Is the book of Psalms meaningless figurative language?

How can we know what is literal or figurative?

Arguments about the Bible (as well as other writing and speech) can arise due to the interpretation of the message as literal when it was meant to be figurative. For example, imagine that you have just read a Bible passage. You think it says something. But then you are told that in this passage, the words don't mean what they usually do. In this passage, they somehow mean something completely different. The entire notion of figurative language is confusing for people when it comes to the Bible. But the first thing to understand is a simple point. We all use figurative language normally every day and understand it just fine.

Generally speaking, language is not figurative. Words mean what they mean. If the words were not to be understood using the literal meaning most of the time, then we would simply need to change what the literal meaning is. Therefore, if someone wants to use language figuratively, then something needs to be said to make this clear. Otherwise you are simply speaking in another language that happens to have words which sound the same as your listener's language. Figurative language is very useful though. It helps to make many points. But literal language should be the normal assumption unless there is a good reason to think otherwise. If this was not the case, then we would need to just change the literal meaning of the word. And this does happen from time to time. Here is an example: “The United States was born in 1776.” This is a non literal use of the word “born” that has become so common that we had to add to the literal definition of the word.

Here is an example of figurative language. Imagine you have a particularly filthy younger brother named Bob. Let's say that Bob takes at most 3 baths a week on a good week. Imagine that you are complaining to Bob about how badly he smells. To make the point that Bob is nasty, you might say, “Bob you never take a bath!” This is a form of figurative language called a hyperbole. The word “never” in this sentence doesn't mean what it usually does. In this case, it is clear that you mean the word should be taken in a non literal sense because it's obvious that Bob does take some baths. But you are still making a point to Bob about how badly he needs to take a bath by using what would be an obvious exaggeration to both you and Bob.

Here are some Biblical examples. Jesus tells one parable where He is the gate and we are the sheep. It is obvious that Jesus doesn't mean he is literally a gate for sheep. In another place the New Testament says that before we come to Christ, we are dead in our trespasses and sins. This is obviously not literal, but people sometimes miss this one. If you order a pizza, do you worry that if a non Christian is the deliverer? That would mean the pizza wouldn't make it right? Dead people lay in graveyards. They don't deliver pizzas. Of course the Bible isn't saying that non believers are dead in the normal literal sense of the word. Otherwise they couldn't deliver pizzas.

Some language in the Bible is a bit confusing, because it was obviously figurative in ancient times, but it isn't obvious today. In 1 Samuel 18, God tells Saul to kill all of the Amalekites. God specifically commands that all of the men, women, children, infants and even animals must be killed. Many read this text and reject the Bible on the grounds that God is apparently a genocidal murderer of babies. But this is figurative language. During the late bronze/ early iron age near east, it was normal to use this type of language as a way of saying that you won a battle very decisively. Numerous examples have been found from other texts all over the near east. For example, Pharoah brags on the Merneptah steele that he has killed all of the Israelites with no descendants left. But obviously he didn't mean this literally, since they still exist to this very day. Living in that ancient time, it would have been more obvious that you can't kill all of an entire nation like the Amalekites. There were no bombs, guns, or anything other than hand to hand combat. People could run away. But we live after a time where Adolf Hitler killed 12 million people in death camps in a few short years. World War 2 was the deadliest event in human history, with a death toll of 65 million that beats any plague or natural disaster. But who would have dreamed of that happening a hundred years earlier? And who would have dreamed of that happening when there were no guns or motorized vehicles? To make things even more obvious, David is still engaging in battles with the Amalekites a few chapters later in the book of Samuel even though Saul (and Samuel) supposedly killed them all.

So there can be a problem when we don't know much about the customs of the Biblical history. Imagine that someone living in the bronze age reads a newspaper sports page from today. Let's say that one football team is described as destroying another one. We instantly recognize that this isn't literal. But would someone who didn't live in our time understand this? It would require some sort of obvious clue to understand it. Being separated from the time and place can make this type of language a problem.

Here's another example. The Bible describes God's word as sweeter than honey. We recognize that if you eat a Bible it doesn't taste like honey. But we don't really appreciate how clear this metaphor was to the reader thousands of years ago. In that time, honey was the only sweetener. When Alexander the Great came to India around 300 BC, he discovered sugar cane. He described it as a plant that produced honey without bees. In other words, honey was just sugar back then. So you might translate the Bible passage as saying that God's word is sweeter than sugar. To us, sugar just is purified sweetness. But to them, that was honey. So this Bible passage is really saying that God's word is sweeter than sweetness itself.

