While the exploration of chiasmus in Scripture continued through the closing decades of the twentieth century, an ambitious research project was undertaken by John Welch in an edited volume, Chiasmus in Antiquity, published in 1981.11 It explored broadly the presence of chiastic design in ancient literature, and found examples of chiastic patterning as far back as the third millennium B.C. in Sumero-Akkadian and Ugaritic literature.12 Welch’s findings have been augmented by research from the field