Chiasmus: Soph. OT 609-610 and Isaiah 5:20

[C. S. Bartholomew]

Is. 5:20 οὐαὶ οἱ λέγοντες τὸ πονηρὸν καλὸν καὶ τὸ καλὸν πονηρόν,
οἱ τιθέντες τὸ σκότος φῶς καὶ τὸ φῶς σκότος,
οἱ τιθέντες τὸ πικρὸν γλυκὺ καὶ τὸ γλυκὺ πικρόν.

Is. 5:20 MT

הוי האמרים לרע טוב ולטוב רע שׂמים חשׁך לאור ואור לחשׁך שׂמים מר למתוק ומתוק למר



Sophocles OT 609-610
Οὐ γὰρ δίκαιον οὔτε τοὺς κακοὺς μάτην
χρηστοὺς νομίζειν οὔτε τοὺς χρηστοὺς κακούς.

for it is not just to consider bad men good at random, or good men bad H.W. Smyth §1613.

μάτην in S.OT ruins the symmetry for a balanced chiasmus, but Sophocles is working in meter and I would assume that μάτην is required.

The Hebrew of Isa. 5:20a in the Masoretic Text of Isaiah has a element of syntax not evident in the LXX. Note the ל before רע and before טוב. E. Tov's MT-LXX database does not match ל with τὸ which might be tempting.

Is. 5:20


הוי הוי ‎Particle interjection woe!
ה ה ‎Particle article the
אמרים אמר־1 ‎Verb qal participle masculine plural to say
ל ל ‎Particle compoundPrepositionArticle to
רע רע ‎Adjective masculine singular bad, evil
טוב טוב־1 ‎Noun common masculine singular pleasant, good
ו ו ‎Particle conjunction and
ל ל ‎Particle compoundPrepositionArticle to
טוב טוב־1 ‎Noun common masculine singular pleasant, good
רע רע ‎Adjective masculine singular bad, evil
שׂמים שׂים Verb qal participle masculine plural

This is pattern is altered in the second and third pairs. The preposition ל is found with the second element.

שׂמים שׂים ‎Verb qal participle masculine plural to put, set
חשׁך חשׁך ‎Noun common masculine singular dark
ל ל ‎Particle preposition to
אור אור ‎Noun common both singular light
ו ו ‎Particle conjunction and
אור אור ‎Noun common both singular light
ל ל ‎Particle preposition to
חשׁך חשׁך ‎Noun common masculine singular dark
שׂמים שׂים ‎Verb qal participle masculine plural to put, set
מר מר־2 ‎Adjective masculine singular drop
ל ל ‎Particle preposition to
מתוק מתוק ‎Adjective masculine singular sweet
ו ו ‎Particle conjunction and
מתוק מתוק ‎Adjective masculine singular sweet
ל ל ‎Particle preposition to
מר מר־2 ‎Adjective masculine singular drop

Isaiah 5:20 E. Tov's MT-LXX database
הוי οὐαὶ
‏ה/אמרים‎ οἱ λέγοντες
‏ל/רע‎ τὸ πονηρὸν
‏טוב‎ καλὸν
‏ו/ל/טוב‎ καὶ τὸ καλὸν
‏רע‎ πονηρόν
‏שׂמים‎ οἱ τιθέντες
‏חשׁך‎ τὸ σκότος
‏ל/אור‎ φῶς
‏ו/אור‎ καὶ τὸ φῶς
‏ל/חשׁך‎ σκότος
‏שׂמים‎ οἱ τιθέντες
‏מר‎ τὸ πικρὸν
‏ל/מתוק‎ γλυκὺ
‏ו/מתוק‎ καὶ τὸ γλυκὺ
ל/מר πικρόν

[mwh]

Wot no responses after 333 views? (the number of half the beast)

The LXX and the Sophocles do have the same structure, but it’s not chiasmus. All these examples have the same word order in both halves: direct object followed by predicate. Chiasmus would reverse the order in the 2nd half, e.g.
το κακον καλον, κακον το καλον,
“sweetness is bitter, sweet is bitterness.”
But it doesn’t have to be paradoxical, and ordinarily you have different contrasting items in each half, e.g.
“Sweet is honey, absinthe bitter.”
“Greek is fun, a pain is Latin.”
“I’ll be drinking whiskey tonight, tomorrow coffee.”
(All these would be more likely to be expressed by μεν … δε pairings with repeated word order instead of by chiasmus—look at Gorgias, or Longus, for instance—, but that’s not always the case.)

