Session 2 - Module 1 - The Biblical Authors' Toolkit - Reading the Bible as Meditation Literature

Okay, in this session, this is going to be kind of like an art theory class. Pretend you're in university and you're doing a history of art class and you're talking about fundamental theoretical principles about how to understand a culture's art, something like that. So this is a set of cross-disciplinary ideas in the field of history of literature, linguistics, a bit of neuroscience thrown in. But really it's just three actually simple ideas that are ways that I've begun to put language to a paradigm shift I've undergone over the years about learning to recover a poetic's biblical literature. So, first key concept, I'll just say the nerdy phrase and then I'll talk normal English after that, is about aspectival representation versus perspectival representation. So, representation, we're talking about whether you're looking at visual art, film, photography, literature. Any work of art is coming from an artist who's had a life. They have experiences, things they've seen, heard and done. And anything that they make is a re-presentation of all the things they've experienced and done but now it's filtered through them. You're representing. Every conversation you have is you're representing something that you're thinking in your mind out there. But different people and different cultures develop habits of how they represent. And a great way to illustrate the difference between perspectival and aspectival is to look at two paintings by the same artist, Pablo Picasso. Maybe you've heard of him. Two paintings of the same subject from two different periods of his life and of his work. And if you were to just quick look at them, maybe at first you wouldn't even recognize that they are a representation of the same subject, that is, a woman with her arms raised up. But it is.

The painting on the left is what you would call a more perspectival representation. If I were in a room with a woman with her hands raised over her head, the painting on the left is actually probably quite similar to what my actual eyeballs would perceive. Now, I would perceive a three-dimensional person in an actual room. So in that sense, it's a representation on two-dimensional. But it's fairly realistic in terms of proportion, in terms of lighting, shadow, face shape. So the painting on the right, however, is a very different kind of representation. So if you look at what he's done, for example, he's painted the two eyes as if from an abstracted shape of what you would see looking at the front of the face, like looking at the front. But then notice the profile of the head is what you would see abstractly represented from looking at it from the side. So a lot of what makes this painting jarring is because he's taken what you would see separately from the front, from the side, from under, from the top, and then abstracted into their theoretical shapes. So instead of these fingers, you get these almost half-oval shapes or something. So which one is a more true representation of whatever actual woman was there with her hands raised? The one on the left. Well, the one on the left is more similar to what my eyeballs would perceive. So in that sense, it's true to what my eyeballs would perceive. But what does it mean to say that a painting is a true representation in the first place? And this is where it turns into a philosophy class. Right? It's just different. Different ways of representing the same subject. And there might be features that... So this would be an aspectival. What you take is an aspect of the front, an aspect of the side, an aspect of this. And then you just juxtapose them together. And the representation on the right forces the viewer to actually do more work. Do you find that the painting... on the right, you have to engage it more mentally, you have to work at it, almost to get coherence out of it, whereas the painting on the left feels easier mentally. I think many people

encounter the Bible like the painting on the right. Sometimes it's very simple, especially narrative books and you're flowing, but not all biblical narratives, you know, you have these moments and you're like, God commissions Moses at the burning bush, and you're like, you can see the Prince of Egypt movie in your mind, but then there's this little three-sentence story that the Prince of Egypt movie left out, which is right after Moses leaves Mount Sinai to go to Egypt, and the Lord sought to kill Moses in the middle of the night, and then Zipporah circumcises her son and then takes a bloody foreskin and touches Moses and then God says, I won't kill him now, and you're just like, what, what, what? And then that's just put next to a story, and then he goes and sees Aaron and they're happy and then they go to Pharaoh, and you're just like, what does that have to do with this? It feels like, so biblical literature doesn't conform to modern conventions of storytelling, of ways that we think of how a story coheres. We have expectations about how to represent a series of events that just the biblical authors don't share the same conventions. Some of them they do. There's some universals in narrative, but there's also some uniquenesses that force the reader to work a little harder. And so, let me just show you one more example and then I'll hear what you're thinking. There is an Egyptologist named Emma Bruner Trout who devoted a big part of her career to really trying to understand the history of Egyptian art. And, you know, think of, you know, famous depictions of Egyptian painting. It's actually very similar to the later Pablo Picasso, where you'll see the front of faces, but then the body is always at the side, and so on. So, she noted, linked with an archaeological find, something really interesting, that a consistent motif in certain areas of Egyptian art is of this particular kind of bowl, like a segmented bowl, depicted here on the left. And so you can see there's a bowl shape, but then there's this like, you know, cross divider here with like, you know, maybe dates and some nuts or berries or something like that. And so, what we might do is, if we were to reconstruct what we think the actual bowl was based on this depiction, we might think, well, here's its basic proportions, looking at it from the side, and this must be, since this is a vertical rise on the two-dimensional plane, it must be an elevated separator, something like number four. And so, let's just notice, when I look at number one, what my brain reconstructs as probably existed was something like number four. But what is interesting is that these bowls actually have

