Mr. Johnson,
In fact I wrote a long post trying to take your misgivings, and then it was lost because that Jeff Meyers guy had turned off comments! Well, c’est la vie. I’ll put this up there as a “new essay.”
I just put up that first essay (#29 in a series) because I’d made some math goofs in the version mailed out, and I thought some other people would be interested. If this kind of study does not interest you, that’s fine. The Kingdom is a big place. Also, as a postmil, I confess that we are still in the early days of the Great Conversation, so perhaps everything I mooted in that essay will prove inadequate. But that won’t happen unless people put stuff out there to be dealt with, which is what I’ve done.
I guess I can see that it might bug you to be told “go see what else I’ve written,” but surely you see that I can’t just put up on this blog several 20-30 page essays. At least the essays in Rite Reasons are fairly short and are on-line. For chiasms, see the books of Dorsey and Breck, and for that matter, anything done in Biblical studies in the last 20 years since literary analysis has found a place.
Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance.
Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as “new creation” passages.
The fact that scores of passages and numerous whole books have this 7-day chiastic pattern surely invites us to employ that template on other passages just to see if it might fit. It may or may not. There are 39 whole psalms in Book 1, so clearly it is not a complete set of 7s. To date, however, my studies have suggested to me (and to other readers) that Book 1 may well start with four sets of 7. Psalms 1-7, for instance, are about evenings and mornings, over and over. It points (or MAY point) the reader in a direction….
There’s nothing esoteric about literary structuring by chiasms and by numerics. It is all over the ancient and medieval world. The Bible is written in hieratic scribal Hebrew, not in parole Hebrew. It is written by men in a company of people almost always completely at odds with their society, which we know from the Bible was mostly idolatrous. The various writers in this tradition are extremely referential of one another, and self-consciously so. I reject the modernist view that the Bible grew like Topsy with writings from here and there just coming together by the mysterious work of the Spirit.
An ancient trained priestly scribe was like someone with a Ph.D. in physics today — not like a newspaper reporter. Their works are complex in the way a Bach quadruple fugue or a Beethoven symphony are complex. I myself enjoy admiring that musical beauty, and I do think that over time, the things we bring out of the Bible will prove helpful to the church.
Jim,
I’m sorry I screwed up with the comments in the last post. I’m irritable from being sick in bed all weekend. That’s my excuse. I won’t cut off the comments next time without checking with you guys first.
Jeff, bro:
I understand, being given to irritability myself. (!)
We’re still finding our way on this. We want a serious Blog, a place for serious conversation about good matters. You are right to worry about running up to 100 “replies” to something, but at the same time we need a way to have good discussion. So, we’ll have to work at it.
No harm done.
[...] Shoots and Scores This quote comes from Jim Jordan on the Biblical Horizons Blog. Also, as a postmil, I confess that we are still in the early days of [...]
Mr. Jordan,
For the life of me I can’t understand how this answers anything I’ve brought up to this point. I appreciate the window into your thinking here but was really looking forward to more interaction with what I brought forward in the last comment thread.
As for whether or not this interests me I suppose it remains to be seen. I haven’t seen much reason for switching to your perspective even though I share a postmillenial and theonomic outlook in general with you. So, I don’t doubt we have more to learn from the Scriptures–I just haven’t seen an elucidation of the principles guiding your take on these things in any real way where you respond to what I wrote.
To me, whether or not chiastic or numerologic structures exist is quite beside the fundamental point at issue and that is your contention that the Spirit has inspired the order of the Psalms as we have them in our canon today. Without that inspired order, any contention regarding the structure of the Psalter as you call it winds up being an interesting but quite irrelevant opinion on the nature of the Scripture.
I’m not saying we can’t appreciate chiasm (and especially when it occurs within individual Psalms) and other literary forms–just that I see little reason to make it overly important when no one has yet to argue successfully that we must see the hand of God directly having arranged the Psalter as we have it in today’s form.
I can appreciate your reservations. I happen to take it on faith that the final version of the canonical text as we have it is the result of the work of the Spirit. When I see that Book 4 of the Psalter is structured chiastically, when I see repeated 22s and 17s in the groupings of the psalms, when I see the narrative progression in Book 5, I assume I’m looking at a carefully planned and executed ordering.
You may come back and say that the Spirit’s outbreathing applies only to individual psalms, and that as admirable as the canonical ordering may be, it is only the work of the final redactor and is not the work simultaneously of the Spirit. That, of course, is a fair position. What I’m trying to do (in Conversation, of course) in looking at the ordering and arrangement of the Psalms is the same whether one assumes the Spirit or not.
The same kind of question, though, arises with Jeremiah. We have two versions. The Masoretic is highly structured as a chiasm, betraying the same general form as several other books of the Bible (Ezekiel, Revelation). The LXX is shorter, arranged differently, not chiastic.
It seems to me that your question applies to Jeremiah as well. You might say that the individual pericopes of Jeremiah were given by the Spirit, but that the Hebrew text’s dischronologized but chiastic arrangement is not the work of the Spirit but of Baruch or some later redactor.
On the other hand, if you want the Hebrew text’s arrangement of Jeremiah to be taken as the work of the Spirit, then I don’t see how you can take much issue with my belief that the Hebrew text’s order of the Psalms is also the work of the Spirit. You may not be certain, but I don’t see that you can dismiss my view (which I’m pretty sure would be held by most all churchmen in the history of Christendom).
Anyway, I hope that this gets to your question and reservation in some kind of helpful way. Thank you for the interaction.
Perhaps I’m ignorant in this matter, but is there any difference in the order of the Psalms between the MT and the LXX besides that some are combined in one but not the other, and LXX adds 151?
No. No difference in order.
If that’s the case, then I think the burden of proof lies with whoever would deny this order was inspired… but that’s just my .02.