12 God's great deedsand 19a is even a little chiasm of its own (will live - your dead, my corpse - will rise i.e. A-B, B-A).
13 Others may take your place - we will remember you
14 Others will be punished - they won't be remembered
15 God's great deeds
16 God brings man down
17 Pregnant writhing
That's us
18 Pregnant writhing
Man is brought down
19 the dead will rise
they'll rejoice
they'll be sustained
the dead will rise
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL HELP ME?
i don't think i need to talk about the chiastic structure - it doesn't change the argument one way or the other as regards the afterlife, so i'm not quite sure what to do with it all!
5 comments:
so i'm not quite sure what to do with it all!zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....
That's what I do with em' :-)
Isn't the middle bit of a chiasm the most important thing?
i think either the middle (in an ABCBA) or the outside (in an ABBA). so we could take 12 & 15 (Yhwh is great), then 17c (we once were dead), then 19a & d (we will be resurrected).
i think that makes sense of it too.
Maybe you could see the three similarly structured segments -- I want to call them parallel -- as presenting different 'angles' or metaphorical reworkings of the basic experience being reflected on?
Alternatively, each one could represent a slight advance on the others -- the paralleled chiasms binding it together, but the 'momentum' of the parallelism moving it forward? (I think Robert Alter's Art of Biblical Poetry says something like that about the kind of 'poetic logic' built into parallelism.)
Nice pick up on the mini-chiasm in v 19. I don't know what to do with them either...
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