Could You Do This?

What Is a Chiasm?

Long before anyone wrote on paper, ancient peoples composed poetry and sacred texts using a literary structure called chiasm — named for the Greek letter chi (χ), which crosses in the middle. A chiasm works like a mirror: ideas introduced in the first half of a passage are repeated in reverse order in the second half, with the most important idea placed at the very center.

Think of it as a pattern: A, B, C … X … C′, B′, A′. The opening and closing echo each other. The second element corresponds to the second-to-last. And whatever stands at the center — element X — is the heart of the entire composition. Everything else exists to frame it.

Chiasm is found throughout the ancient world — in Mesopotamian literature, in Greek and Latin poetry, and especially in Hebrew scripture. The Old Testament is filled with it. Scholars of ancient Near Eastern literature recognize chiasm as a hallmark of sophisticated, orally-composed sacred writing. It takes extraordinary literary skill to construct. A master chiasm doesn't just organize ideas — it makes the structure itself carry theological meaning. The shape of the text is part of the message.

A Young, Uneducated Farm Boy

Joseph Smith was 23 years old when he dictated the Book of Mormon. He had perhaps three years of formal schooling. He had not studied Hebrew, Greek, or ancient literature. He had no access to academic works on biblical poetry or Near Eastern composition. By every account of those who witnessed the translation, he dictated continuously, without notes, rarely if ever going back to review what had been said.

Chiasmus as a literary form was not even identified and named in biblical scholarship until the early 19th century — and those findings were in German academic journals that Joseph Smith almost certainly never encountered. The discovery that the Book of Mormon contains chiastic structures was not made until 1967, when a young Latter-day Saint scholar named John Welch, studying in Germany, recognized the pattern while reading about chiasm in ancient texts and realized he had seen it in the Book of Mormon.

Welch's most striking find was the 36th chapter of Alma — a father's personal testimony to his son. What Welch discovered was not a simple two- or three-element chiasm. It was a seven-level interlocking structure, spanning thirty verses, in which every element on the descent has a precise verbal and thematic counterpart on the ascent — and the single verse at the center is the theological hinge on which the entire composition turns.

The structure is not decorative. The center — the hinge — is the cry of a desperate man to Jesus Christ. Every verse before it is a descent into darkness. Every verse after it is an ascent into light. The shape of the text enacts what it describes: a life turned around at a single moment.