Have you ever wondered how the author of an ancient biblical text went about composing the work?
Virtually all composed writings have structure. And if you are familiar with the structures being used by the author, it’s much easier to understand.
The Hebrew author had normal and accepted structures to work with when they were composing and organizing a text. Moderns generally use the accepted A., B., C., and conclusion as their form for composition. But the ancients virtually never used that structure. The most common structures used by the ancients are presently known to us as chiasmus, parallelism, and dirge pattern. The ancient authors were free to use these forms in their construction. But they were using them in very specific ways and for very specific reasons; they used them as tools.
The ancient literary structures were used specifically to organize and construct advanced treatises. The structures typically relied on pairing certain verses, sentences, or paragraphs together in order to communicate, though the intended pairings were for the most part not located next to their intended referent.
Here is a simple outline example of how a chiasmus would be constructed;
A.
B.
C.
B.
A.
Imagine these letters represent paragraphs and that they make up the whole of an ancient composition. This is the natural and common form of a chiasmus, which was the most common structure in ancient writings. In a chiasmus, the first paragraph would intentionally be written to correspond to the fifth paragraph. The second and fourth paragraphs would also be intentionally written to correspond to each other. That would leave the third paragraph as the center of the composition, which was virtually always reserved for the most important part, the climax of the story or teaching. This form, though it could come in other sizes (three, seven, nine, eleven parts, etc), is a normal chiasm. The Hebrew writer and reader were both well aware of this pattern. So, the writer would often use this form, and the hearer or reader would naturally be looking for it. But the western reader generally has no idea it exists, that is, until he has been made aware of it.
A normal parallel pattern, the second most common construct, looks like this:
A.
B.
C.
A.
B.
C.
Again in this form, we see paragraphs that are not side-by-side, that are intentionally written to correspond a different paragraph. First and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth, were all written intentionally to go together. The author is not doing this for art. He has very specific reasons for using these patterns. He is working to communicate something very, very important. Not having this understanding leaves the modern reader short and often times, next to without.
Next up is the form of the dirge patter:
A.
B.
C.
D.
A.
B.
C.
Notice that this structure has only seven pieces as there is no second D. The dirge pattern is a basic parallel structure constructed so that is purposefully incomplete, missing the last section. This missing piece was to signify death or loss, hence the idea of dirge.
Take for instance the book of Lamentations. The author of that book used the dirge pattern – a widely accepted construct of that day – to organize his material. If you have read that book you know it is about destruction and death. It is a very sad book, indeed. But the author CHOSE to use the dirge pattern to organize the book into a coherent form, one that would convey a teaching apart from the words on the page. In other words, the text will convey the simple and surface story. But the dirge pattern speaks without words. It uses the pattern to speak in ways that cannot be seen on the surface and especially by the modern. But conversely, the Hebrew reader or hearer, noticing the very dark nature of the story – culminating in death and destruction – would have been expecting a dirge pattern as the organizational form. The ancients who heard lamentations were literally expecting it and they were not disappointed in that regard.