetic device to structure the text. It arises from the very life of God, and is played out in the structure of the lives of the images of God in many ways and at many levels. It is because human beings live and move so often chiastically, that poets often find themselves drawn to chiastic writing. God creates chiasms out of His inner life, and so do the images of God.
Ignorant (willfully?) of ancient literary conventions, higher critics explained the carelessness of arrangement they thought was apparent in Old Testament books with fallacies like the JEDP theory. It turns out they were very wrong. James Jordan writes:
