CHIASMS

Treasure Maps for Meaning

It's not just the words, but also the structures and forms of a story that the author uses to help reveal its meaning. One of the Bible's most centrally important and widely deployed literary devices is the chiasm, a form of a story where the first half is mirrored by its second half and the deeper meaning is found in the middle. This device, common in ancient literature, enhances the aesthetic balance of the text while subtly directing the reader's focus to its theological core. In largely oral cultures, such structures were also vital for aiding memory in the retelling.

In Eastern thinking, the chiasm functions like a treasure hunt. The author purposely employs this device to bury a deeper meaning in the text, similar to an "Easter egg" for the reader to discover. When an inverted chiasm (A, B, C, D, C, B, A) is identified, the structure points directly to the center (the D element) of the story. The center is the "treasure" and key message the author intends to highlight.

Genesis 1 is a complex chiasm that is both parallel (ABC ABC) and inverted (ABCDCBA). The structure is in the correspondence between the days: Day 4 relates to Day 1, Day 5 relates to Day 2, and Day 6 relates to Day 3. Days 1-3 involve God separating things (light/darkness, waters above/below, Land/Seas), while Days 4-6 involve God filling those separated spaces (sun/moon/stars in light/darkness, birds/fish in sky/waters, beasts/humans on Land/Seas).

Identifying the inverted structure (ABCDCBA) allows the reader to find the center. This can even be done by counting the Hebrew words. This center word at the heart of Genesis 1's chiasm is moadim, translated "sacred times" or "festival times." The importance of moadim is that it refers to the Sabbath. For the Israelites, who were slaves in Egypt and valued only for making bricks, one interpretation that can be inferred from this – both because of the chiasm’s emphasis and the later repeated emphasis in the fourth of the 10 commandments – is that the first lesson God wanted to teach his people upon leaving Egypt was that their value was not tied to what they produced — that they were valued because of who they were to God as part of God's good creation.

The chiasm highlights that the story is about creating and resting, and knowing the importance of both. God’s creative work is characterized by two triads of Ordering acts of separation and ordering, which transform Chaos into a structured, purposeful universe. Light, like darkness, is viewed as a discrete entity, a notion made explicit in Isaiah 45:7 and Job 38:19. This motif of dividing, categorizing and naming is central to the portrayal of creation, as the act gives boundaries and definition to all the phenomena of the world's undifferentiated Chaos. In the ancient Near-East, having no name was equivalent to nonexistence. An Egyptian text describes pre-Creation as the time “when no name of anything had yet been named,” and the Enuma Elish similarly designates primeval Chaos as the period “when on high the heaven had not yet been named, and below the firm ground had not yet been given a name.”

These form two triads of Order by separating and filling:

Days 1–3: God orders by separating.
Days 4–6: God fills with corresponding inhabitants.

Finally, the seventh day of creation carries profound symbolic weight as a time of completion, rest, and divine blessing. Other creator gods built temples as a sign of their victory over the wild forces of Chaos, but this God instituted ritualized Sabbath as a temporal shrine in which the people of Israel can rest from their labors each week with their God.

Westerners like to say that creation was perfect, but perfect is a static Western idea. It doesn't even exist in the Hebrew mindset. It's not that creation was perfect – it's that creation was good. God stepped back and said, it can go. It's not static. It's dynamic. It’s meant to move forward, to reproduce and grow on its own, empowered by the Creator’s own creative power. God says, you need to know how to stop; you need to know how to Sabbath: to enjoy creation.

Marty Solomon

God rests on the seventh day not because He is tired, but because the work is finished and shalom (everything in its proper place, nothing lacking) is achieved. In Judaism, each day – and thus each Sabbath – begins at sundown, when the work day is over, to reflect and remember the priority of rest before work. The familiar “evening and morning” refrain in Genesis establishes this and appears for each of the first six days in Genesis 1, but is absent on the seventh day. It is as if the author deliberately leaves the seventh day open-ended, inviting us to enter into God’s ongoing wholeness. Each observance is both a memory and an “ongoing seventh day.”

