Linguistics and The Book of Mormon - Chiasmus

Chiasmus

Chiasmus is a form of rhetorical parallelism wherein key ideas familiar to the reader are inverted, usually for some kind of emphasis. Chiasmus appears in many languages, including English, Ugaritic, Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. It is found in the Bible and other ancient Middle Eastern poetry; for example, Genesis 9:6:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,

by man shall his blood be shed.

Chiasmus has been identified in modern poetry and prose. The first lines of John Keats' On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, for instance, run,

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

Here "realms of gold" and "goodly states and kingdoms" are bookended by the verbs "travelled" and "seen" to form an ABBA pattern.