What about Figurative Language
 in the Bible? 

It is common to hear people say, "I take the Bible literally." They intend to convey that they believe the Bible means exactly what it says and says exactly what it means. Biblical scholarship in the Middle Ages taught that there were a number of senses in which a single passage from the Bible could be read. For instance, some scholars taught that the Fall did not actually take place, but was an allegorical story to explain the existence of evil in the world. During the Reformation, the strong emphasis placed on sola Scriptura (Bible only) as the basis of hermeneutics led to the principle, that the Bible can be understood by most people because its meaning is plain. This is known as the perspicuity of scripture.

However, many fundamentalists and evangelicals have pushed  the perspicuity of scripture concept beyond its original intent. Many passages in the Bible use imagery that cannot be taken literally or at face value, but people who insist on taking the Bible literally in all cases tend to ignore the literary nature of scripture. Thus they find themselves in some theological quagmires and interpretive dilemmas because they do not recognize figures of speech or they treat figurative language as being somehow “lower” than literal language. For them, the figure becomes more important than the truth it was meant to describe. For example, Christians sometimes think of heaven as having literal streets of gold and of hell has having literal flames of fire. Those who believe the flames are figurative rather than literal flames are viewed by strict literalists as abandoning the clear meaning of Scripture. Instead of recognizing that these readers may be having trouble reconciling literal flames with hell’s literal darkness, strict literalists would rather brand them as apostate or as mishandling scripture.
 

Even the use of the word “literally” is not always used literally. It can be used as an intensive to add emphasis to a person’s speech. Have you ever heard someone say: "I laughed so hard I literally fell off my chair"? Do we believe that the person speaking actually fell off the chair? The word literally was used, so it must have happened, right? Not necessarily. In this context, it is still a figure of speech, even when using the word "literally" because both the speaker and the listener understand the context of the remark. Even the dictionary recognizes this ironical use of the word “literally.”

As discussed elsewhere on this site, many books containing Shakespeare's plays have footnotes to help the reader grasp the figures of speech he used. In just a few hundred years, English has changed so much from his day to ours that we need the usage of our own language explained to us. Why would we expect the Bible, written in different languages over thousands of years ago in a foreign culture to be any different? Often the individual words and phrases in the Bible are easy to understand. However, just because we grasp the words and phrases, this does not necessarily guarantee that we understand the meaning of a particular passage. The original translators of the King James Bible recognized this problem and included explanatory notes and variant translations in the Bibles they produced to help the reader through these difficult sections.

Christians are not the only ones snared by a strict literal reading of the Bible. A favorite tool of skeptics is to attack the Bible and Christianity based on their “plain sense” reading of figurative speech. They love to point out confusing and contradictory passages as "proof" that the Bible is unreliable and cannot be trusted. For instance, if they point out that when Joshua said for the sun and moon to “stand still” that the Bible is really in error because the sun does not really revolve around the earth, but rather the sun only appears to revolve around the earth. In order to be completely accurate, they assert, Joshua should have told the earth to stop spinning. However, if you ask them what time sunrise was that morning, they will often answer without realizing that “sunrise” is a figure of speech that is so commonly used, we don’t even consider that it is not literally a sun rising.

All of us actually DO hermeneutics every time we read the Bible. We may not realize it, but we have certain criteria we use to evaluate what we read. Even when we say, "The Bible says it; I believe it" we have adopted a certain hermeneutic by which we interpret exactly what the Bible "says." When we talk of "the arm of the Lord is not shortened" or "the hand of God" we do not insist that God has a physical body with literal hands and arms, but when the gospels declare that the body of Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we do insist that it be taken literally. This is a simple distinction that we make almost effortlessly. However, there are a number of passages in the Bible where we stumble - either by interpreting a figure speech literally or by interpreting a literal event in a figurative manner. In fact, it is often this very division - what to take literally and what to take figuratively – that forms the basis of most debates about the Bible.

Let’s examine some figures of speech and how they are used in the Bible.

Hyperbole - Jesus stated that unless we hate our fathers and mothers, we cannot be his disciples. (Luke 14:26) He says if our eye offends us we are to pluck it out and if our hand causes us to sin we should cut it off. Do we take these admonitions literally? Does anyone? Not if we understand who Jesus was and what he taught. With these statements he used a rhetorical device called hyperbole—an exaggeration to make a point. We often use hyperbole today. We might say of a spoiled person: "He gets away with murder." It is generally understood that we are not referring to a literal murder, but rather we use an exaggerated form of speech for emphasis or effect.

Metaphor - The Bible is full of metaphor. A metaphor compares two unrelated ideas. A characteristic that is obviously true of one is described to be true of another. We use metaphors so commonly in our everyday usage that we often fail to notice them. "He is such a pig," or "She is a cow," are examples of metaphors that are so deeply woven into our language that we don't even question their meaning. In the Bible, we often see metaphors with which we are familiar (The church is the bride of Christ) and others that are less familiar (The sun, moon, and stars representing human government in Joseph’s dream). Sometimes we can easily recognize metaphors. Do we really think Jesus is a literal rock, door, or light? Or, we may find ourselves interpreting passages literally that were intended to be taken as metaphorical.
 

Metaphors are used to enhance our understanding, not confuse us. Bible students will sometimes argue about the use of metaphors. Some students get the impression that metaphorical language is less reliable or less forceful than literal language. However, we need to realize that sometimes metaphorical language contains more meaning than literal language. When Jesus said, "I am the vine and you are the branches," he was using a metaphor to describe a relationship that can summarize a set of complex ideas by this simple comparison.

