![]() ![]() How can you know when a poet has used personification? It is not complicated: whenever a poet attributes human qualities to some- thing inanimate, often an abstraction, he or she has used personification. My personal favorite is Zechariah’s vision of a woman named Wickedness sitting inside a cereal container (Zech. “Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15 esv). “Mercy and truth are met together righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Ps. ![]() Just recall some famous examples: “Sin is crouching at the door” (Gen. Poets have always used personification, and biblical writers did as well. Well, yes she can if she is a personification of an abstract concept. Wisdom, someone might protest, cannot speak. We noted that wisdom is the speaker in Proverbs 8. As I said earlier, I will make the case for literary genre as an effective way to spare us from misreading the Bible. Lest we think that the Jehovah’s Witnesses thought this up on their own, they correctly adduce “Christian writers of the early centuries of the Common Era” as having also believed that the speaker in Proverbs 8 is really Christ.3 Indeed, the view that the speaker of Proverbs 8 is Christ continues to make the rounds in some evangelical circles. 24–25 esv), moreover, this same Christ must be a created being and not an eternal member of the Trinity. Since the speaker in the Proverbs 8 passage speaks of being “brought forth” (vv. They argue that because the speaker in Proverbs 8 is described in the same terms as are used for Christ elsewhere, that speaker, therefore, must be Christ. 1 Corinthians 8:6, where the italicizing in the tract shows the Jehovah’s Witnesses interpreta-tion that God the Father created Christ, who then created the world: “There is one God, the Father, from whom are all things,…and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.”.Several verses from Proverbs 8, one of which speaks of how “Yahweh created me, first-fruits of his fashioning, before the oldest of his works” (njb).Revelation 3:14, which speaks of Christ as “the beginning of God’s creation.”.Colossians 1:15, which calls Christ “the first-born of all creation.”.In a Watch Tower tract entitled Should You Believe in the Trinity?2 the following verses from the Bible are strung together: With this context as your guide, you would probably not find the passage difficult, but what would you say if someone rattled off proof texts to support the belief that the speaker of the poem is really Christ and that the passage, moreover, shows that Jesus is a created being? This is exactly what Jehovah’s Witnesses claim regarding the passage. 1) and in verse 12, we read, “I, wisdom, dwell with prudence.” The repeated first-person references (my lips, my mouth, etc.), therefore, are to wisdom. Who is speaking here? The lead-in to the speech answers the question: “Does not wisdom call?” (v. When there were no springs abounding with water.īefore he had made the earth with its fields, When there were no depths I was brought forth, Of his work, the first of his acts of old.Īt the first, before the beginning of the earth. Here are the first five verses of the poem: One biblical text that illustrates this principle is a famous poem that praises wisdom (Prov. It is this principle I propose to explain: literary genre should influence our interpretations, and an awareness of literary genre can spare us from misreadings of the Bible (though that is not its only usefulness). What Lewis meant is that the Bible is composed of different kinds (genres) of literature - narrative, poetry, prophecy, epistle (authoritative teaching in the form of a letter), and so on - and each part of the Bible must be read according to the kind of literature it is. Lewis expressed that same reservation when he accused those who read the Bible “as literature” of reading the Bible “without attending to the main thing it is about.”1 Two sentences later, however, Lewis asserted unequivocally, “There is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.” I’m an enthusiast for “the Bible as literature.” There are, of course, liabilities to this popularized label since in some circles it runs the risk of implying that the Bible is only literature and therefore devoid of the special authority that Christians ascribe to it as a religious book. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: This article first appeared in the Practical Hermeneutics column of the Christian Research Journal, volume 27, number 2 (2004). ![]()
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