Rare Chiasms?

In her introduction to the current Semeia volume, Eskenazi argues that the biblical writers rarely use ring or chiastic constructions. The ones that are “found” are, in her opinion, usually unconvincing. But she offers a more philosophical reason for the Bible’s avoidance of chiasm: In a Levinasian vein, she claims that the biblical writers resist closure and that chiasmus is complicit with totality. This, in my view, is a misconception of chiasm. If one follow John Breck’s account in his Shape of Biblical Language , chiasm is not a structure of totality, but rather a dynamic and open literary device, one that does not close off reading but permits one to read the same text forward, backward, and inside out.

Eskenazi points out, insightfully, that the Hebrew Bible ends in mid-sentence, with the partial quotation from the decree of Cyrus at the end of 2 Chronicles. It ends with a virtual cry for “something greater” to come. What Eskenazi seems to want to do with this, however, is to suggest that this lack of ending is a permanent affair, a permanent state of the people of God. This reminds me of recent work by Gelertner in Commentary , where he argued that the “veil” was a fundamental symbol of Judaism, a veil that is never rent and never removed, one that forever stands between the worshiper and God. Eskenazi is using the end of Chronicles to indicate a parallel with Levinas, and this suggests that Levinasian eschatology is less the hope for an ending than a hope for the permanent possibility of a new beginning. Hence the links he forges between paternity, fecundity, and eschatology. This also suggests that Levinas is a deeply Jewish thinker, as is Derrida ?Eboth Jewish in the sense that they are not Christian, in the sense that their thought is structured by an absence of eschatology in the Christian sense. These images ?Eveil and openness also seem to provide important (because profoundly Pauline) features of a Christian apologetic over against Judaism: “The God behind the veil, whose face you have not seen, that God we proclaim to you.”