The Language of the Narratives: Hyperbole, Motif and Anthropic Speech

God has always communicated so that people would understand. He has never communicated in a complex manner. If He had wanted to be obscure, He would not have used human language, human idioms and human images at all. So the language of the Bible is not a puzzle set to confuse its readers. It is ordinary human language, used in all the ways human language is used. The Law and the narratives of the Bible are full of metaphor, analogy and imagery. The phrases are loaded, because the writers believed in brevity, but they are not cryptic. To read them rightly, we must understand the message, understand the clothing in which it comes, and enjoy the beauty of the language.

Narration Is Not Formal Record

Every genre of writing has its own nuances, and its authors use techniques peculiar to it. We must approach each in its own way. Narration is not formal record. Recording something formally is one thing; narrating it informally is another. Narration is storytelling, and storytelling need not be fiction. It can tell of a real event in the manner of a story. And whenever we read a story, we must look out for hyperbole.

Hyperbole Is Not Deception

Narrative passages always contain some exaggeration. Hyperbole is part of narration. Moses tells the people that they are about to dispossess “nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky” (Deuteronomy 9:1). He does not mean that the cities had skyscrapers. He means that the nations they would face were settled, with great architecture, while Israel was a people without land, without architecture, without anything.

The land “flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 11:9) is hyperbolic and metaphorical in the same way. So is the description of “a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven” (Deuteronomy 11:11): a fertile land that receives the rain and holds it. When Moses says he took the golden calf, burnt it, crushed it and ground it “as fine as dust” (Deuteronomy 9:21), there is a little exaggeration there too. Exaggeration of this kind is not meant to deceive anyone. It is a literary device, part of the way narratives are told.

Motif and Refrain

When Moses says that he stayed on the mountain “forty days and forty nights” and “ate no bread and drank no water” (Deuteronomy 9:9), we need not worry about how he survived so long without eating or drinking. “Forty days and forty nights” is a motif.

A refrain is a matter of words: a couple of lines repeated again and again in a song, usually the chorus. A motif, an existing literary term, is a concept: an element repeated through a particular writing or a sequence of writings. It may be an image that keeps appearing, or an incident. Anyone who has listened to film music or orchestral music knows the theme, the section that returns again and again through the film. That is a motif. The woman at the well is a motif that appears more than once in Scripture (Genesis 24:11–27; 29:1–12; Exodus 2:15–21; John 4:5–26).

“Forty days and forty nights” recurs in the same way. It rained for forty days and forty nights in Noah’s time (Genesis 7:12). Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights the first time (Exodus 24:18), and again the second time (Deuteronomy 9:18). Elijah travelled forty days and forty nights to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8). Jesus was in the wilderness forty days and forty nights (Matthew 4:2). Could it be literal? It could be; it does not have to be. It is a Hebrew motif that stands for intensity: a long, substantial period of intense experience.

This is literary analysis, and we need not load it with theology. Whatever is written is literature, and because these writings all come from one people, the Hebrews, a connecting thread runs through them: a particular use of language that recurs throughout.

So we must not spiritualise it. Some jump to “Man shall not live on bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4) and say that because Moses was listening to God’s teaching, he needed no bread. So, they conclude, whoever has God’s teaching needs no bread at all. That is what many preachers say today: “I give you the teaching, so you don’t need bread. Whatever you would spend on bread, give it to us, so that we can preach more.” You get the teaching; they get the money. The passage is neither about how Moses survived, nor about our needs vanishing when we are near God.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Moses broke the tablets “to pieces before your eyes” (Deuteronomy 9:17). Before whose eyes? Not, literally, the eyes of the people Moses was addressing, but those of the generation before them. And think of how it happened. In a film, when the hero or the villain does something, the camera zooms in. However large the crowd, he fills the frame, and the audience knows whom to look at. In the film The Ten Commandments, when Moses breaks the tablets, everyone looks at him. In reality there was chaos. Hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own thing: making the calf, caught up in an orgy, all of it noisy, and no one watching the mountain (Exodus 32:6, 17–19, 25). Even those who looked did not all turn towards him at once because of some sound effect. It was not an explosion. It was two tablets being broken, and only those near the mountain would have seen it.

So every narrative calls for what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief”. Disbelief says, “I don’t believe that.” When we read a narrative, knowing its genre, we willingly set disbelief aside for a while. That is how any work of art is approached. When the hero of a story is a superhero, we accept that he can break the laws of physics, because that is the kind of story it is. But in some Indian films, a hero who is supposed to be an ordinary man does things no human being could ever do. That does not call for a suspension of disbelief. It makes fools of the audience. There is an amount of disbelief that we have to suspend when we read a narrative, and no more.