The simple fact is that a document should be taken literally unless there is some good reason not to take it that way. Words mean what they mean. If an author wants to have them mean something different just one time, then that author needs to make that obvious.

A form of language that is confusing on this point is the proverb. For example, an apple a day doesn't really keep the doctor away. This proverb isn't literally true. But it communicates an idea in this proverbial way. Proverbs make big ideas easy to remember. People somehow miss this when it comes to the Biblical book of Proverbs. I can't remember how many people I've heard claim that Proverbs 3:5-6 means we can't use our own intellect to understand anything because it says, “lean not on your own understanding.” But you can't literally lean on understanding can you? You can lean on a car, fence, wall or person. And God obviously isn't saying He doesn't want us to understand anything! If that was true, then how would we understand Proverbs 3:5-6 itself!

Perhaps this is a good time to discuss a more fundamental philosophical problem. People sometimes claim that all language is meaningless because we can never be absolutely certain what meaning, literal or figurative, an author intended. People tends to use this as a sort of escape from having to admitbeing wrong. Suddenly, language becomes meaningless when it isn't going their way. It wasn't meaningless five minutes ago when they thought you weren't going to be able to prove your point. Now that you've scored a touchdown, some people just move the goal post and claim that they won't admit you are right until you move the football a thousand yards. They argue that language is meaningless all the time. The problem here is that this is self contradictory. People who say that language is meaningless can't say that it is meaningless. For them to do that, they have to meaningfully use language in order to tell you that it is meaningless.

Allow me to get a bit more philosophical for just a bit. We could wonder if we are really talking to other people at all. Maybe everything that exists outside of your own mind is an illusion and no other people exist? I don't want to get too bogged down here with these types of questions. But the thing is that the illusions still come from somewhere. Someone or something is still communicating with you. At it's core, language takes ideas and translates them into shapes on a page called letters or either vibrations in the air called sounds. These ideas now have physical forms. Then the listener or reader senses these forms and interprets them as ideas. One way we know language works is pretty simple. Imagine you are one year old and see your mother tell your father, “Hand me that cup.” Pretty soon, you'll realize that the sound “Cup” means that family of objects from which we drink.

But there's more! Grammar itself appears to be something that simply must exist. Saying, “Bob is nasty” isn't much different from “Bob = nasty.” Or look at four rocks and then four more and count them. Then call the set “eight rocks.” In other words, “4+4=8.” The thing is, 4+4 must equal 8. It would be 8 even if the universe never existed. And when the universe does exist, it cannot contradict that truth. And it is even true if there is no human to ever think about it. Physical reality must conform to logical and mathematical truths. They are firmly in place even without the physical universe existing or any human thinking about them. They must be true. And this applies to all logical reasoning as well. The statement, “There are no true statements” must contradict itself. It cannot fail to do so.

Whichever way you look at it, successful communication is clearly possible. That means that we must reject the notion that we can never be sure of the meaning of language. And yet some try to reject the Bible on the basis of just such a claim. The problem is that they tend to apply this reasoning only when it is convenient for them and drop it whenever they wish. A principle like “language is meaningless” cannot be dropped like a taxi cab that has arrived at the destination. You can't use “language is meaningless” to disprove the Bible and suddenly start saying “language is meaningful” to prove some other thing. You see, when people want to disbelieve in the Bible, they say, “Nobody knows how to interpret the Bible.” But when you owe them money they would never agree with your claim that, “I had no way to interpret your request for money.”

Usually the problem is that an outspoken atheist, or other disbeliever in the Bible believes she or he has found some good passage that makes the Bible look bad. The atheist has begun to rest and take comfort in the belief that the Bible is a silly book that should be rejected because it says stupid things. A great example is 1 Samuel 18 and the command to commit genocide. Many atheists proclaim that this passage means no one should believe the Bible. So when you confront this person with the claim that the text isn't literal, they just say that nothing in the Bible can be understood. This is because you sort of just took their toy away. They are upset now and don't want to play anymore. They don't want to think about it anymore because it isn't going in the direction they wanted. This is because truth wasn't really what it was about all along. It was about finding something to back up a certainty in atheism which was held long before.

In logic, this is called a false dilemma. In other words, are you a communist or a fascist? Which is it answer the question! In reality there are other options. So this critic of the Bible believes that either the Bible is incredibly easy to interpret, or else it is impossible to interpret. To diffuse this situation like all other false dilemmas, just introduce the hidden third option. The Bible may be difficult to interpret, but not impossible. Given that we can read the Bible and follow it's logical grammar, it's not unreasonable at all to think that we can understand what it says.

