Understanding Biblical Literary Forms for Accurate Interpretation

We considered what is meant by the term literal interpretation of Scripture, and if you will recall, at the end of that lecture, I talked a little bit about the importance of being able to recognize different types of literary forms that are found in the Bible, lest we make mistakes in translation and interpretation by failing to understand that poetry has its own rules, and prose has its rules, and so on. [00:00:09]

The Bible, when it tells narratives and recalls history and describes events and people and places, it uses a kind of language that we can call the language of appearances, or descriptive language; or the more technical term for it is what we call phenomenological language. Phenomenological language just means language that describes things the way they appear to the naked eye. [00:02:12]

The classical case in point, of course, is the black eye the church got in church history over the Galileo episode, when the church and her bishops refused to even look through Galileo's telescope to see whether or not they could confirm the theory that the earth is not the center of the solar system, but rather, that the sun is the center of the solar system. [00:04:10]

Now we get into trouble when we want the Bible to be a precise scientific textbook to describe things in terms of twentieth century terminology. Wouldn't you be suspicious if tomorrow afternoon, somebody dug up a manuscript or found a manuscript in a cave in the middle east and they dusted it off and they said, oh, here is a lost book of the Old Testament and it dates back to 2000 B.C. [00:08:41]

Some people are upset by the fact that the Bible is not written with the same kind of mathematical precision that we can expect from computers. The Bible is given to round numbers when it describes crowds. You know, five thousand people were there on the day that Jesus fed people from fishes and loaves; does that mean that one of the disciples went around with a pocket calculator and carefully marked off every single person that was in attendance? [00:10:26]

What's a hyperbole? A hyperbole is an exaggeration of fact. It's an exaggeration of the truth. And at that point, we could say a hyperbole is a distortion of the truth. Now we recognize that distortions of the truth are falsehoods. They're lies. They're errors, or so whatever else, so how can we tell a hyperbole? [00:11:54]

Some have found fault with the biblical writers when the biblical writers say, for example, "All Capernaum came out to hear Jesus," and they'll jump at that and they'll say, well that's not true. We can't trust the Bible when it talks to us like that -- all Capernaum went out to Jesus. Does that mean that every man, woman, and child in that city came out, that the shut-ins were carried on beds out to hear Jesus? [00:13:30]

We know that the Bible uses metaphorical language -- Jesus was fond of it. In fact, the Middle East, the Middle East ancient people have a speaking style that is rich in the use of figurative language and of metaphor. How many times does Jesus use the metaphors drawn from nature to liken His role as the redeemer: "I am the vine; abide in Me and I in you," and He makes that illustration, that analogy between vines and their fruit and their branches and Christ and His people bearing fruit. [00:17:14]

Unfortunately, there are some cases in the Bible when the literary structure is not quite so clear as to whether or not it is metaphor or figurative language. I think, for example, of Jesus' statement in the institution of the Lord's Supper, where in the words of institution, Jesus took bread, and when He had broken that bread, He looked at His disciples and He said, "This is My body." [00:19:47]

Another dimension of biblical language that we need to be very much aware of and lest we fall into serious error is that the Bible uses what we call anthropomorphic language -- anthropomorphic language -- when it describes God. What is anthropomorphic language? Well the -- we know what anthropology is; anthropology's the study of man. It comes from the Greek word, "anthropos," which means "man," and so and so anthropomorphic is just a combination of the Greek word "anthropos," man, and the Greek word "morthos," form. [00:22:34]

The Bible uses human forms to describe God; it talks about God's eyes, His head, His hands, His feet. It talks about His throne -- He's seated on the throne; the earth is His footstool. The Bible, from beginning to end, speaks in human forms and in human descriptions to describe God, and yet at the same time, the Bible warns us that God is not a man, that God is not a spirit. [00:23:22]

God becomes a man, He takes upon Himself a human nature and He speaks to us in human terms because that's the only way He can speak to us because we don't have the minds of God, we don't have the perspective of God. We have human perspective, and the only way we're going to be able to talk to God at all is on our terms. [00:25:57]