RE: Literal and Not Literal
November 1, 2019 at 5:13 pm
(This post was last modified: November 1, 2019 at 5:13 pm by Belacqua.)
(November 1, 2019 at 3:31 pm)mordant Wrote: ... Or adhere to a "dual interpretation". It is clear that Abraham is presented as a historic person and his story is supposed to be literally true. Paul here is doing a "dual interpretation", a literal one with a symbolic one superimposed on it.
Yes, this is a good point.
It's been common for a long time to do four-level readings, with the literal meaning being one of those.
And as I've pointed out before, early commentators used the word "literal" to mean "what the original author had in mind," so that paradoxically, if the original author intended a metaphor, then the literal reading is metaphorical. Some had different meanings "superimposed" later, and some had it from the get go.
As everybody knows, the Bible is an anthology of a variety or writing produced by different people, in different styles, for different reasons. There is no reason to think that all of it was intended to be literal (in our modern sense) when it was written. Tropes and symbolism were part of it from the beginning.
