Inclusio: Words Repeated at the Beginning and End

Inclusio, or epanadiplosis as the Greeks titled this form, "means a doubling upon again, and the Figure is so called because the same word is repeated at both the beginning and at the end of a sentence." This interesting form separates the internal message of the inclusio from the writings that come before and after it. Within the inclusio is always one message or several messages. Often an individual can locate a sentence that contains two or three parallelistic ideas and later in the chapter find other similar messages, yet the center of the expected chiastic structure does not follow the typical form of a chiasm. It is simply an inclusio, which follows a chiastic structure but is not a complete chiasm. The center of the message is not chiastic, but the beginning and end are. Wilfred G. E. Watson writes, "Inclusio or envelope figure is the repetition of the same words at the beginning and end of a section of poetry." It is a form of distinct parallelism.

--------------

An extract from Hugh W. Pinnock, Finding Biblical Hebrew and Other Ancient Literary Forms in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1999), 110-111.

For more from this volume, please visit the link below.