“Neither Wickedness Neither Holiness nor Misery”

Alan C. Miner

According to Donald Parry, the prevalent poetic form of the canon of scripture is not the ode, the lamentation, nor the psalm, but parallelism. . . ."Parallelism is universally recognized as the characteristic feature of biblical Hebrew poetry."

Repetition may be classified as a subcategory of the poetic forms called "parallelism." Repetitive forms are considered a parallelism because, by their unusual repetition of identical words within a short span, it creates a series of thoughts being parallel or connected one to another.

One type of parallelism, the repetition of the disjunctives "either" and "or" or "neither" and "nor" at the beginning of successive sentences is called paradiastole. . . . Ironically, by using disjunctions, the inspired writers caused a junction (rather than a disjunction) or linkage between each succeeding phrase, thus creating parallel lines. . . . Note the use of the disjunctives "neither" and "nor" in 2 Nephi 2:11:

If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass,

neither wickedness

neither holiness

nor misery,

neither good

nor bad

Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life

neither death

nor corruption

nor incorruption, happiness

nor misery,

neither sense

nor insensibility

[Donald W. Parry, The Book of Mormon Text Reformatted according to Parallelistic Patterns, F.A.R.M.S., pp. i, xxxv, xxxix]

Step by Step Through the Book of Mormon: A Cultural Commentary

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