Scripture

"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

— Micah 6:8

A tricolon of duties — justice, mercy, humility — rises toward a single climactic question. Hebrew prophecy loved this same periodic stacking that Cicero later codified.

"O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever."

— Psalm 136:1

The psalmist repeats the same refrain twenty-six times — an anaphora of covenantal memory that carries the listener forward on a drumbeat of mercy.

"O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!"

— Habakkuk 1:2

Direct address to God, a cry of delay and violence — the same exclamatio that Cicero used to move a Roman jury to pity or indignation.

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."

— Ecclesiastes 3:1–2

A catalogue of balanced oppositions — birth/death, plant/uproot, weep/laugh — forces the listener to accept the argument by the sheer weight of contrast.

"The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters."

— Psalm 23:1–2

A sustained metaphor of shepherd and flock compresses an entire theology of care into a single image — the rhetorical move Cicero called translatio.

"And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."

— Exodus 3:14

The speaker constructs absolute authority through self-naming — an ethos so unassailable it needs no further proof, much like Cicero's own appeals to Roman virtue.

"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."

— Genesis 9:6

A perfect chiasmus (A-B-B-A): shed blood / by man / blood / man. Hebrew legal poetry relies on such symmetry, the same architecture Cicero built into his periods.

"Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness."

— Psalm 150:1–2

The psalmist amplifies a single command — praise — across place, power, and greatness, multiplying predicates until the whole creation is enlisted in the refrain.

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

— 1 Corinthians 13:13

Paul builds a tricolon then resolves it with a climactic superlative — the same periodic release Cicero uses to seal a Ciceronian sentence.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are they that mourn… Blessed are the meek…"

— Matthew 5:3–5 (Sermon on the Mount)

Nine successive clauses opening with 'Blessed are' — an anaphora of covenantal cadence that Cicero would have recognised as the highest rhetorical form.

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

— 1 Corinthians 15:55

Direct address to an abstraction — Paul's apostrophe is structurally identical to Cicero's 'O tempora, O mores!' in the First Catilinarian.

"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life."

— Romans 6:23

Balanced opposition — wages/gift, sin/God, death/life — deployed in the Ciceronian manner to force a moral choice on the audience.

"I am the vine, ye are the branches."

— John 15:5

Sustained metaphor as theology — a rhetorical device Cicero praised in De Oratore for its ability to compress an entire argument into a single image.

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

— 2 Timothy 4:7

Paul's tricolon of self-witness — a rhetorical construction of ethos as unimpeachable as any Ciceronian peroration.

"The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath."

— Mark 2:27

Textbook chiasmus (A-B-B-A). Hebrew scripture and Koine Greek alike lean heavily on parallel structure — the same symmetry Cicero engineered into his periods.

"Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up…"

— 1 Corinthians 13:4

Paul amplifies a single virtue across fifteen predicates — amplificatio in its purest Ciceronian form.