Story Sandwiches and the Architecture of Creation

Another potential win for Bible readers without theological training is what this shape could do for understanding structures in Scripture that often confuse modern readers. Anyone who has taken a biblical studies introduction module will learn about ways the biblical text is separated and filled. We call these techniques chiasm, inclusio and interpolation, but affectionately some people call them sandwiches.

One of the best-known examples is Mark 5. Jesus is on his way to heal Jairus’s little daughter, Talitha, when the story stops for a filling narrative about a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years. She is referred to as “daughter”; then Jesus proceeds to raise Talitha, whose name means “little girl”, from the dead.

Death is pushed back to either side, denied its power and urgency. In the middle, liberation is brought to a woman who has lived with ritual impurity for as long as Talitha has been alive. The two stories interpret one another: the older woman and the little girl are both daughters, and Jesus’ authority reaches across both chronic exclusion and apparent finality.

If we had learned the foundational structure of Genesis 1 in the first days of Sunday school, perhaps we would not dismiss these arrangements as historical quirks from a vanished culture. We might recognise them as precisely the kind of structure we should expect from Scripture: separating and filling, making space and then filling it with meaning and life.