Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 02:4 (Fall 1959)
Article: Figures Of Speech In Human Language
Author: C. F. Pfeiffer

BETS 2:4 (Fall 1959) p. 17

Figures Of Speech In Human Language

C. F. Pfeiffer

Gordon Divinity School

Biblical Hermeneutics, the science of Biblical interpretation, cannot be divorced from the study of language in general. The Bible is not simply a book from God. It is a book for men. It was written in human language by men who used the vocabulary, idiom, sentence structure, and grammar of the generations in which they wrote. Bible interpretation—and translation—must bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between the ancient world and the contemporary world. It is not enough to translate words. The ideas and thought patterns of the Biblical writers must be made relevant to modern society.

I. The Nature of Figurative Language

a. Concrete expressions precede abstract ideas.

In the development of language, refined or abstract meanings largely grow out of more concrete meanings (Bloomfield, Language, p. 429). The concrete meaning may be thought of as the “literal” meaning of a word, but that “literal” meaning may be completely forgotten in the later history of the usage of the word. Many of our prosaic expressions have a most colorful history. The sincere man is, etymologically, the man “without wax,” and the unscrupulous man has no grains of sand in his shoes (to annoy him). The Kaiser of Germany and the Tsar of Russia bore titles derived from Gaius Julius Caesar, whose name also gives us our medical “caesarean” operation. Meaning in each case is determined by use, not etymology.

Our word “dollar” has colorful history. The German “taler”, its antecedent, is derived from Joachimstalef, from Poachimstal (Joachim’s Dale) in Bohemia, where silver was minted in the sixteenth century. St. Audrey’s Fair in Britain was famous for the lace which was sold there. It gave rise to our word “tawdry,” in the sense of cheap, showy, or gaudy.

The Hebrew word paneh means, in the first instance, face or countenance. As in the English usage of the same word, “face” can mean “surface” and it is possible to speak of “the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). With the preposition Le, “to” added, we have the concept “to the face of” which comes to mean “in front of” or “before.” The concept “before” may refer to place (Gen. 23:12; Exodus 7:10), or of time. Isaiah 18:5 speaks of a time “before the harvest.”

In Biblical interpretation it should be remembered that concrete meanings tend to be forgotten when abstract ideas are assigned to words. Lipheneh, “to the face of”, becomes the word “before” and was thought...