British and American researchers say they have uncovered a secret 'Genesis Death Sandwich' that reveals a 'striking pattern between the two key themes of ‘life’ and ‘death’'. 'The opening and closing verses of the book contain frequent mentions of life, whereas mentions of death are only found in clusters in the middle,' they say.

The team at Keele University, UK, and Amridge University, USA, say the find is the first known use of a technique known as ‘bracketing’. Dubbed the 'Genesis Death Sandwich', this pattern offers the first clear example of this common rhetorical structure being used in the text describing the creation of the universe.

'This is a significant discovery for historians and theologians interested in the Old Testament, and shows that whoever wrote the version of the text that has been passed down to us was clearly employing this rhetorical structure,' said Dr Gordon Rugg of Keele University, who developed a new tool for analysing texts.

Called Search Visualizer, it represents entire texts as a grid with each square representing a word and coloured squares representing search keywords. When used to examine the words 'life' and 'death' in the King James Version of Genesis, the new pattern emerged.

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