Digging Into the Burial of Sarah

For my final post on the chiasms found in Genesis, I want post more of an assignment rather than just posting information. I would like to challenge you read Genesis 23 and identify the chiasm there and the find the focus of the passage in this section of Scripture.

This chapter records the burial of Sarah by Abraham. It is an interesting story. Spend some time looking at this passage. Attempt to find the chiasm by identifing the word pairs in parallel to each other (they are easily identifable in the English translation). After that, you can read this article, which is a great study of this passage, its structure, and how that impacts interpretation of the story. The article is bit technical but skip over all the Hebrew "stuff" and look at the structure and the exegesis. It is a worthwhile read.

I hope this study of poetry in Genesis has been helpful. I will be posting some other posts dealing with Genesis in the coming day. I pray those will be helpful as well.