None of this means believing everything blindly. When it comes to teaching and the concepts being taught, we must use our reason and our minds. We must use them; otherwise we shall be a superstitious people. But when it comes to genres of writing, we must understand how things are written. Every book of the Bible has its own beauty and uniqueness, and one person’s narration differs from another’s in style and language. So we should not ask of a narrative, “How did it all happen?” That is not superstition. It is understanding the genre. We must ask the right questions.

Creatively Verbalised Collective Thought

The narratives often put words in quotation marks as though a whole nation spoke them together. The Israelites say to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” (Exodus 14:11). Moses warns them not to ask about the nations’ gods, saying, “How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same” (Deuteronomy 12:30).

Hundreds of thousands of people did not shout the same words in unison. That is not only unreal; it could not be real. If five people are kept waiting in a queue and grow angry, they do not shout the same sentence together. Each expresses his anger in his own way. The same is true of “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower” (Genesis 11:4): it is written from the perspective of the people. Yet the narrative quotes the whole nation as one voice. It is a literary device that runs through the narrative books, and I call it creatively verbalised collective thought*. What the people thought collectively is put into words by the writer, as though they had all spoken it. The point it conveys is real: this is what was in the minds of the people, even if it was never spoken in those words by everyone at once.

The Substitutionally Accused

A related device concerns the word “you”. Moses is speaking to a new generation. Apart from Moses himself, Joshua and Caleb, the generation that made the golden calf has died (Numbers 14:29–30; 26:64–65). It is a generation that knew what the older generation knew. They had travelled with Moses through all of it, and everything he recalls was already in their minds. But they had not made the calf. Still, Moses says, “you made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf” (Deuteronomy 9:16). He has not gone senile and forgotten whom he is speaking to. If his “you” were taken as historically precise, he would be accusing people of something they had never done, because they were not even there.

His “you” is collective. I call those he addresses in this way the substitutionally accused*: the present generation is accused in place of the generation that actually sinned. It was a patriarchal society, not an individualistic one, and responsibility was collective. “You” means “you as a nation”. It is also inclusive: this is the rebellion that you, too, could commit, because people are people. The whole nation is responsible.

Anthropic Language

In the narratives, and often in the Law itself, God is described as though He had a human form and human characteristics. This is usually called anthropomorphism. Anthropos is the Greek for a human being, and morph has to do with form, as in morphology. Anthropomorphism gives God a human form. And it gives Him not only a physical form but human characteristics: emotions such as anger, possessiveness and jealousy. I call such descriptions anthropic language*, or analogic language*.

God’s arm is not too short and His ear is not too dull (Isaiah 59:1). His eyes are on the land “from the beginning of the year to its end” (Deuteronomy 11:12). All that the hearers understood was that the land would be fertile. He has no ears and no eyes. He is spirit; He is incorporeal; He has no body. These are attributed to God. They are not attributes of God. His attributes are His goodness, His wisdom and His justice. And when Moses calls it “a land the LORD your God cares for” (Deuteronomy 11:12), it does not mean that God cares for one piece of land and for no other. Everything is created by Him, and He does not want any of His creation destroyed by human beings.

When God is called “a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 6:15), the same holds. God is likened to a husband, and the nation to a wife. A nation is usually personified as a woman. The wife becomes unfaithful, and the husband becomes jealous. That is a comparison, not reality. Jealousy is a petty human emotion. It comes from envy, possessiveness or insecurity, and God has none of these. He has no rival who is His equal, and He has lost nothing to anyone, because there are no other gods. He has not lost His people to a rival; He has lost them to themselves. So the “jealous God” whose anger burns is not insecure. He stands against idolatry because selfishness destroys, and because He has concern for those who would become its victims. He uses the comparison because it is something His people understood: how a husband feels when his wife breaks the covenant. And the analogy is neither universal nor eternal. To another people, at another time, another analogy could be given, for the sake of clarity.

Some narratives make God sound very temperamental. In Deuteronomy 9, God says to Moses, “Let me alone, so that I may destroy them” (Deuteronomy 9:14). It is as though Moses were holding Him back, and God were saying, “Let go of me; I want to destroy them.” He sounds impulsive, acting on the spur of the moment, without thought or reflection. If that were literally how God is, we would have to be very wary of Him. He would be given to impulses, speaking before He thinks, and changing His word whenever it suited Him. That is not how Scripture portrays God. Either God is wise and knows everything, so that nothing people do takes Him by surprise, or He is impulsive, reacting to events and changing His plans as they unfold. Only one can be true. How do we know which? What God says about Himself is theology: that He is good, long-suffering, wise and just (Exodus 34:6). What a narrative says about Him is depiction. Depiction is not a lie, but it is not theology. We must build our theology on what God says about Himself.

