Alma’s instructions to his son Helaman take up chapters 36 and 37, as he is handing over the records. Here, we present chapter 36 in its entirety to demonstrate one of the Book of Mormon’s most complex literary devices. It is calledchiasmus, or chiasm, a term that comes from the Greek letter chi, which looks like an X. In effect, the structure of chapter 36 is best described by the shape of an X: The beginning and end of a chiasm are parallel, and the parallels continue consistently throughout. In this first verse, for example, the advice to “keep my commandments and ye shall prosper in the land” is repeated verbatim in the final verse of the chapter. In chiasms, such patterns are repeated reliably, with each element having its matching counterpoint: the second idea would have a parallel in the penultimate idea of the chapter; the third idea would have its corresponding verse in the third-to-last section of the chapter, etc. (Note that sometimes, the verse numbers do not correspond precisely; the verse numbers in the Book of Mormon were added later and were not part of the original text.) The pattern continues until we come to the heart of the chiasm—the center of the letter X, so to speak—when we get to the central point of the whole message. In a chiasm, the most important message is located halfway into the text and is the foundation of the rest of the passage.
It is a good idea to read through the entire text of this chapter before delving into the commentary line by line, so that the overall meaning in all the literary parallelism is not lost.
John Welch, a Brigham Young University professor, has done extensive work on Alma 36, and this commentary is adapted from his careful exegesis of the passage and identification of major parallels, to which I have added several more that I have discovered.