When you hear someone begin to talk again about a chiasm in some Biblical passage, you may be inclined to groan and ask why commentators and Bible teachers are always looking for these things. What good are they, and why must I be constantly afflicted with them? There are two things that we should remember. First, we should think of chiasms in Hebrew the same way we think of paragraphs in English writing. They mark off units of thought. Biblical Hebrew in the old manuscripts does not have paragraphs, verses, spaces between words, or even punctuation to mark the ends of sentences. It’s just one long string of letters. How do we know where sentences end, new thoughts begin and so on? Frequently, Hebrew indicates such units of thoughts with chiasms. Secondly, we must appreciate that Biblical writers did not think the way we in the western world think. We usually begin with the main thought and then develop that thought in the sentences that follow. Hebrew writers loved to put their main thought at the center and then arrange the developmental material symmetrically around it. Thus the frequency of chiasms. If we miss them, we may well miss the main thought, connect ideas wrongly, and even fail to see where a sentence ends.
Psalm 86 is another example of chiasm in the psalms.
Psalm-86-StructureNote the careful symmetrical placement of the name Yahweh. It occurs four times, once in each of the A passages and once in each of the E passages. That name was extremely important to the people of Israel; it reminded them of the Lord’s enduring faithfulness to his covenant. “I am Yahweh. I do not change. Therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed” (Mal.3:6).
At the center of the psalm stands, “There is none like you among the gods… You are God alone.” That is the fundamental thought of the psalm. It explains David’s confidence in a dire distress. What could be more fitting than making this the central thought of the psalm?
Surrounding the petitions of the E sections, David has added in the D sections a further reason for confidence, the great lovingkindness of the Lord to him.
The C sections both refer to the Lord’s grace, but in different ways. He asks for grace in the first and praises the Lord for grace in the second. There is progress from the first half of the chiasm to the second.
The same is true of the A sections. In the first he asks Yahweh to hear. In the last he says, “You, Yahweh, have helped and comforted me.”
The psalm is primarily a psalm of petition, but in his petitions, David does not show great distress or anxiety, as he does, for example, in Psalm 6. Instead, trusting that there is no God like Yahweh who has shown to him his lovingkindness, he faces the assembly of the violent (v. 14) with quiet strength.