How Chiasms in the Bible Point Us to the Chiasm of Human Life

A Road Map

I know that people either love or hate the idea of a chiasm—if they’ve ever even heard the idea to begin with. It’s a form of ancient Near Eastern parallelism that sounds odd to our ears because it tends to place the emphasis point at the middle of what it’s saying rather than at the end. We’re accustomed to a punchline in a joke or a moral to a story that lands on the final beat of what we’re reading, and a chiasm does something different. It starts with parallel ideas at the outsides, and it moves in toward a central idea.

Psalm 139 is an easy one to pick up on without actually looking at it. It opens with, “Lord, you have searched me and known me,” and then it closes with “Search me and know me, O God.” And so then you think, If it starts and ends like that, I’m going to try to map these other parallels in toward the midpoint.

I love chiasms. I do not hate them, obviously, because the Bible, for most of human history, was received by learners through an oral tradition. They didn’t have copies of the Bible. Essentially what chiasms do is give memory hooks for a listener so that they can remember a point.

I had to ask the question, Why do we see this structure littered all over the Old Testament and the New Testament? Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that it’s there. And I came to realize, at the passing of my mother, how similar the beginning of life and the end of life are.

At the beginning of life, you have this giant inhale and then this piercing wail that’s proof of life. And as I sat at my mother’s bedside, I heard her final exhale and this crashing silence. And I thought, This is like a chiasm. It’s the same but different. There’s a similarity, but there’s also something slightly different in the second part.

And I got curious about mapping that in with the whole pattern of a human life. And I don’t wonder if the Lord, in his kindness, has given us this kind of road map so that we don’t have to face the second half of life coming from a place of total ignorance. We could actually gain wisdom by paying attention to how we move inward in the chiasm so that we might move out of the chiasm, giving due respect to the passage of time and to the sacredness of human life.

Jen Wilkin is the author of Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World.

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