Introduction to Biblical Symbolism (Pt. 1)
Do you want to understand Revelation? You have to understand this.
I recently gave a seminar at my high school. I am very grateful that the teachers are given the opportunity once a school year to teach on something that is in their wheelhouse of expertise. Since it felt to me to be interesting and eye opening to the students (and, yes, that was confirmed in the students’ comments after the seminar), I’m going to reproduce it as a series here. A couple of necessary comments: 1) I only used sparse notes for the seminar, so I’m going to do my best to write this as a “transcript” of the talk. 2) Most of this content is highly influenced by the work of Theopolis: James Jordan, Peter Leithart, and Alistair Roberts. A more in-depth video series by them can be found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZVU5W7G_m6iEHqj4k-1N7MYajT21CJCs
Introduction
To start with, a little about me. I have been reading the Bible since I was very young. I have a distinct memory of reading Scripture on my own around 9 or 10 (which would have been around 1995). My reading life has been all over the place since then, some here and there, but since about 2010, I’ve been reading and studying the Bible on a near daily basis.
I only bring that up to highlight that it hasn’t been until the past 2 years that I’ve learned how to read Biblical symbolism, and it has completely changed the way I read Scripture. It definitely gave me the “Why has no one told me this before?” feeling. The reality is, they haven’t told me because they don’t know themselves. This type of reading is most certainly how the ancients read the Bible, but after the enlightenment and the rise of scientific thinking, we’ve forgotten.
In this newsletter series, all I will do is lay the groundwork for biblical symbolism. But that’s OK because biblical symbolism is like a snowball. It starts to form in Genesis 1 and then rolls on down the hill of Scripture, each symbol picking up more contextual resonances as it goes along, so you have a boulder by the time you reach Revelation. That does not mean that each instance of a certain symbol being used is meant to contain all those resonances; it could be that it only contains some and that we’re just supposed to look at one side of the snowball.
With this in mind, we’ll walk through Genesis 1 but move to other places in Scripture when necessary.
Symbolic Interpretation
This method of reading Scripture can be called the symbolic, typological, theological, spiritual, or phenomenological method. It’s notoriously hard to pin down a name, as it seems to bust through each of these categories. You don’t really have to know any of that, but what is good to understand is that this reading produces different (and better!) results than a modern, scientific reading.
What do most of us think about when we read Genesis 1 if we’re American? It’s how Genesis 1 fits or not with modern science. We look at the 7 days of creation and the order of when they were created and see if it maps onto the most recent scientific consensus on evolution and the Big Bang. When it does not, we find ourselves backtracking, on the defensive, trying to fit everything together in a compelling way. But a symbolic reading of Genesis 1 is so profound, in just this case, because it shows that these are not quite the types of things that Genesis is speaking to. Simply, a symbolic reading of Genesis 1 tells us what creation means, who created it, why it was created, etc. These are questions that scientists cannot speak to (even though they may try).
So let’s begin with perhaps the most famous verse of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
There is some debate over what Genesis 1:1 is saying. Some believe that it is a heading describing what God is about to do in the rest of the chapter: create the sky/universe and the earth. While it would be fun to spend time on the debate and really trace it out, I’m just going to say that my belief is that Genesis 1:1 is saying that God creates the spiritual heavens—not the physical “heavens” (that is, the sky)—and the earth in the state that we find it in Genesis 1:2, formless and void.
I will only give one piece of evidence for this view—even though we’ll need to look at the deeper symbolism in a bit. Psalm 148:1-4 says, “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; Praise Him in the heights! Praise Him, all His angels; Praise Him, all His hosts! Praise Him, sun and moon; Praise Him, all you stars of light! Praise Him, you heavens of heavens, And you waters above the heavens!”
When the psalmist is telling the heavens to praise the Lord, he speaks to angels, those who exist in the spiritual heavens, those, as he says, in the “heavens of the heavens.” There is a heaven that exists above our sky heaven. The psalmist also speaks to the waters above the heavens, which are the waters in the spiritual heavens that sit above the firmament at the foot of God’s throne (as we’ll see).
The psalmist speaks to the earthly heavens as well—sun, moon, and stars—but these are actually symbols of spiritual realities (as we’ll see). The earthly heavens are not created until Day 2 (1:8), and the sun, moon, and stars on Day 4 (1:14-19). What we have in Genesis 1:1 as heavens is not the physical reality in my view. The physical heavens are, I believe, contained within the creation of “the earth.”
What we can establish here, bare minimum, is that there are two heavens. And I believe that Genesis 1:1 is talking about the creation of the spiritual one, the heavenly dimension where God dwells on his throne.