They mention it's used in oral literature as an aid to memorization. It can also be seen as a human error-correction technique, just like a transmission over a noisy channel this allows the text to be preserved using oral transmission over many generations.
There are many other literary techniques which can be seen in the same light, the simplest of which is rhymes. There's also alliterations, verse-lengths in poetry being restricted to the right amount for chunking, anadiplosis, chiasmus in a more general sense...
I've been working on a series of texts that combine these techniques with mnemonic systems to try and achieve super-human speed in vocabulary acquisition for fun but they're really hard to combine into a text that is somewhat natural.
Mormons use this as evidence that the Book of Mormon has ancient origins. In response, someone wrote an article sarcastically arguing that the chiasmus in dr seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham is evidence of the ancient origin of that book as well.
Chiastic structure is more than just repetition. It is a poetic way of showing central themes. It makes the structure part of the communication and that’s why it’s effect is more than just repetition but that of central foundations. From a Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) perspective it gives deeper meaning to scriptures such as Alma 36 which is in it self an entire chapter in supplication who’s center is Jesus Christ. It has special meaning to those who believe the foundation of grace and source of redemption is Jesus Christ.
Really makes you appreciate the subtlety of arts in literature and popular media of old. It’s unfortunate that in many ways we (Americans at least) are no longer subjected to as much subtlety through laugh tracks and the like. Discovering these gems is really fun.
Chiastic structures are one of the most common forms of Hebrew Poetry. In fact, a chiasm is really a subset of a parallelism, which is what Hebrew poetry is primarily based on(English poetry, by contrast, is primarily based on meter).
The same person to first identify parallelism as a distinguishing feature of Hebrew poetry was Robert Lowth. Perhaps most interestingly, Lowth's works on English grammar are also responsible for a lot of the supposed rules in English that we dont apply [0](e.g. never end a sentence with a preposition, unless you have to)
Interesting, but makes sense, it also works for literally packing/unpacking things. You take out pieces on top first from a board game box, and then go deeper. At the end you have to put them back in in reverse order for everything to fit.
There are many other literary techniques which can be seen in the same light, the simplest of which is rhymes. There's also alliterations, verse-lengths in poetry being restricted to the right amount for chunking, anadiplosis, chiasmus in a more general sense...
I've been working on a series of texts that combine these techniques with mnemonic systems to try and achieve super-human speed in vocabulary acquisition for fun but they're really hard to combine into a text that is somewhat natural.