We continue our look at the Literal Sense of Scripture from MAKING SENSES OUT OF SCRIPTURE:
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Not to mention, of course, the fact that the very attempt to “read Scripture for ourselves” is something that would have been extraordinarily difficult for a first century Jewish peasant since none of them owned Bibles. For them, Scripture was a thing you heard at synagogue (and later, at Church), not a thing you read at home. For most people, acquiring a copy of the Bible for home use would have been like purchasing a family space shuttle. That is why Paul writes in Colossians 4:16: “When this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the Church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea.” In other words, Scripture was meant to come to us through the Church. And, of course, it was meant to be understood the way the author intended it, not the way we happen to feel like understanding it today.
Bottom line: in approaching Scripture, as in approaching any book, there is, in the words of Fr. Raymond Brown, S.S., “no substitute for educated effort.”[1] This means, as Vatican II taught,[2] there are three things we must take special care to do when approaching Scripture:
Let’s look at these guidelines in depth.
The very first step we take as readers in understanding a biblical (or, for that matter, any) text is to determine what literary form the author is employing. Is the passage poetry? Historical narrative? Philosophical reflection? Pastoral instruction? Apocalyptic? Myth? Scripture is simply crammed with a wide variety of different kinds of writing, and the kind of writing you are reading will greatly influence the way in which it is intended to be read.
It will not, however, affect one tiny bit the question of whether the text has a literal meaning because—mark this—every biblical text has a literal meaning. Many people are stunned to hear this. That is because many people think a “literal meaning” can only be conveyed by literal language. They make the mistake of assuming that an author who uses metaphor, fiction, hyperbole, or various other figures of speech does not have a literal meaning. Thus, for instance, if I say “my heart is broken”, some people mistakenly imagine that I “meant nothing literally.” But, of course, I do. I literally mean I am deeply grieved and I am expressing that grief via a metaphor. Likewise, if I say “I stood in line for a million years” I am using an exaggeration to communicate another literal meaning: I waited a long time. Indeed, more often than not, metaphor is exactly the right vehicle for conveying a literal meaning and is far better than nonfigurative language. The shortest distance between two minds is a figure of speech.
George Orwell showed this quite clearly when he quoted a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes 9:11:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to all of them. [KJV]
… and then re-wrote the passage with its life blood drained away and replaced by the embalming fluid of nonfigurative bureaucratic prose:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.[3]
Both passages have the same literal meaning. But the original passage breathes while Orwell’s “translation” has all the liveliness of a waxen corpse.
That is why Scripture employs dozens of different devices to communicate literal meanings. “I am the vine and you are the branches” employs a metaphor to express the literal meaning of the Christian’s complete dependence on Christ. Likewise, as we saw in Chapter 2, the author of Genesis uses various linguistic devices (such as measured Hebrew poetry and the image of six “days” of creation) to convey a literal meaning, but many modern readers mistake the device for the meaning. The literal sense of the author was “creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God.” What the modern reader often hears, however, is “The universe was made in six 24-hour days.” This is as wrong-headed as taking me to mean I actually stood in line a million years or that my cardiac tissue has been torn in half or that Christ had delusions of being a grape plant. It is necessary therefore to distinguish between the literal meaning of an author and the various literary devices he may employ to communicate that meaning.
Take, for instance, the parables of Christ. Jesus tells us the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In relating this story to us, does Luke intend as his “literal” sense to tell us a true story about a historical Judean domestic dispute? Obviously not. His literal meaning is “God forgives the repentant sinner.” But he has used a particular literary device employed by Christ to get that literal meaning across. Likewise, elsewhere in Scripture, we find writers making continual recourse to metaphor, poetic imagery, fiction, and hyperbole to get across a literal meaning.
That is what is happening in the Psalms. Every one of the Psalms is filled with literal meanings. Thus, the literal meaning of Psalm 23 is, “God takes care of us.” But the way in which the psalm (and all psalms) communicates that literal meaning is by means of a series of metaphors and imagery, in this case portraying God as a shepherd and we as a flock of sheep. In the same way, the prophets may speak of God’s strong right arm or of the eyes of God watching Israel. They do not, of course, intend to say that God is a man with an anatomy. Rather, their literal meaning is that God is omnipotent and omniscient. But they employ metaphorical language to get their literal meaning across.
Again, this is fairly smooth sailing. But when we get to fiction rather than metaphor or parable as the means for conveying a literal sense the waters can sometimes get a little choppier. Good examples of this are books like Tobit or Judith in the Old Testament. For some reason, modern readers who have no difficulty recognizing that the fictional Parable of the Prodigal Son communicates a literal meaning can still stumble over the supposed “difficulty” of Old Testament books that likewise aim to communicate truth via fiction. Thus, when Tobit or Judith are shown to contain a number of historic and geographic inaccuracies, some people get the vapors and imagine this means they could not have been inspired by God.
This is why it is so important to notice what the Church says in the Catechism passage above: namely, that we must interpret the books of Scripture “following the rules of sound interpretation.” When we do this in the case of Tobit and Judith, we find the Church teaches that to understand the truth of Scripture we must have in mind what the author was actually trying to assert, the way he was trying to assert it, and what is incidental to that assertion. So, for instance, when the gospels say the women came to the tomb of Jesus at “sunrise”, they are not mistakenly asserting the truth of Ptolemaic astronomy or promulgating a dogma that the sun rises rather than the earth moving. The “error” of the gospels here is an illusion because the gospel writers are not making any particular truth claims about astronomy to be in error about. They are simply using human language in a human way. Similarly, both Judith and Tobit have a number of historical and geographical “errors”, not because they are bad history and geography texts, but because they are first rate pious fiction that never pretended to be remotely interested in history or geography any more than the Resurrection narratives are interested in astronomy. Indeed, the author of Tobit, in particular, goes out of his way to make clear that his hero is fictional. He makes Tobit the uncle of Ahiqar, a figure in ancient Semitic folklore like Jack the Giant Killer or Aladdin. Thus, just as one does not wave a medieval history textbook and complain of a tale that begins “once upon a time when King Arthur ruled the land”, so we are not reading Tobit and Judith to get a history lesson. That’s not the sort of stories they are and that’s not the sort of truth they tell.
Of which more tomorrow.
[1] The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Vol. 2, Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm., eds., (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 607.
[2] Dei Verbum, 12 §4.
[3] George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language“, The New Republic, June 17-24, 1946.
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