Abstract: In this article, Paul Hoskisson discusses the question of whether Janus parallelism, a sophisticated literary form found in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere in manuscripts of the ancient Near East, might also be detected in the Book of Mormon. Because the Book of Mormon exists only in translation, answering this question is not a simple matter. Hoskisson makes the case that 1 Nephi 18:16 may provide the first plausible example of Janus parallelism in the Book of Mormon.

 
[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the LDS community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.
See Paul Hoskisson, “Janus Parallelism: Speculation on a Possible Poetic Wordplay in the Book of Mormon,” in “To Seek the Law of the Lord”: Essays in Honor of John W. Welch, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson and Daniel C. Peterson (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation, 2017), 151–60. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/to-seek-the-law-of-the-lord-essays-in-honor-of-john-w-welch-2/.]

John W. Welch’s discovery in 1967 of chiastic structures in the Book of Mormon was to that date the most important literary discovery regarding latter-day scripture since the beginning of the Restoration, and it continues to be a singular event in the scholarship of the text of the Book of Mormon. He not only opened up hitherto unplowed and [Page 62]fertile research fields, but he also pointed the way forward to previously untouched approaches to the text. All faithful scholars have benefitted from this discovery. It is therefore a daunting task to write a requisite article to thank and honor a great scholar and a dear friend.
While serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany, John, or Jack as his friends call him, began his discovery serendipitously by attending a class in the Regensburg Priester Seminar on the New Testament. This led him to a book that explained the chiastic structures in and of the Book of Matthew. He became intrigued with the concept of chiasmus, for, “if it is evidence of Hebrew style in the Bible, it must be evidence of Hebrew style in the Book of Mormon.” He soon enough found chiasms in the Book of Mormon. After returning home he wrote his master’s thesis on chiasmus and has never looked back.1
Janus Parallelism in the Hebrew Bible
In 1978, eleven years after Jack’s discovery, Cyrus H. Gordon published an article defining and outlining the literary form he termed Janus parallelism, and about which he had lectured previously.2 He chose the name because the Roman god Janus had two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. Thus, this label describes “a literary device in which a middle stich of poetry parallels in a polysemous manner both the line that precedes it and the line which follows it.”3 Gordon came upon the concept one day when reading Song of Solomon 2:12, which reads in my own translation,