We must also read an author on his own terms. We cannot ask Shakespeare why he did not write so that we would understand him. In the same way, we cannot ask Moses why he did not write for readers some 3,500 years later. His hearers understood him, and that is what matters.

In the same chapter God says to Moses, “your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become corrupt” (Deuteronomy 9:12; Exodus 32:7). When things go well, they are His people; when things go wrong, they are Moses’ people. Taken literally, it would mean that when everything goes well He takes the credit, and when things go wrong He puts it all on Moses. That is a very human thing: take the credit when things are fine, and blame someone else when they are not. The narrative is almost humorous here. Read literally, it would make God a petty being. That is not how God operates. Moses never brought anyone out of Egypt; God did, and Moses was a very reluctant leader (Exodus 3:10–4:17). Moses then hands God’s words back to Him: “your people, your own inheritance that you redeemed” (Deuteronomy 9:26). It is friendly sparring. The same banter returns with the second tablets: “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones… I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke” (Deuteronomy 10:1–2).

To take such passages literally is not merely a disservice to God. It is blasphemy, because it would make Moses a better leader than God, with more love for the people than God ever had. God becomes a cranky being who always wants to destroy, and we become the more mature ones. To read “the LORD listened to me” (Deuteronomy 9:19) as though Moses changed God’s mind is to make a joke of God. It brings God down to the human level. That does not glorify God; it diminishes Him. And that is exactly where idolatry begins: in creating a god just like a human being. What these passages establish is how great a leader Moses was, and how much he cared for the people. This is not theology. It is the way a story is told, and we must not turn it into theology.

Even “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster” (Isaiah 45:7) must be approached very carefully. Light and darkness are used symbolically there, not as references to good and evil, and the language is anthropic. At Sinai God spoke out of the fire, the cloud and “the deep darkness” (Deuteronomy 5:22): He is God of light and of darkness. Darkness is not an entity; it is the absence of light. God is not the cause of evil. If He were, He would be like someone who pinches the child and then rocks the cradle. He is saying that He is the sovereign Lord, with control over everything.

When Moses says, “the LORD’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain” (Deuteronomy 11:17), that too is anthropic. There is no such thing as shutting the heavens. The words come from the way the people of the ancient Near East understood the world.

Whose Words, God’s or Moses’?

Is it God who uses this kind of language, or Moses? Does anthropic language mean that God did not say the words? Not at all. God uses words that people understand. He spoke Hebrew to Moses, but Hebrew is not His language. God has no language. Anything that changes cannot be from God, and language always changes: the King James Version’s “suffer the little children” (Mark 10:14) no longer means what it meant. So God cannot have a language. He also accommodated practices, not only words. Vows, for example, were never His initiative; He regulated a custom the people already had.

In direct speech, both in the Law and in the Gospels, the author’s words sometimes spill over into what God says. Such overlap between what God said and what the author says is occasional. Where exactly God’s words and the author’s language intersect, we shall never know. But whether the language is Moses’ or God’s own makes no difference, as long as we recognise it as anthropic language. We understand the message, and we understand the clothing in which it comes: the cultural clothing, which I call anthropic clothing*. When we understand both the principle being taught and the way it has been communicated, everything is clear.

The same is true of the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic. The Gospel writers wrote in Greek. That does not mean they changed anything. They put into Greek what He had said, and He had said it in a language His hearers understood.

Why God Speaks This Way

God speaks this way for the sake of clear communication, not to muddle it. When Jesus told His disciples that they would be His witnesses “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), He was not speaking of time, as though they were to preach until the world ended. He was speaking of space. And He spoke as though the earth had ends, as though it were flat.

For His hearers, the earth was a disc, round but not spherical, like a plate. Standing in an open place, they saw the horizon on one side and the horizon on the other. So they thought the earth began at one place and ended at another. The ancient Greeks had already worked out that the earth is a sphere, but that was not the common knowledge of ordinary people. Such knowledge stays with a few for centuries before it reaches everyone. We ourselves still speak of the sun rising and setting. So Jesus said, in effect, “Start at Jerusalem, in Judea; go to Samaria; then go everywhere, until you reach the horizon.” The earth has no end in distance. Yet He was not lying. He was using their language, and what they could comprehend, to tell them something. The teaching mattered far more than their understanding of cosmology.