Separation (bāḏēl) as positive action integral to the process of divine Order can be understood as "a setting apart," as elsewhere when it designates cities for special purpose (Deut 4:41; 19:2, 7) or individuals for service (1 Chr 25:1; Ezk 39:14). The concept is employed to describe God's special activity in setting apart Aaron to the consecration of the holy things (I Chr 23: 13) and the setting apart of the Levites (Num 16:9; Deut 10:8). Israel was also set apart to be God's heritage (1 Kgs 8:53).

LOGOS IN GENESIS

There are fascinating allusions elsewhere in the Bible to older Hebrew accounts of creation (in Job, Isaiah, and Proverbs) where God's creative act is not just speech, but measurement: measuring the waters, marking the heavens with a span, weighing the mountains, and giving weight to the wind. This process—from the root hqq ("to engrave" a boundary)—may also conceptually prefigure and reinforce the "dividing and separating" in Genesis 1.

Divine measurement was seen as the foundational "mystery" of creation by Greeks and Jews alike, a heavenly pattern that was to be replicated on earth. Echoing the idea that the Temple's specific proportions were believed to replicate the measures of the creation, Ezekiel's Temple vision writes that these measurements are the "form" and "fixed Order" that should govern not only sacred architecture but also a just society, including the fair division of Land and honest commerce. The laws given to Moses included these cosmic Temple measurements alongside the laws for human society, linking divine Order in creation directly to ethical and social order.

God measures the universe in this illustration from the Bible Moralise; France, mid-13th Century

This deep-rooted tradition of creation-as-measurement also prefigures an aspect of how some early Christians understood Jesus as the Messiah. The Hebrew word for measurement, middah, eventually came to also mean "mystery," as the act of measuring was understood not as a simple physical task but as the profound, divine secret at the heart of creation – an idea that would eventually undergird the assumptions of medieval alchemy and the birth of modern science. Philo, a preeminent Jewish philosopher living in Jesus's day, described the Logos (identified with the Messiah as the "Word" of God in John's Gospel, ) as the "pre-measurer," of all things – that is, as as an archetypal, pre-existent entity that embodies a "measure" or blueprint for creation. He claimed the Logos was the "central stem of the menorah," an ancient symbol of Yahweh's presence, dividing its lamps, illustrating its role as measuring and maintaining Order, keeping Chaos at bay and thereby ensuring the stability and coherence of the universe.

The connection of measurement with the Messiah is additionally attested in the non-canonical Gospel of Philip, which states that the "Messiah has two meanings – the 'anointed one' or 'the measured' (mšiḥã in Syriac)... It is the anointed (Christ) whom they have measured out." The notion that the Messiah is "measured out" also suggests a divinely predetermined pattern but unlike Philo's cosmological "pre-measuring" of universal principles, Philip focuses on the singular "measurement" of God's redemptive plan in a specific, incarnate figure.

Both conceptualizations highlight an underlying theological conviction that God's action is characterized by the intentional economy of Order that we see in Genesis 1, where what is manifested is a direct, pre-ordained reflection of what is conceived. The "dividing and separating" of creation is an act of divine measurement, which establishes the Order ultimately personified and embodied in the figure of the Messiah as "the measured one." Interestingly, it also echoes the definition of Logos that philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976 CE) formulated two millennia later:

"the laying-down and laying-before which gathers itself and others. …It names the inexhaustible mystery that the speaking of language comes to pass from the unconcealment of what is present… Logos, which is thus linked to the unveiling of truth, is what allows the phenomenon to show itself as itself… the essence of language from the essence of Being – indeed, as this itself. For Logos is the name for the Being of beings.

Sabbath from Creation
and Destruction

There are chiasms within chiasms, as well. After the Flood, God establishes a covenant (Genesis 9:8-17) with four specific Hebrew words that recur in odd-number frequencies. Numbers, words or phrases appearing in odd numbered frequencies are often indications of chiastic meaning. The chiastic "middle" of the number 7, for example, is 4, the middle of 5 is 3, the middle of 2 is 1. In Genesis 9, the words "covenant" appear 7 times, "earth" 7 times, "clouds" 5 times, and "bow" 3 times. The "middle mentions" (which are indicated by ★ below) of each of those words (ie. the 4th mention of the 7 "covenants") combine to form a mini-chiasm. In an otherwise repetitively worded passage the final middle mention of those 4 key words is followed by new words that reveal the chiastic meaning of the whole:

