[b-hebrew] chiasmus and topic
FPutnam at biblical.edu
FPutnam at biblical.edu
Mon Mar 8 16:29:33 EST 2004
Hi, Joe.
Great topic!
I am delighted to hear that you are working on the basis of verbal
parallels, and encourage you to pursue this approach, rather than the
far-too-common topical labels used by scholars (which tend to demonstrate
their ingenuity at developing chiastically correspondences that
conveniently fall into chiasms). <wry grin> I also encourage you to base
your work on work on *explicit* verbal parallels, rather than semantic
domains. The latter are certainly a legitimate linguistic function, but
are too open to the manipulation that (once again) demonstrates scholarly
ingenuity.
IMHO, we need to be extremely cautious in attempting to discern the
general significance of any [chiastic] structures, as well as of any
particular example thereof. Does a chiasm emphasize the terms in the
means, in the extremes, or in some combination thereof? Without a good
deal of input from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, as well as
materials from comparative literature--especially literature where we have
some control over the sources--we are merely guessing when we say, "The
author used a chiasmus here because ..." Adele Berlin's discussion of the
signficance of [so-called] word pairs in light of psycho-linguistic
research into word association illustrates this point.
Finally, from time to time, I notice chiasms in student papers (e.g., the
order of a list of nouns on page 3 is reversed on page 7, or two verbs are
used a second time, but in the opposite order). I have not kept score, but
I can confidently say that few students to whom I have pointed this out
realized that they had created a chiasm (well, one or two have done it
just to see if I would notice). When the chiastic words are closer to each
other, the student usually says something like, "I just changed the order
for variety". [This doesn't prove anything, it merely illustrates the need
for great humility when assessing the significance of literary forms from
a world long ago and far away.] :-)
Fred
Frederic Clarke Putnam, Ph.D.
Professor of Old Testament
Biblical Theological Seminary
Hatfield, Pennsylvania
215.368.5000x150
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