I've prepared an appendix that goes into detail on chiasms and whether or not they count as evidence. I'm especially proud of the last paragraph.
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One of the positive correspondences that Dale and Dale point to is the presence of chiasms in the Book of Mormon. This one warrants some special attention. Like other apologists such as John Welch, Dale and Dale argue that chiasms exist within the Book of Mormon and that the most likely explanation of them is that they were deliberately written by ancient authors following a traditional ancient form. Welch has argued that the chiasms indicate that the Book of Mormon is authentically Semitic in nature, and Dale and Dale argue that this also shows a link between the Maya and ancient Semitic cultures, as the Book of Mormon suggests that there is. I argue that the chiasms in the Book of Mormon are best explained by Joseph Smith copying the Bible, or by natural human tendencies in writing, or unfortunately by apologists trying to see chiasms where there are none.
To the first possibility, that Joseph Smith got chiasms by copying the Bible, Dale and Dale claim that "the Hebrew chiasms and poetic parallelisms in the Old Testament were largely erased by the scholars who translated the King James Bible into English." Many people disagree. In Preserved in Translation, Donald W. Parry claims that the Old Testament has "hundreds of chiasms" and cites a few in the entry on chiasmus. Other people credibly claim to be able to see those chiasms, such as the the people who host Biblical Chiasm Exchange (
https://www.chiasmusxchange.com/). They find chiasms that range from small, focused chiasms like Joel 2:27-3:17 to broad chiasms like Exodus 24-40. I invite you to peruse their site to see more of the examples they give. My point in including them here is to show that they are abundant in the Bible, so someone who read the Bible as diligently as Joseph Smith did could have discovered these poetic forms and imitated them on purpose or by accident.
To the second possibility, that chiasms occur naturally, I will point out that chiasms can be found in literature from around the world, including the Quran and Beowulf. (See this article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiastic_structure for more examples.) Humans like symmetry, so we are inclined to put symmetries into what we write. These can be as simple as rhymes, or they can be more complex like mirrored phrases across multiple lines. For an amusing look at other places where chiasms appear, I refer you to Robert Patterson's article, Hebraicisms, Chiasmus and Other Internal Evidence for Ancient Authorship in Green Eggs and Ham. The Maya, the Semites, Joseph Smith, and Dr. Seuss were all human and all inclined to symmetry. Should we be surprised if all of them independently discovered a poetic form that emphasizes symmetry?
To the third possibility, that the chiasms being pointed out are not so chiastic, I point to Robert M. Bowman Jr's article, Alma 36: Ancient Masterpiece Chiasmus or Modern Revivalist Testimony?(
https://mit.irr.org/alma-36-ancient-mas ... -testimony) The article makes the case that Alma 36 is not nearly as chiastic as apologists like Dale and Dale have made it out to be. It features repetitions of elements in the wrong places and large volumes of text besides the ones that apologists have fit into the chiastic structure. Given the repetitions in places that don't match chiastic structure, the article argues that many of the repetitions are simply the result of a naturally repetitious writing style. I have written elsewhere, such as in this Reddit post (
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... of_Mormon/), that the Book of Mormon is tedious, featuring many unnecessary repetitions. I invite you to look at the supposed chiasms in the Book of Mormon to see if they are best explained by a deliberate effort to repeat text in a pattern or if they are the result of a tendency to repeat everything.
The presence of chiasms seems to be worthy of further study, but from what we have now, they seem to fall short of being the overwhelming evidence that Dale and Dale claim that they are. Dale and Dale suggest that they should count for a weight of "one in a billion", but I say that we can't even count them as one in fifty.
As a final aside, Dale and Dale conclude their section on chiasms by saying: "We invite Dr. Coe or anyone else to dictate a chiasm like Alma Chapter 36. They can't do it. This is unusual in the extreme." It is indeed difficult to dictate anything like Alma 36, but I don't find that to be compelling evidence of its ancient origins or its divinity. Joseph Smith had many talents that I don't have. For one thing, this man persuaded more than thirty women to marry him. If he could do something that I cannot, that doesn't make him superhuman. Also, I have heard a similar line of reasoning used to defend the Quran. Hamza Andreas Tzortzis's article, "Produce One Chapter Like It": The Miraculous Inimitability of the Quran's Shortest Chapter (
https://sapienceinstitute.org/produce-o ... r-like-it/), shares with us the challenge within the Quran to produce anything like what the prophet Muhammad wrote and argues that no one has met the challenge. If difficulty in producing anything like Alma 36 is evidence of its authenticity, is the difficulty in producing anything like the Quran evidence of that book's authenticity? I invite Dale and Dale to take the challenge of the Quran, and then to come back and tell us if they think that the challenge of Alma 36 is still compelling.