A1 Β1

Β2 Α2
Draw a line linking the two A's and another linking the two B's and you have the letter chi, a χιασμος. That's how they conceptualized it.
It’s a pretty figure, rather mannered, though less artificial than in English (inevitably so, given the freedom of Greek word order), used for rhetorical effect. Unlikely to be much found in koine.

If I interpret the post correctly (which is quite an if), it appears that the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Isaiah verses does have chiasmus in the second two of the trio, unlike the LXX, which doesn’t.
CSB doesn’t say what the significance of this might be. Did the Septuagint standardize the construction, or does the Masoretic text depend on a Hebrew version here different from the version represented by the LXX, or did the Masoretic willfully depart from the Hebrew underlying the LXX? I don’t know enough about the Hebrew transmission to say which of these is the most likely. Any one of the three seems possible in principle.

But, sticking to Greek, what I wanted to make clear is that neither the Sophocles nor the LXX is an example of chiasmus.

[C. S. Bartholomew]

RE: chiasmus … antimetabole

Perhaps the best example of a sequential triple chiasmus comes from the Bible, in this passage from Isaiah 5:20:
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”

http://www.drmardy.com/chiasmus/types.shtml

Elizabeth Wenzel

CHIASMUS:
reversal of grammatical structure and meaning

ANTIMETABOLE: a specific form of chiasmus
reversal of words

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20)

https://prezi.com/uv1wyolyhz5g/chiasmus/

“In English … ANTIMETABOLE … CHIASMUS are virtual synonyms.” A Handbook of Rhetorical Terms, R. H. Lanham, UCLA 1968 p. 10.

Chiasmus is a figure of speech in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form. In other words, the clauses display inverted parallelism. Chiasmus was particularly popular both in Greek and in Latin literature, where it was used to articulate the balance of order within the text. As a popular example, many long and complex chiasmi have been found in Shakespeare and the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible.

In classic rhetoric, this figure of speech can be differentiated from an antimetabole, which is repetition of words in successive clauses in grammatical order. In a chiasmus, there is no recurrence of the same two terms. When chiasmus is applied to entire passages or writings, it is called a chiastic structure. Some examples of chiasmus are, "Never let a fool kiss You or a kiss fool you" by Mardy Grothe, "Do I love you because you're beautiful? Or are you beautiful because I love you?" by Oscar Hammerstein, and "They don't care about how much you know until they know how much you care" by Jim Calhoun. - See more at: http://www.chiasmusexamples.com/#sthash.UAWoq2U1.dpuf

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20)

- See more at: http://www.chiasmusexamples.com/#sthash.UAWoq2U1.dpuf

Reversals--Chiasmus

antimetabole   antimetabole
 an'-ti-me-ta'-bo-lee Gk. anti “in opposite direction”
and metabole “turning about”
Also sp. antimetavole
commutatio
the counterchange
Repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order.
  This figure is sometimes known as chiasmus.
Examples
  When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. —John F. Kennedy
You can take the gorilla out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the gorilla.
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. —Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! —Isaiah 5:20
Related Figures
  
=======================
antimetathesis   antimetathesis
 an-ti-me-ta'-the-sis from Gk. anti, "against" and metatithenai,
"to transpose" ("counterchange")
Inversion of the members of an antithesis.
    * chiasmus
    * parallelism
    * Figures of Repetition
    * Figures of Order
 
  Sources: Ad Herennium 4.28.39 ("commutatio"); Peacham (1577) K2r; Putt. (1589) 217 ("antimetavole," "the counterchange"); Day 1599 95 ("antimetano" [sic], "commutatio"); Hoskins (1599)14 ("antimetabole," "commutatio")
============================
Is adult entertainment killing our children, or is killing our children adult entertainment?
Marilyn Manson
============================
chiasmus  
 ki-az'-mus Gk. "a diagonal arrangement"
 
   1. Repetition of ideas in inverted order
   2. Repetition of grammatical structures in inverted order (not to be mistaken with antimetabole, in which identical words are repeated and inverted).
  
