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56 Structure and the Book ofZechariah
3. This impressive looking structure has been produced by
ignoring other words which occur twice or more. For
example 'Hezekiah' occurs in vv. 4 and 9, and if anything
ought to be significant for the structure, this would surely be
one of the most obvious candidates. We have actually ignored
J?T in v. 11 although it is actually related to 333Dn! We have
also ignored n(0i> in vv. 2, 15 and 18; ntn in vv. 3 and 5;
Dnn in vv. 1 and 5; and several others.
4. Common words are of minimal value in indicating structure.
In any passage several verses long there are bound to be
repetitions. Only if a word has some additional distinctive
feature can it be taken to be significant.
Notice that, if we were determined to carry through the theory that
this chapter has a chiastic structure, we might argue that not only is
there an overall chiasmus from v. 1 to v. 17, but there is another one
superimposed on this just before the centre (v. 10): 1
p DV. . . vrprn. . .-IDIOT (2x) v. 4
q 'ny v. 6
r DOT v. 7 (but any other 'centre' could be chosen)
q' iDtf v. 8
p 1 DV. . .vrprn -IDR'I v. 9
We have to ignore DV in v. 6. On the other hand, we could point out
as a supporting argument, the correspondence between the whole
world ("?3n, p«) in v. 6 and Jerusalem (twice) in v. 8.
Clearly there is much that can mislead us here, and our aim will be
to find methods of ensuring that an apparent structure was actually
planned by the author or editor. No doubt there is a certain amount
that statistics could do. For example, we might deduce that since the
word DD occurs x times in 1,284 verses in the book of Isaiah the
probability is that in any 20 verses it will occur v times. Since I have
little competence or confidence in this kind of statistics, more sophisticated
methods must be left to others. I believe that we shall obtain
1. This is sometimes claimed to give added weight to arguments for an elaborate
structure, e.g. in his treatment of the Tower of Babel story, Fokkelman argues for a
parallel and a concentric symmetry (which, incidentally, have a different centre);
Narrative Art in Genesis, pp. 11-45.