I’m not religious at all, but I’ve read a little bit about hermeneutics, so I can say a few things here.
The short answer to your question is: you have to use your brain. You have to think about what you’re reading. The meaning may or may not be obvious at once — it may be something that challenges you or provokes you or only reveals its relevance over time.
These days we tend to think that the best writing is the easiest. A good text will be like good journalism or a science book: completely clear, no ambiguity, nothing that requires interpretation. Religious texts don’t work that way. Neither does Plato, or the Heart Sutra. Neither does Proust or Dostoevsky. Any book which addresses the human heart, with all its infinite complexity, contradictions, and depth, can’t work like a science book.
The writers of the Bible didn’t intend every sentence to be read literally. That’s not how myths or parables work. The idea that it should all be read 100% literally is a new thing, based on ignorance. But even people who say they read it all literally don’t live up to that. When Jesus is talking about not throwing your seeds on stony ground, for example, everyone knows he isn’t giving agricultural advice. Both Jesus and Paul recount stories from the Old Testament and interpret them as allegory, not literally.
It’s been traditional for a very long time to read each sentence of the Bible on four levels. In Christianity, these four levels are: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The levels are a little different in Judaism and Kabbalah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_senses_of_Scripture
But even here we have to be careful, because when Augustine, for example, uses the word “literal,” he doesn’t mean what modern Christians do. For him, the literal meaning is the meaning intended by the original author. So, paradoxically, if the original author intended a sentence to be metaphorical, then the literal meaning is metaphorical. But Augustine thinks that the text is inspired, so it can have a great deal more meaning than the original author was aware of.
So it’s important to see that the meaning of the Bible, for us, isn’t just what’s written on the page, but is the text plus all the centuries of interpretation and elaboration that has happened since. (Derrida and some of the other Frenchies secularized this idea, when they talked about interpreting literature. The much-misinterpreted “death of the author” has to do with this.)
I want to say thank you, by the way, for asking a genuine question. It’s really nice to see someone who sincerely wants to know, rather than just type snark.
Quote:How do you know when the bible is being literal and when it's being metaphorical?
The short answer to your question is: you have to use your brain. You have to think about what you’re reading. The meaning may or may not be obvious at once — it may be something that challenges you or provokes you or only reveals its relevance over time.
These days we tend to think that the best writing is the easiest. A good text will be like good journalism or a science book: completely clear, no ambiguity, nothing that requires interpretation. Religious texts don’t work that way. Neither does Plato, or the Heart Sutra. Neither does Proust or Dostoevsky. Any book which addresses the human heart, with all its infinite complexity, contradictions, and depth, can’t work like a science book.
The writers of the Bible didn’t intend every sentence to be read literally. That’s not how myths or parables work. The idea that it should all be read 100% literally is a new thing, based on ignorance. But even people who say they read it all literally don’t live up to that. When Jesus is talking about not throwing your seeds on stony ground, for example, everyone knows he isn’t giving agricultural advice. Both Jesus and Paul recount stories from the Old Testament and interpret them as allegory, not literally.
It’s been traditional for a very long time to read each sentence of the Bible on four levels. In Christianity, these four levels are: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The levels are a little different in Judaism and Kabbalah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_senses_of_Scripture
But even here we have to be careful, because when Augustine, for example, uses the word “literal,” he doesn’t mean what modern Christians do. For him, the literal meaning is the meaning intended by the original author. So, paradoxically, if the original author intended a sentence to be metaphorical, then the literal meaning is metaphorical. But Augustine thinks that the text is inspired, so it can have a great deal more meaning than the original author was aware of.
So it’s important to see that the meaning of the Bible, for us, isn’t just what’s written on the page, but is the text plus all the centuries of interpretation and elaboration that has happened since. (Derrida and some of the other Frenchies secularized this idea, when they talked about interpreting literature. The much-misinterpreted “death of the author” has to do with this.)
I want to say thank you, by the way, for asking a genuine question. It’s really nice to see someone who sincerely wants to know, rather than just type snark.
