"17: So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God, dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.
18: And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim.
19: Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom shall be a desolate wilderness, for the violence against the children of Judah, because they have shed innocent blood in their land.
20: But Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.
21: For I will cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the Lord dwelleth in Zion."
The rhetorical device primarily used in these verses in the Old Testament is a chiasmus - a specific form of inverted parallelism, where the ideas are presented, the then represented in reverse order. By doing this, the verses sandwich their topic between the same important statement which is said at the beginning and repeated at the end.
In these verses, the chiasmus is set up with the following ideas:
The Lord dwells in Zion.
Jerusalem is holy.
No strangers/foreigners shall invade her.
Blessings will come from the kingdom.
Foreign enemies will be destroyed.
Judah and Jerusalem will live forever.
The Lord dwells in Zion.
The chiasmus sets up a ABCDCBA pattern. This parallel rhetorical device is an effective way to get readers to remember the topic/the points made, and reflect on it. The Lord dwells in Zion is a key point for readers to remember, so it begins the section of scripture, and ends it, as if opening and ending on the most important part - hitting it home with a bang, if you will. By presenting the information in a mirrored way, readers are able to see the information for the first time, process it, and digest it full circle as it is reversely repeated.
Other rhetorical devices pervade this section of the Old Testament, but chiasmus is one we see written often throughout Biblical text. It is important for readers to know why it is put in the text so often, and what we are supposed to learn from it.
Picking up on patterns like that is a really great way to understand the Old Testament. A lot of the time I don't know what's going on, but like you mentioned, if there is something repeated it sticks out.
ReplyDeleteI love chiastic structure! There are a few in the Book of Mormon as well. As well as emphasizing the first and last principles, I also think of them as holding the potential to emphasize the middle, the "D" in this case, as if they were building up a pyramid and that was the crowning element.
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