hy·per·bo·le
hīˈpərbəlē/ noun. Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
Where would Christian apologetics be without this word? The word “hyperbole” immunizes Christians to difficult questions, making them feel invincible against those pointing out biblical flaws. After all, what better way to defend the ludicrous things that God said than to tell people that he didn’t really mean them? If you’re a Christian being challenged, then try throwing around the words “hyperbole,” “metaphor,” “allegory,” “synecdoche,” and “metonymy.” Luckily for you, few critics of the Bible know enough about it as a work of literature to argue effectively, and you’ll have the floor.
21st century Christians are not the first to hammer Old Testament jigsaw puzzle pieces together the way they want to see the picture. In 2nd century B.C. Alexandria, many Jewish philosophers gave up their traditional interpretations of the Hebrew Bible for easier ones to deal with in a Hellenistic world. It began with Aristobulus of Alexandria, who established an allegorical interpretation of the Torah to ease its offensiveness to the Greeks. His successor, Philo, used this concept of allegory to reinterpret the Torah through the lens of Platonic philosophy, thus syncretizing the ideas of Moses with the ideas of Plato.[1] Why did they feel the need to impose an allegorical interpretation on the Torah? For the same reason that modern Christians do—because unless you’re a 15th or 13th century B.C. Hebrew wandering around in the wilderness, you have more perspective with which to see the Torah’s flaws. So if you’re determined to believe that these texts speak the truth, but you can’t change them, your best tactic is to change the way you interpret them.
The Smart Way to Read the Bible
An intellectually honest person, however, will read the Bible with a hermeneutical approach. Hermeneutics refers to the study of investigating what an author really meant when he wrote his literature— in short, the study of interpretation. The Bible contains a vast collection of ancient literature with varying literary styles. Poetry, narrative, revelation, lyric, instruction, teaching—each of these genres comes with distinct features that must be considered. If you are reading Biblical poetry and mistake it for apocalyptic literature, then you may get the impression that the author of Isaiah meant that the mountains will actually burst into song (Isa 55:12). Yes, he said that, but was using a literary feature called personification to express that life will improve when Israel turns from its unrighteousness. This is an example of why we must read Biblical literature within its literary genre. As any Christian will happily tell you, it is important not to take Biblical poetry too literally.
The Wrong Way to Read The Bible
Similarly, it is important not to take narrative literature too figuratively. This is where Christians struggle. They become enraged if you take narratives of Jesus’ miracles figuratively, but they become defensive if you take narratives of Israel’s conquests literally. That is, Christians pick and choose their hermeneutical tools based on what they want the text to say. For example, Paul Copan, one of the leading ambassadors of Christianity’s on-again-off-again romance with allegory, focuses heavily on allegorizing the conquest narratives in the Old Testament. Of course, he starts off well by teaching his fellow Christians to avoid statements like, “I take the Bible literally” and he instead instructs them to “Read the Bible literarily.” While his advice sounds rational, he either does not mean it or does not know how to do it.
Here is his approach: he takes obliterative language in the conquest narratives like, “Joshua utterly destroyed them with their towns,” (Josh 11:21), then likens them to hyperbolic phrases following a basketball game in which the winners brag, “We annihilated those guys.”[2] As scholarly and deeply-researched as this hypothesis sounds[3], few basketball players precede these childish boasts with violent supernatural expositions like, “For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle, in order that they might be utterly destroyed, and might receive no mercy, but be exterminated, just as the Lord had commanded Moses,” (Josh 11:20).
Paul Copan’s Mistake
He goes on to argue that “The knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized this as hyperbole; the accounts weren’t understood to be literally true.”[4] How does he support this extraordinary assertion? He points out that ancient Near Eastern authors commonly used obliterative hyperbole. For example, he mentions that “Egypt’s Tuthmosis III [also known as Thutmose III] (later fifteenth century) boasted that ‘the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those (now) not existent.’[5] He is correct that this is likely hyperbolic language, but he forgot something.
The Gebel Barkal Stela tells of Thutmose III’s success in battle. To find out what style of literature it is, you can read a translation here (you’ll find the sentence in question on page 105). Now look at some of the sentences immediately surrounding Copan’s example: “He flashes across the two arcs (of heaven) like a star crossing the sky, who plunges into the thick ranks aggressively(?), breathing fire against them.” Just in this sentence we have synthetic parallelism, simile, metaphor, and hyperbole—a collection and structure not intrinsic to historical narrative. Shortly following Copan’s example sentence, the stela reads, “May he live forever! He is Horus with Flexed Arm! A good fortress for his army, a refuge for the people.” Praises, metaphor, synonymous parallelism—and hyperbole. The Gebel Barkal Stela text is clearly not quite the same genre as Joshua II, and thus does not help Copan back up his argument that Joshua’s historical narrative is hyperbolic.
