Take the Bible Literally?

My childhood home was overseen by a mother who was born in England and grew up in Canada with parents who never completely abandoned their British heritage. Because of this lineage, my mother was careful to impress the use of proper grammar and pronunciation on my sisters and me. Perhaps this explains why I did well in elementary and secondary school English and literature classes. It may also explain why I eventually chose English as my major (and initially, French as a minor) in my secondary education curriculum in college. More to the point, my concentration was grammar and linguistics. Over the years, I have been referred to as a “grammar Nazi” by my students and a few friends who chafed under my constant correction.

When I entered Bible college in my early twenties, I was thrilled to study koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. Having inherited my mother’s love of precise language, I was keen to know exactly what the Bible writers had said. As a witness to my enthusiasm, near the end of the first term, my first-year Greek professor told me not to bother with a second year because my capabilities were already beyond most of his second-year students. Had circumstances not intervened, I would have gone straight into the study of Hebrew so that I could apply the same diligence to Old Testament study, but it was not to be. I have done some self-study, but I must rely on commentaries to fully understand ancient Hebrew.

I lay all of this background so that my penchant for interpreting the Scripture in the most diligent fashion might be understandable. As I wrote recently in “Where’s My Cloud,” knowing who God is must be the primary goal of any sincere Christian. Following closely behind this is knowing what God expects of His people. To learn these things from texts that are thousands of years old, one must take care to interpret them in the context in which they were written. The Bible says plainly that God does not change, but languages and cultures do. The most reliable interpretation of Scripture is one that first attempts to understand the original intent and meaning of the ancient author.

Seeking original meaning also entails knowing the genre in which the original was composed. As I wrote in “Understanding the Bible as Literature,” “The Old Testament, particularly the wisdom literature and the prophets, is full of metaphor, imagery and symbolism. The original readers were accustomed to literature that was not meant literally.” Not literal does not mean not true. Nor does it mean not inspired. It certainly does not mean that we can ignore the lesson it teaches. It simply means that modern readers must get into the heads of the original authors and audience to grasp the significance of what was written.

Now I come to the point which inspired me to write about this subject again. My through-the-Bible reading schedule has me in Numbers these days. As its name suggests, Numbers is a record of counting things. God ordered Moses to count the people by tribes and clans. The total was a surprising 603,550 males over the age of 20. This would mean that there were between 2-3 million people when women and children were added. That number of people, if it is literal, is going to present problems.

The actual numbering is problematic for those who want the Bible to be literal in every word. Ancient language scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser, says that several factors mitigate against the Numbers count being a numerical value. The amount of food needed for the 45 days after leaving Egypt before manna arrived would have been unmanageable; millions of animals and thousands of pounds of grain would have been necessary. Also, the time for a phalanx of that magnitude to cross the Red Sea would have been a week or more not one night as Scripture records.

Additionally, according to Heiser, the area outlined as their camp on the Jordan before crossing into Canaan could not be realistic. He says, “At 2 million, the population density would be over 40,000 people per square mile—13,000 people per square mile greater than the city of New York in 2010.” Remember, there were no high-rise tents in ancient Israel making that density beyond unlikely. Then too, the Israelites were said to be the smallest ethnic group of all those in Canaan, yet there is no archeological evidence that there were any cities large enough to make that true. I suspect one could also rebut this claim with the counts of enemy dead during the conquest of Canaan even if we believe those numbers were numerically accurate.

Something inside me struggles with this information. I want to believe the historicity of all the Bible, but as Heiser points out, the ancient Mideastern literary practices were not the same as ours. As Westerners (Greeks) we think only of numbers having numerical value. The ancients considered them to have metaphoric value perhaps more important than their actual value. Example: God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Since no one thinks there were exactly 1,000 hills where cattle existed when that was penned, neither does one assume that there were other cattle on other hills that God did not own.

I would easily buy the idea that numbers were taken metaphorically until I come to a spot where God was numerically specific. When counting heads of Israel to balance numbers of Levites for redemption of the first born, God uses the exact number to be redeemed, 22,273. Since there were only 22,000 Levites, the Israelites had to add 273 animal redemptions to make up the difference in the actual numbers. (Num. 3:39-48) I feel like I am way out on a limb to say that the number is a metaphor, but the concept of one-for-one redemption is accurate. It works, and it maintains the truth of Scripture without being literal. Nonetheless, it makes me quiver slightly, metaphorically speaking.

To quote myself again, “A slavish, literal interpretation of all Scripture leads to gross misinterpretation. At one point in church history, people were put to death because they suggested the earth revolved around the sun. The church leaders thought this contradicted the clear teaching of the Bible that the sun rose and set (revolved) around the earth. Again, the Bible frequently uses the idea of the earth having ‘foundations’ because the cosmology of the day pictured the earth as a table with legs or foundations.” I would add that people who are expecting the heavenly Jerusalem to be a 1,500 cubic mile floating city with transparent gold streets and gates made of giant pearls may also have been influenced by misinterpretation of figurative language.

I will attempt an analogy from secular culture. Many children in our culture believe that a mythical character named Santa Claus delivers presents in a magical sleigh on Christmas Eve. As I have written elsewhere, the legend upon which Santa is built is not indisputable. It remains, however, a good reason to be charitable at Christmas time, so there is no reason to scrap the practice just because we outgrow our belief in the myth. Since the Bible is so much more believable than myths due to its authenticated historicity, borrowing principles from metaphors, images and symbols found in Scripture is a sound practice.

It may be my mother’s voice echoing in my head that says numerals must be numbers. I can fully relate to people who insist that creation took exactly six twenty-four-hour days, and the Messianic reign will last 1,000 years of 365 ¼ days each. What I cannot do is join the doubters who will reject the entire Bible because the numbers don’t work. I will try to get comfortable with the numbers being metaphors alongside all the other beautiful imagery of Scripture. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of literal death, I will fear no evil because I know God loves a good metaphor.

 

Related posts: Understanding the Bible as Literature; Rain on the Parade; Not Our Fathers' God