Simile - Much like a metaphor, similes compare two different ideas or things. However, similes use the word “like” or “as” when making the comparison. For instance, when the man who was healed of blindness said, “I see men as trees, walking,” (Mark 8:24) he was using a simile. This simile usually does not give us hermeneutical problems because we have an easy time figuring out what the speaker intends. Other similes are not so clear. When David says, " For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes," (Psalm 119:83) the literal sense of the words are easy enough to understand, but what he means by this simile is not as clear. We can tell he is making a comparison, but a “plain sense” reading does not tell us how a bottle in smoke feels since we are not familiar with what he is comparing himself to. Since few of us keep wineskins hanging from the fireplace mantle, we are unfamiliar with how blackened, cracked and dried out they can get. In David’s day, this was a familiar object and the comparison made sense to the people of his day.

Parables and Allegories - Metaphors and similes are simple comparisons where a single idea stands for another idea. These comparisons, when extended, become more complex and varied. Parables and allegories are two examples of these extended comparisons. Jesus used parabolic speech as a way of focusing on an idea and then reflecting that idea back to make his point. One of his simplest parabolic statements was to compare the image on the coin with the image God has stamped on our lives when he said, concerning taxes, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17) One of the most extended examples is found in Luke 15 when Jesus was criticized for eating with sinners.  He used three distinctly different stories to emphasize the point that he has come to seek and to save the lost.

The temptation is to analyze every specific detail of parabolic statements. Jesus himself interprets the parable of the soils and explains each element to his apostles. However, some will go beyond the words of Jesus and find meanings that are not there. In most cases, the details of the parable are not important. It is best to focus on this main point rather than getting bogged down or adamant about the interpretation of questionable details.

Allegories are among the most difficult comparisons to interpret. Whereas parables use fictional events and characters to make comparisons, biblical allegories often use actual events and characters to emphasize a spiritual truth. Sometimes allegory is the preferred hermeneutic because the literal or plain sense reading makes Christians uncomfortable. Few expositors of the Song of Solomon spend much time dwelling on the eroticism of this Middle Eastern love poem, but move very quickly to its allegorical interpretation as a depiction of the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and His Church. By contrast, more time is spent in Sunday School literature with discussions of the literal Hagar and Sarah rather than the allegorical interpretation the apostle Paul places on them in the book of Galatians. He saw a spiritual truth contrasting a covenant of works with a covenant of grace. Modern Bible teachers often leave this underemphasized for fear that they will be accused of taking the Bible allegorically or symbolically, even though the Bible itself interprets these (and other) events allegorically. 

Proverbs - A proverb is a wayside statement of “common sense” or conventional wisdom. In English we say, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” or “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” We recognize that these are not absolute, unvarying truths that apply with a rigid consistency across all times and places. Yet for some reason, people tend to take proverbial statements from the Bible as fixed guarantees. When we say, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” we do not expect this to be a universally applicable Law for child rearing. We recognize this as a common sense understanding of how the early development of children has a tendency to shape them later in life. Yet when some people read, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” (Proverbs 22:6) which is the Hebrew cognate of our English twig proverb, they expect this to be a guarantee of parental success. When reading proverbs, read them as proverbs. The writers intended them to be read with discretion. Notice the juxtaposition of these seemingly contradictory adjacent proverbs as evidence that these are not intended to be applied as absolute universal truth, but as conventional wisdom.

Proverbs 26:4 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.”

 Proverbs 26:5 “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”

Idioms - The Scriptures also include idioms such as: "the four corners of the earth." (Revelation 7:1, 20:8) This is an example sometimes cited by critics of the Bible to support the idea that people in Bible times believed in a flat earth. It is their literal reading of scripture that keeps them from understanding that this is just an idiomatic statement. The question of whether or not the ancients knew that the earth was round is easily answered by Isaiah 40:22 where the earth is described as a sphere. Knowing what we know now about the shape of the earth, it's not difficult to figure out which one is a figure of speech or idiom. Some translations may say "circle" instead of "sphere" which would be yet another figure of speech to depict the shape of the earth.

These are just a few of the figures of speech used in the Bible. In future articles we will provide examples of irony, where a phrase is deliberately used to mean its opposite; enigma, where sayings are deliberately obscure to hide meaning; personification and anthropomorphism where human characteristics are ascribed to non-humans.

People who say they always read the Bible “literally” need to be careful how they use the phrase. We have heard people preach on the book of Revelation proudly and almost defiantly announce that they “take the book of Revelation literally” and then scarcely a breath later proceed to interpret the symbolism in the book. For instance, no serious commentator teaches that the account of the Dragon and the Woman in the desert in Revelation 12 is about a literal woman and a literal water-breathing reptile. Even the most well-intentioned and rigid literalist reaches the point where biblical figures of speech must be taken as figures of speech. The challenge for us is to recognize when a figure is being used, how that figure is used, and how to read the Bible for its intended meaning.

Hermeneutics calls for careful reading. Strict literalism is a hermeneutical short cut that offers the promise of easy understanding of any biblical passage. However, the danger inherent in ignoring the figures of speech used in the Bible is that it leads to an indiscriminate reading of the scriptures. Treating all passages with the same interpretive grid, without taking into account the use of figurative speech or the varieties of literary style contained in the Bible, can lead to contradictory conclusions about the Bible.

Go back to Hermeneutics.