been found by Egyptian archaeologists, and they have this shape of number two, right here. And then, if you imagine them filled, it would look like number three, right here. And the language she uses to describe this difference is super interesting. She says, the method of observation used for Western art cannot be adopted at all for the study of Egyptian art. We cannot understand Egyptian art from the outside. We must instead approach it through its own laws of thought. Artistic representation in ancient Egypt is characterized by the sequential juxtaposition of relatively independent parts or aspects that have to be mentally added together to create the whole. So, we're used to art and literature that does a lot of the work for you to create the whole. And what this example is showing is that in ancient Egyptian art, look at it from the side, look at it from the top, and you just put those two together on one two-dimensional plane. And the viewer has to do the work, one could say, ha-ga, for how those two parts relate to each other. The way she puts it down here is, in aspect, there is a basic... principle of order. Aspect always contains the idea that it is one among others. In other words, when you're looking at, think of Picasso's painting, when you're looking at the face from the front, you notice certain things from that angle that you will only ever see from that angle. So bring out that aspect, but then look at it from the side and you'll notice other things that you wouldn't have seen. And so represent the eyes from that angle. And then you lay them on top of each other and we think that looks incoherent. But actually, it's two separate aspects overlaid on top of each other. And you have to do the mental work in your mind of going, put out the eyes, look at the face. Put out the profile, look at the eyes. And it's just a different way of imagining how to represent something. And so she says, no particular aspect lays claim to completeness. No one way of looking at it gives you the whole. Indeed, how the individual aspects are unified into an overarching whole, or whether they can be unified at all, remains open. So, this has been a helpful category for me for why biblical texts,

I feel like I'm tracking, and then all of a sudden I'm like, what? I'm encountering another culture's way of representing something. And if I can learn to be more empathetic to another way of seeing the world, it's possible that my perspectival bias is actually blocking me from being able to even notice things. That if I were to be able to learn how to hold two things that seem opposite together and let the tension generated be the thing that teaches me, there's something here. So, let me pause right here. There's two more helpful thoughts, but this is the first one. So, tell me what you're thinking and or feeling. If I'm understanding you correctly, within the process of intellection, you're saying that as we see the particular, we abstract from it the universal principle, which then we see the universal principle from the particular, and as readers, what we're doing is we have this abstract principle, and we have a particular in front of us, and we're going the opposite direction of the typical engagement of my matter engages other matter, and then I abstract from it a concept, and then from that concept, I see something greater. And so, the process for the reader is that they have the universal in their mind, and then they're trying to engage the particular. So, with your example of like the basket of fruit, I have this universal in my mind, which is these multifaceted perspectives of what this looks like, but now I have to go through the reverse process of now seeing that particular basket of fruit. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. I think I understand what you're saying, and I think what I'm saying is a little bit different. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. No, no, no. That was a great chance to clarify.

Yeah. What occurs in my mind that I abstract from representations of reality that I see might feel like obvious and natural to me, but it's also a reality that the language I speak, the culture that I've been shaped, and the family that I was raised, the subcultures I'm a part of, are all actually very particular ways of seeing reality and teaching me how to represent reality. And so when I come across another culture's abstraction of how to represent a dish, I look at it and I think, well, if it has a vertical rise, if it looks like this, I picture number four. But actually, that's not what these artists had in mind. They abstracted differently than I do. So what I have is particular pictures of Egyptian art. What I have is a particular set of ancient Israelite texts. And when I go in my mind to create coherence and meaning, I'm doing so usually based on assumptions about coherence and meaning that I've learned growing up on the west, upper, northwest coast of America in the 21st century. So it's more that different cultures have different ways of representing their encounters with reality. And if I can learn another culture's way, I just stand to be enriched. Like maybe my way of viewing reality is just impoverished. And this is why world travel and having a rich community of diverse friends in your life is such a wonderful part of the human experience, because it's about expanding your humanness. Or as C.S. Lewis said, to see the world through many eyes that aren't just my own. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. This one's the most theoretical. The next two are a little more practical. Shall we? The next one, it's hard to know what to call it. Parallelism, binarity, parataxis. Binarity means a habit of representing things in opposed pairs, or different pairs. Parataxis is actually very similar to aspectival, which is a way of setting two things in front of each other

without making specific the relationship between them. So, I think, therefore, I am. Right? Famous philosophical slogan. But if I were to just say, I think, I am. Without the word therefore, you're just like, okay, you think and you are. But taking out the word therefore is forcing the listener to say, what's the relationship between your thinking and your being? So, putting that therefore in there is called syntaxis. It's where we get the word syntax of a sentence. It's how to tie together groups of ideas. Parataxis is just setting, here's one idea, here's another idea. You work it out. So, biblical literature has a habit of presenting itself in a more paratactic, binary way where things that are parallel to each other are just set in front of you and you do the work of meditating on the relationship. It's easiest to spot in Hebrew poetry. So, just here's some examples. Psalm 33, 6. So, if I'm paying attention to the what, this is a poetic line representing creation. If I pay attention to the how, what I notice is that the word of Yahweh is present, focused, right, in the first line and the breath of his mouth is the focus of the second line. The verb made isn't even present in the second line, but it's assumed, isn't it? By the word of Yahweh the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts were made. But they've been shaped in parallelism to each other so tightly that you can just straight up leave out the verb

and you infer it to the second line. Notice then what does the parallelism, it forces your mind to start to connect things. So, what is it that was made? So, the heavens and all of their hosts. The whole and then one particular part within that whole. So, like a part and whole relationship. The word of Yahweh, the breath of his mouth. That's cool. So, you're imagining when we speak, like breath comes out. So, why didn't the poet just say, God made everything by his word? Well, I guess you could say that, and that's an interesting thing to say. But how this presents the same exact idea, it's right representing, but by doing it through this kind of how, it has an effect, a specific kind of effect. How would you describe the effect that this particular how has on you as you haggah upon it? Just even the power of the details. Like how, like you said, if you say God or Yahweh did this, you focus on just the action. But by highlighting the word and the breath, it's like, oh, oh. Yes. Yes, so. Name the oh.

Can you put words to the oh? The word for me. It speaks of an intent and a breath feels of something less tangible. But yet both are potent because they both come from Yahweh. Okay, so if I could take a Polaroid of that moment. So what you just did was you looked at these two phrases, word of Yahweh, breath of His mouth, and then it sent your mind somewhere to say something really beautiful, like you just said, right, this beautiful meditation on God's intent. And then this potency that comes from God. So I think you're right. But how you got there was by pausing for a moment, not just moving on, but pausing and letting the parallel, the two aspects, these two ways of representing creation, and then holding just that, because the poet clearly wants you to see these two things in a relationship. And how are they in a relationship? He doesn't say therefore. And it sent your mind to this really profound reflection on that creation is an expression of God's intent, but there's also this personal element of involvement, and then empowerment and potential. So this is Haggad, you just Haggad. But notice we're letting the design of it guide our imaginations on what to focus on. Because it might be you read this and you think about last night, you were stargazing, and then the Holy Spirit can make a connection there, and that is so cool. I don't think that's what the poet had in mind. Recovering a poetics of biblical literature is saying, what did the author do?

And what are they trying to do to me by crafting the lines this particular way? Do another one? Yeah, Isaiah 44, 3. For I will pour out water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground. I will pour out my spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants. I'll do one more, I'll comment to draw attention. But you can see it, can't you? And I'm using colors and kind of font treatments to draw attention to the relationship. So four lines, poetry. The first two are in a group, second two are in a group. We have this little picture of someone pouring out a pitcher of water onto dry ground. First, it's pouring out water, but then second, pouring out a stream. And you're like, okay, pouring out a pitcher, but a stream like comes up out of a fountain. So pouring out comes from above, streams come from below. That's interesting, like above and below. Thirsty land, dry ground. So dry is describing absence of water. Thirsty is like... Desiring. It needs it, yeah, needs it. So, okay, so that's that. But then, what's this? I will pour out my spirit. So now we have an analogy or a comparison put together. God wants to pour out his personal life-giving presence and energy on your offspring, and that is likened to pouring out water on the dry ground. Streams from the dry ground, blessing.

