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:
At the centre of any good chiasm is the main point, the thesis. History is chiastic, with the life of Christ at the centre. The Bible’s main point is the union of God and man in Christ.
This contribution by Kelby Carlson, who just finished my book. He deserves a big medal. He also thinks it should be longer!
For our English class we are reading The Scarlet Letter. It’s amazing how much symbolism there is in literature, and your book (Jordan’s, too, and a few others) have really started to help me see that. I think man fundmentally fits symbols into everything, even if sometimes it is unintentional. I am just amazed at how something that at first appears simple can say so much; which has me even more in awe of the Scriptures.
The first ‘cycle’ in the Joseph narrative wasn’t covered in Totus Christus. I have included it in Bible Matrix, and it contains some wonders.
Firstly, Joseph’s first dream (the bowing sheaves) is placed at Firstfruits – Day 3. His second dream (sun moon and stars) is at Pentecost – Day 4.
Secondly, Joseph receives his robe from Jacob at Passover (covering). It symbolises the firmament (Day 2). And his brothers cover it with goat’s blood at Atonement (covering). It symbolises the substitutionary animals and mediatory Man (Day 6). The giving and taking of the robe match chiastically.
Of course, these Scriptures predate the feasts in Leviticus 23.
Tim writes:
“[Totus Christus is] a book which certainly makes you think. While I have read other books on Biblical theology, looking at the structure of the Bible in that way (the Dominion pattern, feasts, etc.) is an idea which I’d never considered at all before. At first I didn’t quite get what each part of the pattern involves, even after you’d explained it, but after seeing it applied to a few sections of the Bible I was fine. I think its helped me get a better understanding of how God has revealed himself through the Bible. Continue reading
“Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon has devoured me;
he has crushed me; he has made me an empty vessel;
he has swallowed me like a monster” (Jeremiah 51:34)
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