Some use the book of Psalms as a very strange example of figurative language. They say that Psalms is never literal so the entire book is meaningless. Actually they just say it is meaningless when it disproves them. Oddly enough, it's often Christians that do this! It's not unusual at all for Christians to have bad interpretations of the Bible. For example, Genesis 1 describes the earth being created in 6 days. But we know that the word translated as “day” has four literal meanings. It also means age, epoch, or eon. It can be an afternoon. It can be a generic word for any period of time. For example, Moses refers to the 40 days and nights he spend on mount Sinai as one day. These are not non literal meanings. These are literal. We know this because of other Bible passages that clearly use it this way. For example, Genesis 2:4 refers to all of the 6 creation days as one day. The funny thing is that if the author wanted to say the earth was created in four ages, then she chose the only word in her entire language to do so. So you could translate Genesis one like this. “God created this and that and there was evening and there was morning, the first age.” That would be a literal translation. So in that language other words around the word are used to make it clear what the word means. Each day ends with the phrase, “And there was evening and there was morning, day 1,2,3 etc.”

So many Christians argue that this use of evening and morning make it clear that this is a 24 hour day. There's more than one problem with that. But one of these problems is Psalm 90. It just so happens that the author is Moses, the traditional author of Genesis.

Psalm 90: 4 A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.

Here, in a Psalm about God's creation of the world, Moses makes it clear that the word “day” doesn't necessarily mean a 24 hour day. But wait, there's more in the next verse!

Psalm 90:5

Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
6 In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

Here Moses is making it clear that the words “morning” and “evening” don't mean a normal morning and evening! People don't die in the evening and neither does grass. Moses uses makes it clear that to him the words “morning” and “evening” can also mean beginning and ending. The fact that this is Moses giving us his view on the use of his language. To Moses, evening can mean ending and morning can mean beginning. You'll never guess how the 24 hour creation crowd responds to this. They say that Moses meant the words figuratively in the Psalms and literally in Genesis. The problem with this reasoning is that you have to admit Moses was completely comfortable with using morning and evening figuratively as beginning and ending. So the appearance of those words in Genesis 1 still proves nothing either way. They can mean a literal 24 hour day or the beginning and ending of an age. So you'll have to look elsewhere for clues on the matter, but we can't do that right now.

There are other reasons why the days in Genesis shouldn't be seen as 24 hour days. But notice the more important point. When we read Psalm 90, it's not as though Psalm 90 itself is meaningless. Even when figurative language is used, the literal meaning of the world is used as a guide for what the intended figurative meaning is. A morning is literally the beginning of a day. So a figurative meaning for a morning can be a beginning. But a figurative meaning for a morning cannot be a toilet or a ham sandwich. Figurative language is not the same thing as meaningless language. People try to say this as an escape from admitting they are wrong, but they just don't make any sense.

Let's boil down the logic here. People are really arguing that figurative language is meaningless because it changes the literal definition of a word into any definition at all whatsoever. But this is incorrect reasoning. It's like asking if you are a communist or a fascist. In reality there are other options. Words are not literal or meaningless. They can also be figurative. A figurative use of a word is not meaningless because it has to have some connection to the literal meaning.

Here is an example to make this clear using the word “morning.”

First let's use literal meanings only.

“The beginning of the United States was in 1776.”

Second, let's use figurative meanings.

“The morning of the United States was in 1776.”

Notice how the use of the word “morning” was still connected to the literal meaning of the word. A morning is a type of beginning so there is still a connection to the literal definition.

Now let's make the same statement but with no connection to the literal meaning.

“The ham sandwich of the United States was in 1776.”

Notice here how the literal use of the term “ham sandwich” has no connection to the word “beginning.” This statement is typically understood as a type of joke called a non sequitur. This indicates that the joke is about how meaningless the statement is. Notice how this is not the same thing as figurative language. So the summary of the point is clear. Figurative language is not meaningless language because it still has some connection to the literal meaning. Usually, the point is that something more is expounded upon by using the word figuratively. For example, Psalm 90 begins by saying that we dwell inside of God. But I dwell in my house don't you? Nevertheless, the figurative usage here forces us to do some theological reasoning. Perhaps in some sense we do dwell inside of God? Psalm 90 goes on to say that God is the creator of all the earth. So everything around us at all times is really there by God's design and choice. So perhaps we in some way do dwell inside of God?