In the 2020 Come Follow Me manual, p. 115, the lesson rightly points out that “Alma 36 is a great example of a form of Hebrew poetry called chiasmus, in which words or ideas are presented in a certain order, leading to a central idea, and then repeated in reverse order.” This definition is a perfect description of Alma 36. For further information, the manual invites readers to consult the Book of Mormon Student Manual which has been used for many years in seminary and institute classes.
That manual presents material based on the groundbreaking articles I have published over the years about chiasmus, beginning in BYU Studies in 1969 and in the New Era in 1972, listed below. There and elsewhere I have specifically discussed chiasmus in Alma 36, both in LDS publications and also in scholarly books and reference works. Of all the passages in world literature that have ever been found to be chiastic, Alma 36 is among the very best examples of this form of composition. It truly ranks as a masterpiece of world religious literature.
This is not the place to revisit all of these publications about Alma 36, but I would like to draw attention here to a couple particular introductory points.
First, I have often told the story about my discovery of chiasmus in King Benjamin’s Speech on August 16, 1967. It’s readily available on YouTube. But I have not before told the story of the discovery of chiasmus in Alma 36, the details of which I just recently ran across in a stack of letters that I wrote home in 1968–1969.
I had returned home from the mission field to resume studying as a Junior at BYU in September 1968. I began reporting my findings about chiasmus to my professors and directors of the Honors Program, and soon was invited to speak in classes and firesides about this new discovery. I was also called to be the Gospel Doctrine teacher in my student ward, and that year the Sunday School curriculum covered the Book of Mormon. On Friday, March 7, 1969, I was introduced to a beautiful and charming graduate student. I would never again date anyone else. On Saturday, March 8, I went to the Manti Temple with my ward, my first time to that amazing pioneer house of holiness. Then, on Sunday, March 9, I taught a Sunday School lesson that “went real well—we drew up a character sketch of Alma Jr.,” as my letter home stated. In the process of considering what Alma cared most about, we read his accounts of his conversion, in Mosiah 27, Alma 5, and Alma 36.
It was in that context that I first found the chiastic structure of Alma 36. Writing in pencil in the margins of the printing of the Book of Mormon I was using, I noted nine elements in the first half of Alma 36 and the same nine elements in the second half in the opposite order. At the turning point in the middle I just drew an arrow, and at the top of the page wrote “Great!” That Sunday night when I wrote my weekly letter home to my parents, I noted, just in passing, “I also just found a gorgeous pattern in Alma 36.”
That has to be one of the greatest weekends in my life. I believe I was blessed for going to the temple and for taking my church calling seriously. I was blessed by finding what I think is the greatest chiastic composition ever written. I was also blessed by finding the wonderful woman to whom I have been married now for fifty-one fabulous years. Life’s blessings don’t get much better than that.
Second, I want to thank and celebrate the many people who have independently refined and reformatted the layout and typesetting of the distinct chiastic structure in Alma 36. In several of my various publications involving Alma 36, I have modified my presentation from time to time, depending on the purposes and typesetting options available in different book or journal settings. In my 1989 report on Chiasmus in Alma 36, I replicate seven different layouts that had been published, to that date, by myself and others. Here is a standard chart (Figure 1), following number 132, that is often used to highlight the basic inversion and central turning point in Alma 36:
Figure 1 John W. Welch and Greg Welch,” Chiasmus in Alma 36," in Charting the Book of Mormon, chart 132.
Since then, in the last twenty years, there have been several other proposals advanced, as careful examiners continue to analyze and appreciate the skill with which Alma tells his conversion story here in Alma 36. The best and most detailed recent studies have been published by Noel Reynolds and Stephen Ehat.
John W. Welch, “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies 10 no. 1 (Autumn, 1969): 83; reprinted in John W. Welch, “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon,” in Chiasmus in Antiquity (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), 206; reprinted also in Lawrence J. Trudeau, ed., Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 321 (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016), 211.
John W. Welch, A Study Relating Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon to Chiasmus in the Old Testament, Ugaritic Epics, Homer, and Selected Greek and Latin Authors (M.A. Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1970), 129.
John W. Welch, “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon: Or the Book of Mormon Does It Again,” New Era, February 1972, 9.
John W. Welch, “Chiasmus in Alma 36” (FARMS Report, 1989), 43 pp. plus Appendix 1, “Table of Words Appearing Only a Single Time in Alma 36, First Half and Second Half,” and Appendix 2, “Table of Words Appearing More than Once in Alma 36, First Half and Second Half.”
John W. Welch, “A Masterpiece: Alma 36,” reworked in John L. Sorenson and Melvin Thorne, eds., Rediscovering the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT; FARMS, 1991), 114–131.
Stephen Kent Ehat, “Brief Introduction to Chiasmus in Alma 36,” video (2016), 11 minutes.
Stephen Kent Ehat, “Words, Phrases, and Ideas in Macro-Chiasms,” in Chiasmus: The State of the Art, ed. John W. Welch and Donald W. Parry (Provo, UT: BYU Studies and Book of Mormon Central, 2020), 335–339.
Noel B. Reynolds, “Rethinking Alma 36,” in Give Ear to My Words: Test and Context of Alma 36–42, ed. Kerry M. Hull et al. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2019), 451–472.