Examples
  
But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves.
—Shakespeare, Othello 3.3
The idea of affection occurs in "dotes" and "strongly loves"; the idea of doubting in "doubts" and "suspects". These two ideas occur in the quotation in an A B B A order, thus repeated and inverted
It is boring to eat; to sleep is fulfilling
The pattern is present participle-infinitive; infinitive-present participle
Related Figures
  
    * Figures of Repetition
    * Figures of Order
    * antimetabole

http://staff.missouriwestern.edu/users/ ... iasmus.htm

[jeidsath]

But what about what Isaiah is saying that these people are saying? Would that be chiasmus?

λέγουσιν ὅτι "τοῦτο τὸ σκότος φῶς ἐστιν καὶ τοῦτο τὸ φῶς σκότος"

[Qimmik]

But what about what Isaiah is saying that these people are saying? Would that be chiasmus?

λέγουσιν ὅτι "τοῦτο τὸ σκότος φῶς ἐστιν καὶ τοῦτο τὸ φῶς σκότος"

Strictly speaking, no. I'm with mwh on this, notwithstanding the abundant examples cited by csb of how the term has become more confused.

This would be chiasmus:

τοῦτο τὸ σκότος φῶς ἐστιν καὶ σκότος τοῦτο τὸ φῶς.

[mwh]

Modern applications of the term in English are wider and looser than in ancient Greek, but it’s ancient Greek we’re concerned with, and in such context I would think ancient Greek usage (and secondarily Latin) claims greater authority than Dr Mardy, say, for whom even “This treatment really whacks a polyp” is a chiasmus. The OED definition is "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other.” Not even that is quite precise enough to meet the present case, where object:predicate order (or subject:predicate order, in jeidsath's example) comes into play. But I don’t really care what terminology we use, so long as we properly distinguish between one figure and another.

[jeidsath]

@Qimmik I see. I may have been mislead by reading the Wikipedia examples, when I should have been looking at the introduction instead, where it states exactly what you and mwh are saying:

"In its classical application, chiasmus would have been used for structures that do not repeat the same words and phrases, but invert a sentence's grammatical structure or ideas."

So, following your example and trying again:

τὸ σκότος τοῦτο τὸ φῶς εἶναι ἔφασαν καὶ ὅτι δοκεῖ δὲ τοῦτο τὸ πονηρὸν τὸ καλόν

[mwh]

Getting there, but this adds the article to what should be the predicate (as well as gratuitously adding τουτο and switching construction).
Stripped down to
το σκοτος φως ειναι εφασαν και πονηρον το καλον
(or τουτο το σκοτος φως ειναι εφασαν και πονηρον τουτο το καλον, if you insist on having the τουτο)
it would qualify, since it gives the order object-predicate, predicate-object, ABBA, the all-important inversion.
It’s not a very happy example, though, since for the object it has noun (το σκοτος) corresponding to substantivized adjective (το καλον), and for the predicate it has noun (φως) corresponding to adjective (πονηρον), and that rather spoils the balance. But it’s OK.

[Qimmik]

As long as the order of the grammatical constituents is reversed, the same words or phrases can be used, as in:

τοῦτο τὸ σκότος φῶς ἐστιν καὶ σκότος τοῦτο τὸ φῶς.

Here we have subject predicate predicate subject (disregarding the unimportant ἐστιν καὶ). This is chiasmus: A B B A.

τὸ σκότος τοῦτο τὸ φῶς εἶναι ἔφασαν καὶ ὅτι δοκεῖ δὲ τοῦτο τὸ πονηρὸν τὸ καλόν

In this the parallelism of the syntactic structures has been lost with the switch from the infinitive complement of ἔφασαν, i.e., εἶναι, to ὅτι δοκεῖ δὲ. (The ὅτι clause also seems odd--: τὸ καλόν - "the good/beautiful" might be ok in a Platonic sense, but τοῦτο τὸ πονηρὸν doesn't make sense for me.) Chiasmus is meant to be a rhetorical figure. Unless there is mirror-image parallelism, it doesn't work, it lacks punch.