Page 22 - Through New Eyes

14 THROUGH NEW EYES

Before the modern era, and before Gutenberg, there were
few books. The few men who wrote books wrote them very care-
fully. As a result, ancient writings, including the Bible, are very
tightly and precisely written. Every word has its place.
This fact is generally ignored by “liberal” scholarship, which
usually assumes that any part of the Bible is a sloppy conflation
of several sources. This viewpoint grew up to explain apparent
contradictions and paradoxes in the text, * A proper reading of
any ancient text, including the Bible, would take the apparent
contradictions as stimuli for deeper reflection. For example, in
1 Samuel 14:18, the High Priest’s ephod is called the Ark of the
Covenant. According to 1 Samuel 7:2, however, the Ark could
not have been present on this occasion. Liberal commentators
assume that we have here two sources, and whoever put 1 Sam-
uel together was so stupid that he did not even bother to make
his book internally consistent. Other commentators (conserva-
tives) explain the “error” in 14:18 by saying that there has been a
textual corruption in transmission, and “Ark” should be changed
to “ephod.” Deeper reflection, however, shows that the Ark and
ephod correspond one to another, and there are important theo-
logical reasons why the ephod is here called the Ark. The Ark
was present with the people in the form of the ephod. g
Ancient and medieval literature abounds in numerical sym-
bolism, large parallel structures, intricate chiastic devices, astral
allusions, sweeping metaphors, topological parallels, and symbol-
ism in general. Modern literature, whether fiction or non-fiction,
is almost always written in a straight line. You don’t have to go
back and forth in such books to unpack allusions or get ‘hidden”
messages. In other words, you don’t have to study such books in a
literary fashion. You just read them and get the message.
Ancient and medieval literature, however, must be studied.
Modern American Christians have trouble understanding
the Bible for other reasons as well. Not only are we unaccus-
tomed to reading ancient literature, we are also unfamiliar with
visual symbolism. The symbols of the Scripture are foreign to us
in a way that they were not foreign to previous generations.
When the Psalms were at the center of the Church’s worship,
Biblical symbolism was much better understood because the
Psalter abounds in it. As Campbell has written, “The key to the