Do you see all these relationships that are set up? Water and spirit, stream and blessing, thirsty and dry. It sends your mind to places of pondering the relationships, and there's no little words in here, therefore, or like, or similar to. It's just four aspects, you could say, put in front of you. Now you do the work of pondering those relationships. Now I'm showing you biblical poetry, which is really known for this type of binary parallels set up really nicely. But biblical authors often... Here, this is not just two, this is a set of four lines. And so we're going to look at two poems, Psalm 1 and 2, as we go on from here. But biblical narratives are actually written in the same style of poetics, that is craftsmanship, of put into sentences and lines that are parallel in relationships in really interesting ways. But it's easier to see... poetry. So it's a better place to start. This is most typically called parallelism. If you've ever took a class at church or somewhere about how to read biblical poetry, you've probably learned or noticed yourself about this parallel feature. But it's really important because it is teaching you about how to think about the relationships between things but to do the work on your own. I'll end the second thought with a line from a really great J.P. Fockelman, who's a scholar who's worked a lot on the poetics of biblical poetry. He says, the parallel lines of biblical poetry are like a pair of eyes. We look with both eyes so that we have the advantage of seeing depth. Our eyes see in stereo, so to The effect results from the fact that one eye has a slightly different angle than the other eye. If you've ever done that, this thing, when it's far away, you can't really see the difference, but you do your hand, and your hand's moving. You know this? As a kid, I did this a lot. Eyes produce a slightly different angle from the other, so producing a minimally different image. But the two pictures are easily superimposed and assembled into one image in our brains. Biblical parallelism does something comparable. This poetic device creates two subtly different images, the word of Yahweh, the breath of His mouth. Two images

with two lines that are to be associated through parallel expression. It allows us an opportunity to consider them separately, then to let them sink in together. And so the point of similarity between the two parallel lines is their very difference, right? It was the similarity that made you notice the relationship, but breath is a different thing than word, so it's similar and different. Only those who look closely and have patience, and I'll add, and haggah, will discover and savor the role played by the dissimilarity, its surprises and its richness of meaning. So that's the second aspect here, is learning to think in terms of parallelism and juxtaposition, where you do the work of joining together similar and different things. That's the second piece. There's one more that follows closely on this one. Can I just throw it out there? Okay. This last piece would be most simply called symmetrical design. I want to go back up to these examples here. Did you notice that in this Isaiah example, there was something you would call technically a symmetry, which means a patterned nature to the similarity and the difference. So that symmetry is signaled by the repetition of the same verb, I will pour out. It's repeated two times. So I will pour out water and streams. I will pour out my spirit and blessing. Can you feel the pattern? So think of how music looks like. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. That's symmetry. So I'm going through a pattern based on with four, as like the foundation form. And then by grouping things in fours, you begin to notice the relationship. And then if I repeat this, it's like break the pattern. And so this is how our brains work in perception is that we're constantly like engaging reality by looking for relationships between things and noticing patterns and differences. And so what in literature or music you can do is set up a pattern and then tweak the pattern. So the similarity sets up a pattern in your mind that makes you expect that there's a relationship between water and spirit. Just the repetition does it. But then the difference between water and spirit forces you to go hugga and go take a walk and think about how is God's spirit like water and how is water like God's spirit. But it's the symmetry. In other words, the pairing of the words in the design shape is what draws your attention to how things relate. So this is true in literature. It's true really in what we perceive. So I'm showing you a picture from my dining room. So, it's this old, like, empty radio cabinet that doesn't work anymore. But my wife saw it at a secondhand store and she thought it'd be cool to put plants on.

And I agree. It's really cool. My wife is a gardener and a house plant expert. My house looks like a jungle and I love it. She's constantly rearranging plants in shapes and locations in our house. So she made this little presentation right here that I think is so cool. And what is interesting is I'm sure she didn't explicitly say this out loud to herself while she was arranging this. But it's very intentional. Do you notice how there's a balance created? Larger pots on the outside, small thing in the center. elements on the outside, on a book, on a trivet. Notice how the plants with light and dark combinations are on the outside, mainly dark in the middle. Notice how the pots are patterned only on the right and in the middle, whereas there's no pattern on the vase. In other words, just by putting these three things together next to each other, you start to notice symmetry, but also differences. And you will actually notice things you wouldn't have noticed if you only saw the left plant by itself. You might look at it by itself and be like, oh, that's a cool plant. But the moment you put it in this formation, you notice more. And that more was always there. You just didn't have something to compare it to. So this is the function of what symmetry does, putting things in patterned relationships to each other, is to draw your mind to be like, well, look at those two next to each other. I'd never noticed that. And then your mind goes places. So all of these elements, aspectival representation, parallelism, juxtaposition, symmetrical patterning,

