Caird - The Language and Imagery of the Bible

Caird, G.B. - The Language and Imagery of the Bible

Our concern is with the Bible. What are the exact melodies, harmony and counterpoint of its haunting music? To what battles do its trumpet fanfares summon us? It has been the common conviction of all Christians that their life must be lived under the authority of the word of God, and that this word is spoken in Scripture; but how may the ordinary reader be sure that he is allowing Scripture to speak to him with its own authentic and authoritative voice? The essence of Protestantism has been that the word of God is not bound, and that, above all the choirs of ecclesiastical dogma, tradition or fashion, without benefit of clergy, Scripture is capable of making itself heard ‘with most miraculous organ’. ‘All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.’1 But since it has become evident that for four and a half centuries the denominations of divided Christendom have all appealed to the authority of Scripture in support of their divergent doctrines and practices, we cannot evade the question whether we have correctly understood ‘the ordinary means’ and correctly discriminated between passages which are clear and those which are opaque.

In an obvious and superficial sense this is a question about translation. The student of the Scriptures can never for long be allowed to forget that the Old Testament is written in Hebrew (and Aramaic) and the New Testament in Greek; and in this book, written for those who read the Bible in English, we shall be unable to avoid some reference to those inexorable facts. But a translator of the Bible, or indeed of any other ancient text, cannot succeed in his task merely by a transference from one language to another; he must also undertake the transfer from the thought forms and presuppositions of the ancient world, from all its mental furnishings, to those of the present day. In this larger task of translation he runs the double risk either of modernising or of archaising: to modernise is to ignore the culture gap of many centuries and to read the Bible as though it were contemporary literature; and to archaise is to exaggerate the culture gap and to ignore the similarities between the biblical world and our own. Yet not even in this wider sense is translation our primary business. We shall be addressing ourselves not to the languages of the Bible, but to its language; not to the fact that it stands written in ancient and foreign tongues, the speech of ancient and alien cultures, but to the more fundamental fact that it is written in words.

In many of its branches the science of language is a long established discipline. Etymology, morphology, grammar, syntax and rhetoric have engaged the minds of scholars at least since Plato and Aristotle, and lexicography is almost as old. But it is only in the last hundred years that the new branch of semantics has developed, which is concerned with meaning; and it is only in the last twenty years that theologians have begun to take any notice of it.2 This book might well be described as a text book of elementary semantics with illustrations from the Old and New Testaments.