STRANGE
FIGURES
“I have used similitudes by the hand of
the prophets,”[1] cries
the Lord, and in doing so uses a “similitude,” for “the hand” here does not
mean a literal hand at all, but is employed as a figure for “the ministry” of
the prophets. The extent to which He has
so used “similitudes “ has been fully realized by few. The East, be it known, is the very home of
flowery and figurative language. In
Palestine, a knowledge of colloquial Arabic soon reveals the astonishing and
charming fact, that the ordinary conversation of the humblest and most
uneducated of the people, who can neither read nor write and who have not the
scientific knowledge of a well‑taught English child of seven years of
age, abounds with figures of speech which, in the West, would be thought worthy
of a great poet. Take the
STREET
CRIES OF JERUSALEM
as
a striking instance of this delightful feature; and contrast them with the
coarse, hoarse, meaningless cries of our far more highly educated street
hawkers. Here comes the cake‑seller,
calling out, “Delicate morsels, buy, O ye children;” and next the vendor of
roses, sold in large quantities to distil for perfume, with the cry, “Roses,
roses of many odors.” The sweetmeat man announces his wares with,
“Peace to the throat! palm candy;” while he with melons shouts, “O melon pips‑solace
of the uneasy.” The woman with water‑cresses and lily‑roots
sings in musical tones, “Daughters of the river‑buy them, buy them.” Here
comes the baker with his tray of bread, crying, “O Thou All‑bountiful! O
God! fresh bread! O Thou All‑bountiful!”
The water‑seller tinkles his little copper bowls, or drinking
cups, and calls to the passers‑by, “O all ye thirsty ones, come to the
water!” or quotes a verse of the Koran which promises heaven to those who give
a cup of cold water to the thirsting. The
hawker of henna, the fashionable
yellowish‑brown staining for the nails‑a paste made from the leaves
of Lawsonia alba, probably the
“camphire” of our Bible (Song of Sol. 1:14; 4:13), which has clusters of white,
highly perfumed flowers lifts up his voice with, “O henna, henna, fragrance of the fifth paradise! flowers of henna!” The woman with a basket of mulberries on
her head thus recommends them, “Sweet, sweet, and black are my mulberries, now
shall hhalaweh [sweetmeat] sellers
die,” that is, for want of any customers to buy their wares now she has brought
her mulberries! From another fruit‑stall
you may hear equally figurative language:
“Dates, dates of the heart! but not for the avaricious;” while stoneless raisins are offered as
“Daughters of Damascus.” Mrs. Finn heard
a woman, vending the produce of her vineyard, cry, “Lovely grapes, lovely
grapes! Oh how often have the doves made their nests amongst them!” and again,
“Look! They are as good as those of
Damascus which men call ‘maiden’s cheeks.’”
The very beggar calls out “Charity, Charity, God will repay it,” and
then, “May thy mouth be always filled with sugar,” to which those who refuse an
alms invariably say, “Pass on! God will give thee.” This highly tropical language meets you
everywhere, even on the most prosaic occasions, but especially when an
Easterner feels and expresses himself strongly.
The humblest and poorest of the people when, like our Savior, they
desire to administer a veiled, delicate, but forcible reproof, will speak to
you in parables, and that often with great readiness and exquisite skill.
A
CHIEF FEATURE OF THE BIBLE.
Now
the Bible, on its human side and as to the whole letter of it, is entirely an
Eastern book. It was written in the East, about events which happened in the East, by
Eastern penmen, and at first, and as to much of it, during long ages, for
Eastern readers only. It
follows as a matter of necessity, that both in thought and language it must
speak as men speak in the East. It is
therefore most natural and interesting to observe, that, next to a sublime
simplicity which is without a rival in any other writing, nothing distinguishes
Holy Scripture more, from a literary standpoint, than its exuberant use of
highly figurative language. The modes of
thought and speech in Palestine being such as I have said, the Bible could not possibly be genuine if it were otherwise. Countless surface difficulties which are
alleged by the free-thinking objector, or which force themselves on the
sensitive conscience of the believer are due to this simple cause. Take an instance of each out of a thousand
others.
Let
us glance first at a free‑thinking objection. “Where,” cries the atheist triumphantly, “is
it spoken by the prophets,
HE
SHALL BE CALLED A NAZARENE.”
Nowhere
is Nazareth so much as mentioned in the Old Testament, and Jews as well as
atheists, taking this literally, triumphantly point to an error in the Gospel. But observe the true answer. In thus claiming a distinct fulfillment of
prophecy in Matthew 2:23, the apostle uses a double figure. First, Enallage,
or Exchange, where “he shall be called,” or “his name shall be called,” is
put for “he shall be.” This is a common Hebrew idiom. It occurs very strikingly in Isaiah 7:14,
“shall call his name Emmanuel (God with us);” in Isaiah 9:6, “his name shall be
called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,” etc., and in Jeremiah 23:6, “He shall
be called Jehovah Tsidkainu (Jehovah our
Righteousness).” Our Lord Jesus Christ
has not borne these as His names, but
He has borne them as His characteristics. The idiom “to be called” means not only “to
be” but “to be recognized and renowned as.”