God created everything, and He knows. We came to know that the earth is a sphere, and later that it is not a perfect sphere but flattened at the poles. We shall go on learning, and unlearning, as long as the world exists. But God does not communicate all His wisdom to us, because we would be overwhelmed and understand nothing. To people who thought the earth was flat, He had to speak like that. On essential theological truths, however, He puts His foot down. The Israelites came from a polytheistic background, and He told them absolutely that there is only one God. At other times He accommodates their culture, their understanding and their worldview in the way He communicates.

The Sarcasm of God

God’s language is often sarcastic. I always say that I learnt sarcasm from God and from Jesus Christ.

At Sinai, the people told Moses, “Go near and listen to all that the LORD our God says. Then tell us whatever the LORD our God tells you. We will listen and obey” (Deuteronomy 5:27). God answered, “I have heard what this people said to you. Everything they said was good” (Deuteronomy 5:28). Was it good? If God had thought it the best plan, He would have taken the initiative and spoken to Moses first, not to the people. It is anthropic language, and it is sarcastic. Who is teaching whom here? It is as though God were saying, “That is an interesting idea; I had not thought of that; let us do it that way.” Is He going to say, “I had not even thought of that”? Isn’t He God? Doesn’t He already know? God is omniscient. He is the epitome of wisdom, and He has already thought of everything we could ever think of. What He is really saying is: I know who you are.

Then comes the “if only”: “Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always” (Deuteronomy 5:29). We do not speak that way when we expect something to happen. When we say, “If only you would do what I asked,” it means that we already doubt it. Sarcasm is not always ridicule. Here it comes with anguish and a great deal of sadness: “I don’t believe it. You think so, but that is not how it is.”

So the tone of an author matters, and it is often lost when we read. Is the tone affirmative, neutral, negative or sarcastic? When Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1), he is being sarcastic. The Corinthians claimed to speak the language of angels, God’s own language. Paul quotes their claim back to them and mocks it: “So you speak the language of angels? First have love.” He is not teaching that there is an angelic language. He is laughing at those who claim it, using their own words.

A Running Joke: God’s “Name”

There is even a running joke in the Law. When Moses first met God at the burning bush, he asked God His name. God answered, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:13–14). If there were many gods, they would need names to tell them apart. But there is only one God, and so God has no name. “I am who I am” was His way of saying, “I am God.” The people took it as His name.

God then plays on their misunderstanding. Again and again, the Law speaks of “the place the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name” (Deuteronomy 12:11): not for Himself, but for His Name. It is as though God were saying, “You remember that you wanted My name? Very well; I will ordain a place for My Name.” God and His name become synonymous, though He has no name. Whether Moses used the phrase knowingly, as part of the joke, or was still unaware of it, we cannot tell. But it runs through the narrative, which is what makes it a running joke.

Personification

At times Scripture uses personification. To personify is to treat something that is not a person as a person, to attribute life to something that is not living. English has a phrase about “death’s icy hand”. Death is not a person, and it has no hands; it is the absence of life. The grim reaper, a hooded figure with a scythe, is a personification of death. Other cultures have their own figures of death.

In the same way, a nation can be spoken of as one person, a man or a woman, or even as a thing. Isaiah speaks of Babylon, through its king, as the “morning star, son of the dawn” (Isaiah 14:12). Ezekiel says of the king of Tyre, “You were in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezekiel 28:13). No one who heard these words thought that Tyre had been in Eden, or that Babylon was a star in the sky. They knew these were literary devices. Evil, too, is personified. The book of Revelation personifies the evil of its day, the Roman Empire. Literal things we take literally; figurative things we must recognise as figurative.

Metaphors for Real Truths

The opening chapters of Genesis are symbolic. We do not go about asking which rib it was, or whether Adam was left with one rib fewer. The woman taken from the man’s side (Genesis 2:21–22) is a metaphor for equality: she is not below him, and she is not above him; she is at his side, close to his heart, from him and equal to him. God forms the man “from the dust of the ground” and breathes into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7). That does not mean that God fashioned a sand sculpture, like an artist on a beach, looked at it, said, “That looks very real,” and breathed life into it. There is a legend about Michelangelo’s statue of Moses: the sculptor struck it and said, “Why don’t you speak?” Genesis is not telling a story like that. It is teaching that God created human beings with special care and for a special purpose. Creation was not hands-off; it was intimate and hands-on.

