You don't have to read much biblical poetry until you find yourself surrounded by metaphors.

The Lord is my shepherd, I am the clay god is the potter, Jesus is the bread of life, the Lord is my rock.

Metaphors can be a way, an author or poet, craft a unique way of talking about something.

A metaphor is taking one idea. Usually something very tangible, something easy to understand, and mapping that idea onto a more abstract experience.

So I know what a rock is like, it's sturdy. I've held a rock in my hand, I've had the experience of trying to move a large rock across the field.

I've stood on a tall pillar and felt its strength blow me. Now I have this other experience that's a lot more abstract.

And my abstract experience is feeling that God is ultimately dependable.

Map these two experiences onto each other, and you get the metaphor, God is my rock.

And while most biblical metaphors are easy enough to understand like that one, we have to remember that every culture develops its own various types of metaphors that will seem strange to another culture.

And this is true for those who wrote the Bible.

A great example of this is how biblical authors constantly use the image of tumultuous waters to describe any experience of danger, whether it be the unknown, dangerous people, dangerous situations, and even enemy nations.

Why is somebody thinking like this? What did it take to produce a poetic imagination that thinks in terms of these images instead of some other edges?

This episode is part one of a three-part conversation on biblical metaphors that we should be familiar with. But first, we need to have a conversation, simply about what metaphors are, how they work, and how you are more saturated with metaphors than you ever imagined.

Even how our very understanding of reality is itself metaphors.

This is the Bible Project Podcast. Here we go.

So we have a series of videos on how to read the Bible.

We had one whole conversation about the art of biblical poetry, the unique styles, techniques, conventions of ancient Hebrew poetry.

And we saved for its own topic just because it's so fascinating and rich.

I mean, eye-opening, which is how imagery and metaphor works in biblical poetry, which is similar to most poetry is image-driven language, but at least as we'll see the biblical imagination pun intended of the imagination.

How's that a pun?

Well, sorry, it's a nerd pun.

We're talking about imagery, the biblical imagination.

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