393 - The Language and Imagery of the Bible

The Language and Imagery of the Bible
By G. B. Caird
Philadelphia, Westminster, 1980. 280 pp. $20.00.

Books of great importance are rare, despite the puffery of dust jackets and of party politics among scholars, but this is surely one of those books. It can be read and reread, with continuing profit, and indeed it requires such careful attention if its full benefits are to accrue. In other cases, which are perhaps best left unidentified, rereading may be necessitated by the opaque style of the writer, but not so here, where Caird expresses himself with great clarity, and at appropriate points with wit as well. But the subject he treats, communication through language, is in itself profound. It has a long history of valuable study, and in our time it has been profoundly and constructively analyzed by specialists from many different disciplines. Caird, Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford, has put at the reader's disposal a prodigious and well-organized mastery of the best of such study, both past and present. Explaining how verbal messages are formed, what they "say" in writing, and how they are to be understood, he has provided invaluable guidance for our study and understanding of the Bible.

When education consisted principally in the reading and interpretation of literary texts, such a survey as Caird's would still have been useful, but among those of us who are the products of today's cafeteria-style education, it is imperatively needed if we are to read the biblical writings with a full awareness. Drawing upon the best assured results of modern linguistic and communications scholarship, and upon the still valid methods of rhetorical and exegetical study, Caird provides a new synthesis for hermeneutics which will allow us to avoid the perils of any of the currently fashionable narrownesses.

Beginning with the uses and abuses of language, he goes on to discuss the nature and structure of meaning, the relations between Hebrew idiom and biblical thought, and the problems of translation, discussions which form the opening or "general" section of the book. The central section is entitled "metaphor," under which he treats literal and non-literal meanings (and valid distinctions between them), comparative language in metaphors, similes, and anthropomorphisms, concluding with a treatment of linguistic awareness. This section forms perhaps the finest treatment of these subjects that I know anywhere. Finally, he devotes a section to language in relation to history, to myth, and to eschatology. Here it is especially gratifying to find a full recognition of the complexity and even slipperiness of "myth" as an exegetical tool,

394 - The Language and Imagery of the Bible

and I doubt that the term can be given a firmer and more effective treatment than he gives it.

Throughout, Caird provides valuable distinctions. These are not of the scholastic or chop-logic variety, or for spinning out the web of critical ingenuity. On the contrary, they are what may be called enabling, distinctions which enable students to realize most fully their opportunities to understand the biblical literature. He has structured his analyses on the way language, story, and message actually work, and he makes no effort to lead us down the garden path to a pre-arranged rendezvous with some hidden theological agenda.

In a world congress of biblical students held at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1969 under the title "Festival on the Gospels: Jesus and Man's Hope," I was invited to contribute a paper on desiderata in biblical criticism as seen from the perspective of a literary scholar who works primarily in non-biblical fields. At that time I indicated the need for applying to the Scriptures the most useful techniques which have been developed for the exegesis of other literary works, techniques which have too often been ignored by biblical specialists. In the dozen years since that time, several valuable books and articles have appeared which address that need. Of these, Caird's is the finest. I wish I had written it, but it is better that Caird did it, for I doubt that anyone else could do it so well.

Roland Mushat Frye
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania