When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain.
What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those meanings you find into each occasion you find that word in a sentence. The breadth of things a word could mean is its ‘semantic domain.’
The absolute novice looks up a biblical word online and decides that it carries all of those meanings with it to each place it occurs. That’s not how languages work, for all the breadth of the domain itself can be informative in understanding how the word functions differently among a set of abstract concepts than it might in your own language.
I’ve mentioned before the idea of symbolic domain. This is my term for the way that Biblical symbols function. A given symbol—bread, trees, sea, etc.—carries with it a set of meanings.
Wine, for example, carries blessing, cursing, and wisdom as its set of meanings. These meanings are found in the Old Testament and arise solely from how wine functions in biblical texts. They’re connected, in fact they arise in the Biblical witness one from the next (cursing arises from blessing, and wisdom from the dialectic between blessing and cursing), but that doesn’t mean that every time we read wine in the Bible we can insert all of the above. I’ve heard plenty of preachers say, ‘wine equals blood,’ but if we’re assuming that the Lord’s Supper has a background in the Old Testament then that isn’t an obvious reading at all.
Wine, unlike some symbols, has its meanings arise in a sequence in dialogue so deciding the appropriate meaning is fairly easy by paying attention to story: wine is initially blessing and joy, the prophets invert that symbol as a curse which is appropriate due to the way alcohol itself is a gift that can become a curse when abused, and the wisdom literature uses wine for wisdom because of the blessing/cursing dynamic. Intriguingly, that means the three meanings line up with the Priest/King/Prophet dynamic across the progression of the OId Testament, though not all symbolic domains are that neat.
In one sense I’m not saying anything particularly clever: symbols carry more than one meaning and they therefore don’t carry all of them equally everywhere they appear. The two additions we can make to that are the following claims: first, those meanings are in some form of dialogue with each other; second, which meaning is carried in a particular passage is driven by attention to story.
By the first claim, I am suggesting that a symbolic domain is not a random selection of meanings that we see arise somewhere, but that we would expect them to be in some form of communication with one another. While the example I gave of wine is much cleaner than even its compatriot bread (life/covenant/friendship), we still expect the domain to make some communicative sense in its entirety. That domain, and the story it tells, is how we read that symbol in the wider world. Understanding its intercommunication is relevant to symbolic reading. It is also particularly relevant to any attempt to read the world. When you eat bread, drink wine, look at a tree, or see the sea, you are engaging in a form of implicit symbolic reading.
By the second claim, I am suggesting that because not all of a domain is necessarily active each time a symbol is used we need a key in the text to determine which meanings a symbol is carrying in any given text we read. While we read story and symbol ‘orthogonally’ we need to allow story to be the controlling factor. Symbols are within texts of the Bible and arise from them, they are not applied to them except from elsewhere in the canon. We expect a text to tell us which meanings within the symbolic domain of a given symbol we should be paying attention to.
That act of reading is not a straightforward activity, but we’re looking for references and allusions to the defining texts for the symbolic domain in question, we’re considering the plain meaning of the text and expecting a symbolic reading to enhance that in dialogue with it, and we’re looking for specific linguistic clues in form and structure.
That itself is not a hermeneutical guide—though for the one hermeneutics nerd reading along I think places me closer to Vanhoozer’s eschatological reading than to Boersma’s sacramental reading despite my repeated use of the term symbol—and the writing of one would a complex endeavour. What I’m trying to do is insist that symbolic reading is good and helpful but cannot operate without a set of guardrails. Those guardrails would include the rule of faith that should guide all hermeneutics, but we expect the other guardrails to rise from attentive reading of the text itself.
I find it helpful to sense check what I think are apparent symbolic readings against these rules.
Photo by Turquo Cabbit on Unsplash
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 