We've been talking about metaphors and symbolism in Biblical poetry.

Metaphors are a way to talk about something, something that's usually profound or hard

to explain, by comparing it to something else more tangible, mapping the elements of

one idea onto another.

Metaphors are powerful. They allow you to begin to understand things that are ultimately

beyond our understanding, or as T.S. Eliot put it.

Poetry is the kind of language that performs raids on the inarticulate.

The Bible uses metaphors, and some of them are hard for us to appreciate because they're

metaphors that we don't commonly use in the modern Western world. But it's important

for us to understand them. Because we want to think about the world the way the Bible

thinks about the world. We want to learn how to adopt the Biblical visual imagination.

In the last episode we talked about how the Biblical metaphor for the human ideal is

a mountain, dry land, high above everything else. And not just any mountain, but a mountain

garden. It's eaten, formed on the ground that even merged out of the chaotic waters.

It's the temple high on the hill. Today we're going to look at a companion metaphor.

We're going to turn our attention to the chaotic waters that God separated in order for

the dry land to emerge.

The uncreated state that's uninhabitable for humans, chaotic water he will witness. It's

an obstacle to the emergence of human life.

Throughout the Bible, chaotic waters is a metaphor for danger and death. And this makes sense.

Humans, we live on land. The sea is dangerous. It's full of dangerous creatures. It's

unruly. It's powerful. It can destroy you. And so for the ancient thinker, a common metaphor

...