NACHO Lives Again! (Isaiah, mission, prophet, Jacob, God)

[DeepShadow]

During hours of scripture study in the mission field, I developed a special love of chiasm, a form of inverse parallelism used in ancient writings. I shared passages that I found with others while serving in New Albany, who started finding more and sharing them back. Within a few weeks we had started N.A.C.H.O., the New Albany Chiasmus Hunters Organization, which lasted a grand total of three months until my transfer out of the area. Now, at long last, NACHO has returned, and I am hereby offering all of you charter memberships!

For starters, a little topical intro, courtesy of www.jefflindsay.com:

Chiasmus is a form of parallelism used as a poetical structure in some ancient writings from the Middle East and Greece [note 1]. The word chiasmus derives from the Greek letter chi (X) which symbolizes the top-to-bottom mirror image reflection achieved by elements of text. An example of a very simple chiasmus is found in Psalms 124:7:

We have escaped as a bird
From the snare of the fowlers
The snare is broken
And we have escaped.

Here are two examples from Isaiah, as presented by Victor L. Ludlow in Isaiah: Prophet, Seer, and Poet [note 2] (one of my favorite books):

(a) Make the heart of this people fat,
(b) and make their ears heavy,
(c) and shut their eyes;
(c') lest they see with their eyes,
(b') and hear with their ears,
(a') and understand with their heart,
and convert [return], and be healed. (Is. 6:10)

(abc) Come ... to the house of the God of Jacob; and ... and we will walk in his paths...
(d) And he shall judge among the nations...
(e) they shall beat their swords into plowshares
(e') and their spears into pruninghooks
(d') nation shall not lift up sword against nation...
(a'b'c') O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the LORD. (Isaiah 2:3-5)

The example from Isaiah 2 shows that the pattern can be complicated with groups of parallel elements (abc) treated as a single element. The conjugate elements in a chiasmus (e.g., b and b') can be related in several ways - direct repetition (synonymous parallelism), contrasting ideas or terms (antithetic parallelism), complimentary concepts (synthetic parallelism) in which one item completes or compliments the other, and more. Through such techniques, very sophisticated structures can be created (see Ludlow, op. cit., pp. 31-39). In major passages of chiasmus, the most important regions tend to be the central or pivotal point (the focal point) in the middle of the chiasmus, and then the ends (top and bottom).

Okay, so now that we've been briefed, it's time to get hunting. Here are the rules:

1) Any recorded source is fair game, and anyone can play. This includes books, movies, and web sites, but not chats or forums (i.e. post in chiasm if you want, but don't expect to get coins for it!)

2) The chiasmus must be in proper format. If it's implied chiasmus, the implied part goes first and is italicised.

3) Coins will be awarded according to the length and style of the chiasmus. Each letter-pair earns five coins, thus an abcc'b'a' chiasmus would earn fifteen coins. Chiasm of five or more pairs score double.

4) If someone posts an incomplete chiasmus, you can snag lots of coins quick by posting the pairs they missed. You'll get coins as if you posted the whole thing: I like to reward completeness!

So who wants to go first? There are a whole lot of chiasmus laying around this site already, but there's a whole lot more to be gathered. If you're interested in analysing some of these chiasmus for deeper meaning, check out "But What Does it Mean?" in the Latter-Day Saint forum.