BUT ARE THEY
METAPHORS?
Most people assume that anthropomorphic
passages in the Bible are metaphors. They take for granted that the authors of
the Bible through their humanlike representations of God were nonliteral. For
instance, Janet Soskice:
It is difficult to believe that the prophets,
although perhaps lacking a developed set of grammatical distinctions which
enabled them to designate metaphors are metaphors, were unaware of that in
speaking of God as a herdsman or planter they were using language not strictly
appropriate to him. (Metaphor and Religious Language [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985], 77)
Soskice says that even though the biblical
passages which she believes are metaphors are never flagged as such within the
text itself (she hypothesizes without evidence that the Israelites lacked
markets for this) they are nonetheless nonliteral because she has a hard time
believing otherwise. One of the problems with this line of thinking is that Soskice
equates her assumptions with those of ancient Israelites. If it is hard for her
to believe that God is a herdsman, it must have been hard for the authors of
the Bible to believe this too. Soskice universalizes her individual experience.
Another flaw in her assertion, and this is
common in discussions of biblical metaphor, is her assumption that unless God
fully represents the terms applied to God, these terms must be metaphors. It is
as if there is a checklist of characteristics that make a herdsman a herdsman.
Unless there is absolute correspondence between objects—unless someone is able
to tick off every last characteristic on the list—scholars assume that an ancient
author used a metaphor. But there are very few concepts that function this way.
As David Aaron points out, the overwhelming majority of expressions within any
language employ “a matrix of general principalities that one might describe as
floating or graded” (Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics and Divine
Imagery [Brill Reference Library of Ancient Judaism 4; Leiden: Brill,
2001], 40). There is hardly ever complete correspondence between a term and the
thing it indicates.
If we stay with the example of a herdsman, we
discover that it can mean different things in different geographic places. A
herdsman in the Levant may stay with his sheep as they move between grazing
grounds. He sleeps with the animals, constantly protects them, and makes sure
individual sheep do not wander off. A herdsman in the Lake District of England,
on the other hand, releases his flock into the mountains in December and does
not return for them until April. The sheep are hefted; they have an instinctual
tie to the mountains and they do not stray from him (James Rebanks, The
Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape [New York:
Flatiron Books, 2015]). The sheep wander around unsupervised for months at a time
while the herdsman stays nice and warm in his living room. We do not say that
the overseer of sheep in the Lake District is not a real herdsman because he
does not remain with his sheep year-round. The checklists that define what a
herdsman is in these two places do not match. But there is enough overlap
between them for the same word to describe them both. We do not coin a new term
for every unique occurrence of the tending of sheep. We extend existing terms to new situations (Umberto Eco, The Search
for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995],
57-58). This may expand a definition as we apply it to different things or
revise it in some way, but what we do not do is assume that the Lake District
herdsman is a metaphorical herdsman while the Levantine herdsman is a literal
one.
This example illustrates the difficulty in determining
when a statement is a metaphor and when it is not. In order to make a correct
assessment, the reader and author must share an understanding of what the text
conveys (Jonathan D. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics
and the Study of Literature [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957],
3-36). This involves collaboration. An author encodes meaning into a string of
symbols and the reader unlocks the symbols’ code and tries to make sense of what
the words say. To be successful, the reader must have a sense of the statement’s
content and what the author was trying to accomplish with it. There are
situations in which readers can understand a literary work with little
knowledge of its context, but this is only possible for highly stereotypical language
such as codified legal terminology (Lawrence M. Solen, “Learning Our Limits:
The Decline of Textualism in Statutory Cases,” Wisconsin Law Review 2
[1997]: 235-81). Even in this case there is still context. The reader brings to
the act of reading their knowledge of the history of how the term has been used
and accepted in the history of legal discourse. There may not be much immediate
grammatical context surrounding the use of the term but there are loads of
historical and situational context a trained professional brings to her engagement
with it (John Berger’s observation about translation also applies to reading: “True
translation is not a binary affair between two languages [or writer and reader]
but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind
the words of the original text before it was written.” Confabulations [London:
Penguin, 2015], 4).
This collaborative effort between author and
reader is more difficult the further apart the participants are in time,
culture, language, and space. We should proceed with a healthy sense of caution
when reading the Bible since there are thousands of years, entirely different
cultures, completely different languages, and a lot of physical distance
between us and its authors. It does not mean that we can understand nothing of
what they wrote, but it does mean that it is unwise for us to make the
assumption that our intuition and levels of credulity are the same as those of
the people who wrote and compiled the Hebrew Bible.
In almost every case, when a scholar labels
an Old Testament statement as anthropomorphic the only reasoning behind this
decision is their intuition regarding the literalness of the passage. If we
take our assumptions out of the equation, there is very little to make us think
the Israelites understood these statements as metaphors. The passages that
depict God in human ways do not include disclaimers denying their literal
reality. They scan just like the statements we regard as propositions. Soskice
hypothesized that Israelites lacked markers to indicate metaphors. But what
kind of markers does she think they need? An author can always say: God isn’t
like this in reality but I picture him as a bearded old man. There are
plenty of similes in the Old Testament that are clearly marked as nonliteral
descriptions—Psalm 78:65, for instance, “Then the LORD awoke as from sleep,
like a warrior [kəgibbôr] shouting because of wine.” In this psalm God
shouts like a drunken warrior. The nonliteral nature of the expression
is marked with a preposition (k). The authors of the Bible had ample ability
to signal figurative statements when they wanted to.
It seems to me that in very many cases the
people who wrote the Old Testament understood their so-called anthropomorphic
statements as literal expressions of fact. God is a king. God has a body. That
is just how God is. We might be tempted to regard these passages as metaphors
because we doubt their reality, but the writers of the Bible almost never
indicate that they did. David Aaron insists that when biblical scholars
label these passages as metaphors they “project post-biblical conceptualizations
of language and transcendence upon the Bible, all while assuming that the
ancients recognized the same philosophical problems that occupy us” (Aaron, Biblical
Ambiguities, 35). In other words, when we label passages as anthropomorphic
metaphors we are interpreting the Old Testament as if we were the ones writing
it. It is not a sound assumption.
To more fully understand the ways in which Old
Testament authors understood God, we need to analyze their depictions of God as
if they are literal descriptions. Unless, that is, they contain disclaimers or
markers that clearly delineate them as metaphor. This methodology is not
perfect. Inevitably, there will be passages that were intended as metaphors and
are not marked as such. There may be many of them. Nonetheless, I think this is
a better approach than the typical practice of regarding all humanlike
depictions of God as metaphorical. Perhaps I’ve swung too far in the opposite
direction, but if so I will at least provide a counterpoint to a long-standing
imbalance. In any case, it is not my intention that we view the Old Testament
God from only this angle. After we have understood God anthropomorphically we
can then bring this picture of God into conversation with more transcendent views
of the divine.
The Old Testament pictures God in at least
two distinct and parallel forms: (1) a deity who takes concrete form and local
manifestation and (2) a god who is spirit and whose presence is everywhere at
the same time, unrestricted in time, space, and location. This is totally
contradictory. So is saying that light is a wave and a particle. If we want to
more fully understand the God of Scripture, we need to embrace these two, very
different representations of God as equally valid instead of regarding one as superior
to the other. (Charles Halton, A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied
God [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021], 48-51)
Further Reading
Lynn Wilder vs. Latter-day Saint (and Biblical) Theology on Divine Embodiment