Good day, good evening friends. I am interested in reading the bible (new and old testament) metaphorically. For some reason I am frustrated and feel there is deeper meaning to most things in the bible. I am trying to find a good source on how to read it metaphorically. Can anyone suggest good sources that could be helpful? Also does anyone have experience in reading it this way?
Thanks in advance
Love and peace to you.
I don't know about any sources, but I learned from my religion teacher that one of the metaphors involves the Adam and Eve story. Instead of Adam and Eve being two people, they could be representative of tribes or 2 large, separate types of people. Some of the more obvious metaphors can be found with, say, the Tree of Life and its fruit (life and knowledge).
It's a lot easier to not read the Old Testament literally (well, for me I've been able to do that only for Genesis lol). It's trickier with the New Testament because it's a more recent account and may or may not be historical (the debates confuse me).
There are too many resources to even begin to list. Here's one, though its scope is quite limited:Originally Posted by motherearth
Good day, good evening friends
Thanks in advance
Love and peace to you.
http://www.biblesecrets.org/METAPHOR.htm
If you want to get right into some very deep metaphorical and mystical interpretations of the Bible, look towards a more Jewish vein - in particular, Kabbalah.
motherearth can you please check back here if you find anything interesting?Good day, good evening friends
Thanks in advance
Love and peace to you.
Newadvent.com It contains all sorts of information about the Bible and Christianity in general, including the writings of the Church Fathers like Origen who took the Old Testament metaphorically.
MotherEarth, unless you read the Bible metaphorically, it makes no sense, and is merely a poorly executed historical novel.
Read it metaphorically, however, and it is good.
Ecclesiastes, for example, is outstanding!
And, for Paracelsus, Genesis was the ultimate in Alchemical writing.
Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.
My favorite book of the Bible...
“You have never answered but you did not need to. If I stand at the ocean I can hear you with your thousand voices. Sometimes you shout, hilarious laughter that taunts all questions. Other nights you are silent as death, a mirror in which the stars show themselves. Then I think you want to tell me something, but you never do. Of course I know I have written letters to no-one. But what if I find a trident tomorrow?" ~~Letters to Poseidon, Cees Nooteboom
“We still carry this primal relationship to the Earth within our consciousness, even if we have long forgotten it. It is a primal recognition of the wonder, beauty, and divine nature of the Earth. It is a felt reverence for all that exists. Once we bring this foundational quality into our consciousness, we will be able to respond to our present man-made crisis from a place of balance, in which our actions will be grounded in an attitude of respect for all of life. This is the nature of real sustainability.”
~~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
"We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes--one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way."
~~Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
"Humans are not rational creatures. Now, logic and rationality are very helpful tools, but there’s also a place for embracing our subjectivity and thinking symbolically. Sometimes what our so-called higher thinking can’t or won’t see, our older, more primitive intuition will." John Beckett
Pagan Devotionals, because the wind and the rain is our Bible
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