And God spoke unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying: 'As for Me, behold, I establish My covenant1 with you, and with your seed after you; and with every living creature that is with you, the fowl, the cattle, and every beast of the earth1 with you; of all that go out of the ark, even every beast of the earth2. And I will establish My covenant2 with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth3.' And God said: 'This is the token of the covenant3 which I make between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:, I have set My bow1 in the cloud1, and it shall be for a token of a COVENANT★ between Me and the EARTH★. And it shall come to pass, when I [ānan]bring2 [ʿānān]CLOUDS★ over the earth5, and the BOW★ is seen in the cloud4, that I will remember My covenant5, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow3 shall be in the cloud5; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant6 between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth6.' And God said unto Noah: 'This is the token of the covenant7 which I have established between Me and all flesh that is upon the earth7.'

This "remembering" (or, "renewed focus") of the covenant is a recapitulation of an earlier chiasm that "remembered Noah," and signaled the second creation of the world:

7 days (7:4)

7 days (7:10)

40 days (7:17)

150 days (7:24)

"God remembered Noah" (8:1)

150 days (8:3)

40 days (8:6)

7 days (8:10)

7 days (8:12)

In the creation of Genesis 1-2, God called humanity to keep the "sign" of a weekly remembered Sabbath much like, in ancient Near-Eastern king-&-servant covenants, the king would call servants to keep signs of their covenant as reminders of obligations – and to show the king if they ever needed his aid. But in this story God is the one that keeps the sign (the rainbow). The subversion shows God giving away the leverage of fear in seeking a relationship not based on insecurity or power, but on God's own initiating commitment.

The sign of a "bow" (keshet) is the same Hebrew word used for "weapon" — another example of imagistic language that contrasts with Western thought in connecting seemingly unrelated concepts. The rainbow is not merely a colorful arc but God's bow-and-arrow. And where would the arrow be pointing if the rainbow is this bow? The weapon points back towards God. In the first creation God takes a Sabbath from creating and calls on humanity to remember it and keep it sacred. In the re-creation, God takes a Sabbath from destroying, and promises humanity to remember and keep it sacred.

Genesis divides history into two: before and after the Flood. The Flood is the "de-creation" of Genesis 1. The situation after the flood is not the same: Originally the plants were assigned as the only food for man and beast (1:29–30); now animals may be eaten, as long as their blood is not consumed. But human life is sacrosanct: murderers must be executed, for man is made in God’s image (9:3–6). The rainbow is designated the sign of the covenant after a de-creation that had been prompted by the human heart, that “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (6:5). But God gives almost the same reason after the Flood for never destroying mankind again, possibly implying that God’s anger against sin is turned into forgiveness because of Noah's sacrifice (8:20).

Adam & Eve’s Chiasm

The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 and 3 is a chiasm. The chiastic structure is evident through repeated elements at the front and back of the story, such as the mention of loneliness, the naming of the woman, and the focus on the serpent.

The center of this chiasm is "The eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked" (Genesis 3:7), which draws attention to this repeated theme of nakedness. Understanding the Hebrew wordplay further illuminates this. The word for "naked" (arowm / erowm) is very similar to the word for "crafty" or "shrewd" (aruwm), used to describe the serpent. The chiasm's focus on nakedness, combined with this wordplay, may suggest that the story is intentionally making it difficult to distinguish between the serpent and humanity, as the serpent exhibits human-like traits (talking, reasoning, relating, walking).

In this way it invites wrestling with what it means to be human and made in the image of God. Both chiasms now form a dialogue about the ability to know when to say "enough", particularly in relation to desire. The tree offered knowledge, but Eve's added perspective was that it was "desirable for gaining wisdom." Being made in God's image means being able to harness desires for greater good, knowing when to say "enough" to them, and not simply obeying baser, animalistic impulses — and thus becoming, as the serpent is depicted, like a hybrid of human and animal qualities.

The shame associated with their nakedness after eating the fruit, highlighted by the chiasm, prompts the question, "Who told you that you were naked?" This implies they had been listening to "other voices" besides God's. Reading this through the chiasm's emphasis encourages the recognition that God made all things good and beloved, and that shame comes from listening to voices that contradict this truth.

NEXT: Patterns
of Descent & Inversion

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