It is therefore “He shall be a Nazarene.” But to “be a Nazarene,” here is the figure of
Metaphor, and means “to be like a
Nazarene.” Now the Nazarenes in our
Lord’s day were despised, and held in great contempt, and treated as worthless
and ignorant people. Nathaniel, who was
a good man, and lived at Cana only some six miles away, and therefore well knew
the village where Jesus was brought up, cries, “Can any good thing come out of
Nazareth?” (John 1:46) Several of the
prophets tell us of the contempt and shame that would cover Messiah, that, as
Isaiah puts it, “He is despised and rejected of men, a very sorrowful man
[literally “a man of sorrows”] and acquainted with grief, and like one causing
men to hide their faces from him; He is despised, and we esteem Him not.” (Isaiah 53:3)
Hence how clear is the fulfillment claimed by Matthew, in allusion to
the character of Nazarenes in his day, “He shall be called “ (that is, “He
shall be counted as a Nazarene.” (Matt. 2:23)
It is as though people had said of a child long years ago, that he would
be said to be a wild and wandering man, and I claimed the fulfillment of this
prediction by saying “They said he would be counted a Bohemian,” or “They said
he would be counted an Arab,” for while they did not use either of these
expressions, they said he would be like what a Bohemian or an Arab is like; and
this in highly figurative language is saying just the same thing. Had our Blessed Lord lived in His own city
Bethlehem, or even in Judea, He would have been known and esteemed as of the
lineage of David; but brought up in Nazareth, in “Galilee of the foreign
nations,” or “heathen Galilee,” in the providence of God He came through this circumstance to be looked
down upon and utterly despised as, ”Jesus of Nazareth,” or as it should be,
“Jesus the Nazarene.” Now we have seen
it was “spoken by the prophets,” that Christ, during His ministry on earth,
should bear, a name of shame and contempt; and Matthew, therefore, strikingly
sums up and expresses this in the highly figurative but strictly accurate
words, “And he [Joseph] came and dwelt in a town called Nazareth: that it might
be fulfilled which was, spoken by the prophets, He [Christ, the Messiah] shall
be called a Nazarene.”
Again, to deal with a case of sensitive
conscience, when I was a child, I felt
A
TERRIBLE DIFFICULTY
in
those words of our Savior’s first sermon where we are told “to pluck out” our
right eye and to “cut off” our right hand if they make us offend, and so to
practice self mutilation. (Matt. 5:29, 30)
Still greater the difficulty seemed in verses 39, 40, 41, where we are
told to turn the left cheek to be smitten to him who smites us on the right; to
give to “any man” our “coat” who rightly or wrongly sues us and takes away our
“ shirt; “and to go two miles for “whomsoever” may force us with unpaid and
compulsory labor to go one. Greatest of
all seemed the difficulty of verse 42, which tells us to give to everyone who
asks, and not to turn away from any borrower, though if the words are to be
taken literally, as I thought, a man could not “provide for his own and specially
for those of his own house,” and so would have “denied the faith” and be “worse
than an unbeliever,” (I Tim. 5:8) to say
nothing of his often giving money to those who would apply it to wrong and even
criminal purposes! In my young heart,
taking these words, as I did, in their literal Western sense, and finding them
in a plain and most practical discourse, I was led to reject the teaching of
Christ as unreal, unpractical, and even immoral! I know now that these forms of expression are
highly figurative, being nothing less than the powerful figure of Hyperbole, or Exaggeration, and mean no
more than that we are strongly to avoid a litigious spirit where our own rights
are called in question, that we are not to give way to bitter resentment in
regard to personal injuries, and that we are to be very ready to lend a
sympathizing ear and a helping hand to the suffering and deserving poor.
Having shown the importance of
understanding figurative language, let us now ask
“WHAT
IS A FIGURE?”
Its
Greek name, a “trope,” from the Greek word trepo, “I turn,” well
expresses the fact that it is the turning a word or words away from its common,
ordinary meaning. In this sense it
signifies a word or words put in the place of another word or other words. This is done by way of illustration and
generally on the principle of resemblance.
The name “figure” comes from the Latin word figura, “a shape,” or
“form.” “A word,” says Macbeth, “is used figuratively
when it is brought forward in a form, construction, or application different
from its simplest form, construction, or application. Thus, when we speak of the head of an animal,
we use the word `head’ in its literal and first signification, as meaning that
part of the body in which are placed the eyes, nose, and so forth; but when we
speak of the head of an army, we think of the resemblance between an army and
an animal’s body, as to the highest or most prominent part in the animal and in
the army, and then we apply the name of that part of the animal to the similar
the force inherent in this figure, his strong sense of personal weakness and
self-distrust in view of the onerous task of being “a prophet unto the
nations,” and that with so difficult arid unpopular a mission as “to root out
and to pull down, and to ruin and to destroy, to build and to plant.”[2]
[1] Hosea 12:10.
[2]“
Jeremiah 1:10 This is of course a species of the figure of Enallage; or Exchange, to which I have
already alluded, by which the active verb is put for “to declare a thing should
be done.” Thus what is here intended is
that Jeremiah should “declare that the nations should be rooted out and pulled down, ruined and destroyed, built
and planted.”