Search Scripture daily!  (Acts 17:11)

This website has been set up to encourage personal Bible discovery by paying attention to the literary structure of Scripture and the flow of thought.  Look out for chiasms in  daily Bible reading – and after that compare with what others have proposed. The website also includes tables on bible echoes.

This blog is supported by Mumbles Christadelphians

http://www.mumbles-christadelphians.com/

and  Jered Bolton –  https://notjustcode.co.uk/

All proposals made here should be considered as provisional and may be subject to modification as we learn more. (Posts marked with an * make  some reference to an academic work directly or indirectly in the posts or comments).

The contributions to this blog have come in the main from those of us who are following the Bible Companion bible reading planner – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Companion which covers the  Old Testament once and the New Testament twice in a year,  To a large extent this explains the sequence of scripture passages as they have appeared.

Please submit comments, corrections or new proposals by clicking “Leave a comment” but  indicate the source if it is not your own. 

If you want to be alerted by email to new submissions click Subscribeand enter your email address.


  • Bible study tool

    http://www.the-boltons.co.uk/ss/

    “Whilst it’s easy to find the root of a given word, it’s rather tricky to go in the opposite direction and find words that stem from a given word. This utility searches for words in the other direction “.

6 thoughts on “Search Scripture daily!  (Acts 17:11)”

  1. I’d like to submit a Chiasmus I found this morning from 1 Corinthians 13. I think it’s strong and might be a textbook example of the art.

    1 Corinthians 13:1-13

    Chiastic Rendering

    A. 1-3 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

    A’. 11-13 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

    B. 4-6. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

    B’. 8-10 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

    X. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

    1. May I suggest extending your good chiasm by adding in another A layer and shifting down your layers by 1.
      A layer: “And Yet, I am going to show you a far better way”
      A’ layer: “But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love’
      Did you notice then this makes the chiasms on either side work. The next chiasm is 14:1-19, a 5-level chiasm fairly easy to identify.

  2. The most unlikely chiasm in Scripture is the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew, 1:1-17. You might ask how can a genealogy be a chiasm?

    A: 1:1 “The Record of the genealogy of the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

    A’ : (1:17) So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations, and from the deportation to the Messiah, 14.

    B I1:2-6) and B’ (12 to 16) are lists of “common folk” before and after the nation of Judah existed.

    X (1:6-11) layer, the main point, is a listing of all the Kings of Judah, beginning with King David. See how the main point of Matthew is Jesus is the “Son of David” and the chiasm center supports the basic theme of Matthew- He descended from the Kings of Judah. (An unexpected chiasm in the most unlikely place). Enjoy!

  3. This Chiasm Exchange is great, and I have used it often. But where are you going with this?

    May I suggest a new guideline for determining what is a chiasm in the New Testament? This new suggested guideline is any chiasm one finds should be checked to see if it is surrounded by chiasms on both sides. This can help to determine if the proposed chiasm is properly defined (A and A’ bracketing layers). Try this out – you will be surprised it generally seems to be true. If you cannot find a chiasm on each side of your chiasm, then double-check you have correctly defined your chiasm.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.