So the truths are real. God created human beings. God created men and women. The woman is equal to the man. That is all true. The way it is taught is metaphorical. The tree of life is a symbol too (Genesis 2:9; 3:22). The book of Revelation takes the symbols of Genesis and plays on them (Revelation 2:7; 22:2). Life was never in a fruit. Jesus said that whoever remains in Him has life, and life in abundance (John 10:10; 15:5).

Metaphor is also the only way to speak of what we have never experienced. Words exist to communicate what we see and experience in this world. For what we have never experienced, we have no words. So the eternity without God is described in metaphors of pain. Jesus spoke of Gehenna (Mark 9:43), a valley where everything was thrown and burnt in a fire that never went out. These are metaphors for a reality beyond our experience, in which there is no body, no eating and drinking, and no marrying (Matthew 22:30).

The Law uses metaphor for daily life as well. “Circumcise your hearts” (Deuteronomy 10:16) uses the heart for the emotions, as other ages used the liver. “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads” (Deuteronomy 11:18). The mind and the hand stand for thinking and doing. Every decision is to be made, and every action taken, through God’s teaching. People later made it literal, with small boxes of microscopic writing tied to their heads and arms.

Never Build a Theology on an Analogy

An analogy is an example, a way of explaining something. The truth and the way it is explained are two different things. Analogy explains the truth; theology is the truth itself†. We must never confuse the two, and never build a theology on an analogy.

The writers of the Epistles often use analogies, helping people in their own situations to understand things through their own culture and understanding. “There is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Jesus never portrayed Himself that way. The Epistles do, because it is an analogy: Jesus made it possible for people to have a relationship with God, so He is described as the mediator. When Paul, in Athens, speaks of an altar “to an unknown god” (Acts 17:23) and says he will make that God known, is he acknowledging that the other gods they followed are gods? Take it literally, and we would have to ask that. He is simply using something at hand that makes it easier to explain. When Paul writes, “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45), he is not saying that Jesus is Adam. He is drawing a parallel for his own purposes. It is not even a true parallel but a contrast, because the two are opposites. Make any of these a theology, and we shall be confused and face endless questions. It works against the truth itself.

Jesus Himself used the language, even the ideology, of His opponents when He attacked them. He quoted, “The Lord said to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand’” (Matthew 22:43–44, quoting Psalm 110:1). In that psalm the Lord, God, speaks to “my lord”, the king. It is a psalm in which the monarchy sets out to prove to the people that it is ordained by God, and that God will put everyone under its feet. When He told the story of the impure spirit that leaves a person and wanders through arid places seeking rest (Matthew 12:43–45), He was mocking them with the demonology that Judaism had brought in. Using their language does not mean that He endorsed it, defended it or approved of it.

God Is Spirit

God can appear in any form: “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty” (Exodus 6:3). He can appear as a human being, which is called a theophany. But He is spirit. He is not “in the form of a spirit”; He is spirit. When Moses asked to see Him and was allowed to see only His back (Exodus 33:18–23), God was, in effect, saying to so righteous a man, whom He did not want to disappoint: “You want to see Me? Very well, I will allow it.” The truth is that God is spirit and is everywhere. Anything physical is limited; He is not.

The tablets of stone were “inscribed by the finger of God” (Deuteronomy 9:10). How did God write? With what finger, and what of His hand or His feet? We have no idea, and we need not ask, because no explanation is given. It is a metaphorical way of saying that God is the one who gave the commandments.

The Science They Had

When Moses says, “To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it” (Deuteronomy 10:14), we must bear in mind how the people of the ancient Near East understood the world: their cosmology. Everything they could see with the naked eye, the sun, the moon and the stars, was in the firmament. Whatever they could not see lay above it, in another layer, and God, they thought, was above that, beyond the firmament. There is no firmament in that sense, but that is how it is explained for their sake. God uses the culture and the science they knew. So when we read such texts, it is not for us to say, “This is science.” Science is always moving forward. What matters is what God was teaching them: that everything they could see, and everything they could not, belongs to Him.

The same holds when Moses says their days in the land will be “as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth” (Deuteronomy 11:21). For them, the heavens were a layer to which the sun, the moon and the stars were fixed, at an almost incalculable distance. What is meant is the length of their lives, not immortality.

So when we read the narratives, we look for these anthropic elements and narrative characteristics. They help us to appreciate the passages. We enjoy the beauty of the language, and we take from it what God was teaching.