The Power of Presupposition
My point is this: modern Christianity’s inconsistent approach to allegorical interpretation is not motivated by intellectual honesty, but by presupposition. The presupposition is that God is a loving god, and Christians are interpreting the Old Testament within the “loving God” presuppositional template. If you disagree that this allegorical approach to interpretation is motivated by presupposition rather than reason, then consider these passages:
“Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Am I mistaken for reading this sentence literally?
“Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” How am I reading too literally here? What literary, linguistic, or historical argument am I missing?[6]
“I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his sons’ sons that dare approach me? I kill where I wish and none dare resist. I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today.” What is it about this sentence that should convince me it is meant figuratively? Am I taking it out of context?
If you’ve developed arguments in favor of an allegorical interpretation for each of these passages, I’d love to hear them. The first example was Moses speaking in Numbers 31:17-18, and the second example was Yahweh speaking in 1 Samuel 15:3. Were you also frustrated by my literal interpretation of that last passage? You shouldn’t be. I assure you that it was meant literally, as that was Smaug speaking to Bilbo in The Hobbit. Nonetheless, the first thing far too many Christians would assume about that third passage (thinking it’s biblical) is, “You’re taking it out of context; surely it wasn’t meant literally.”
Conclusion
My point is to illustrate the inherent bias that Christians bring with them to the study of the Bible. They already generally know what they want the text to say, and they will tell you—in however many words necessary— that that is what it means. But some things in the Bible were meant literally, and an intellectually honest hermeneutical approach will not leave the reader confused about what the Bible says at each turn.
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Footnotes:
[1] Hawthorn, Martin, and Reid. 1993. Dictionary of Paul and His Letters. IVP Academic. Downers Grove, IL. HELLENISM.
[2] Copan’s Seminar on “Is God a Moral Monster” (26:52)
[3] This is an ancient literary feature commonly known among scholars as “sarcasm.”
[4] Copan, Paul. 2011. Is God a Moral Monster? Baker Books. Grand Rapids, MI. p. 171.
[5] Ibid, p. 172.
[6] Copan argues on pages 173-174 that this must be hyperbole because some Amalekites are mentioned later in 1 Samuel 27:8. “Now David and his men went up and made raids on the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites; for these were the landed settlements from Telam on the way to Shur and on to the land of Egypt.” Copan and his colleagues are largely alone in this interpretation, as it is common for a remnant to escape a genocide. Many commentaries that address the Amalekites in this verse refer to them as a remnant that had escaped Saul’s sword. Here is a quick-access online set of examples. The point is that whether or not Saul followed through (which he is known for having not done), God instructed the extermination of the Amalakites in detail and gave reasons as to why (v.33, Ex. 17:8-15, Deut 25:19, etc.) and expressed frustration that Saul had failed carrying this order out with regard to the livestock (vv. 9-31).
For further study into the Gebel Barkal stela:
Hawass, Zahi A. 2003. Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century. The American University in Cairo Press. Cairo, NY.
http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/napata_stela.htm (An additional translation)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Wenig, Steffen. 1999. Studien Zum Antiken Sudan. Otto Harrassowitz. Wiesbaden. pp. 68-70.
For further study into Copan’s arguments on page 172:
Younger, Lawson K. 1990. Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing. JSOT Press. Sheffield. (Lawson, another member of this line of thinking, is likely one of Copan’s sources, specifically pages 157 and 228.)
Copan, Paul; Craig, William Lane. 2012. Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics. B & H Publishing Group. Nashville, TN. (Another writer, Matthew Flannagan, using the same as Copan’s second argument in an essay Copan edited with William Lane Craig, p. 238.)
Hoffmeier, James K. 1994. Faith, Tradition, and History: Old Testament Historiography in Its Near Eastern Context. Eisenbrauns. Winona Lake, IN. (One of Flannagan’s sources, who references Younger in discussing the Gebel Barkal stela.)
For further introduction to biblical hermeneutics:
https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/asbury-bible-commentary/Hebrew-Poetry
