It’s a common assumption today that literary structure and factual accuracy are at odds with one another. If a text displays some artistry, it’s a signal that we shouldn’t take it seriously as a historical source.
The assumption is baseless on the face of things. All historians give literary form to their accounts, and good historians are good stylists. Gibbon’s literary flair doesn’t imply that he’s not telling the truth (though he may not be all the time!).
Theologically, it’s an even more baseless assumption, the exact opposite of the truth. As my friend Bogumil Jarmulak points out, the eternal Logos gives structure to both Word and world. Christology leads us to expect cohesion rather than contradiction between literary and historical structures, a match between the pattern of the text and the pattern of history.
The heptamerous order of the creation account in Genesis 1 isn’t a grid imposed on unstructured events; it reveals the hepatermosity of history. Chiasms are not forms pressed onto chaos, but instead highlight the rolling chiasmus of life and history.