this is the fundamental tool set that biblical authors love. Again, we don't have the Ulipo handbook, but what you can see inductively, if you pay attention to the how of biblical texts and narrative and ancient laws and poetry and proverbs, it all works this way. Like these three ideas are at work everywhere. And as I've begun to read more intentionally looking for those tools at work, I am blown away by things that I have never noticed before. It's fairly intuitive and simple. So what I want to do now is take these ideas, they still might feel abstract, that's okay. We're just going to put it to work. We're going to slowly read Psalm 1 and 2 and notice things. And I'll play tour guide, pointing things out along the way. But I'm going to be passing the ball to you guys. When I point something out, what's the relationship? And let's work on it together. And then hopefully by the end of working through it, I'll need to point out less because you will begin to observe what's there in front of you that maybe you've never thought to notice before. Let me just pause now, reflections on these three fundamental ideas, at least for me, for meditation literature. What are you thinking? Robust comes to mind. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Hmm. Robust. Hmm. Say more. I'm challenged to look at things from multiple perspectives.

Dimetry is something that is familiar, but yeah, I can just feel a richness that comes to the approach. The word that comes to my mind is relationship. So the relationship between these different aspects, which ultimately awakens you to the true meaning of the text by using this toolbox that you described to sort of look at it. And the Picasso example was really great because you have a graphical way of looking at it from different perspectives, and it makes it very exciting. Yeah, I think that the Picasso example was the most helpful to me too, because I think sometimes when reading the Bible or in conversations with people, you want it to be like the painting on the left side. Like you want it to be clear, and the Picasso painting on the right feels scary almost. or like confusing or how do you decipher this? But the way you broke it down, like it just made it feel more 3D. Like yeah, like scripture should have so many different aspects. We should be examining it from top and bottom and side to side. That makes it beautiful and robust to your point. It's not scary, but yeah, I think it's a really cool invitation to engage with it like that. It makes it exciting. I think there is an important conviction in Christian communities that have a high value of scripture is that it communicates something and that if we read it together, we can understand what God wants to say to his people. Like that's important. And depending on the Christian tradition that you're in,

phrases like the clarity of scripture can be important. And so there's something important to honor there, but I also wanna honor that I don't want that conviction to bulldoze over how the biblical authors actually did communicate, which clearly is a way of communicating where there's layers of meaning and that you actually kind of have to work to get the deeper layers of meaning, which is not to say it's a secret code, but it is to say it's a kind of literature that forces you to engage it. And this struck me actually somewhere along the journey where I revisited and was doing a project on the parables of Jesus. And it was kind of like a forehead slapping moment. This is how Jesus describes his parables, that they were intentionally designed not to be fully clear, but for those who are interested and open to the kingdom of God already, they will be drawn in. And for those who are already predisposed to think Jesus is crazy or dangerous, then you'll just think it's a stupid short story about a birds and seed and you'll walk away and think that it's like a children's story. Whereas the potential disciple sees a whole universe unfolding of meaning in that parable. So it's another example where just something about Jewish culture, especially from this period,

and that Jesus and the apostles and biblical authors were steeped in, it values wisdom in the journey of becoming wise through being patient. And it shouldn't surprise us that scripture, while clear, also has depths of meaning that are not obvious, that require work, yeah. I have a question on that. Speaking of the patient attention to detail, I wonder if as we spend time with the scripture and understanding the intent of the biblical authors, are new things going to be discovered? So for example, in mathematics, science, even archeology, new discoveries are made. And as we study these things, we're like, okay, this is the rule, this is the formula. And then new discoveries, and we're like, no, we've had to amend that. We've had to change what we thought about this civilization that existed because all this new data has shown up. And so knowing that there is no manuscript that highlighted how Jesus and the apostles approached the scripture, and we're working kind of through deduction and research and haggai-ing, I'm curious, like how much would change if new discoveries show up? Like is this foolproof? Hmm. Such a great, fantastic question. So I'll give one thought and then I want to hear

what other thoughts are. So in the effort of recovery, what the phrase recovering a poetics of biblical literature means is that while there are new things to be discovered, newness is relative to the discoverer. Because it could be that something that I think is a discovery is actually something that was just lost, but that people knew about for a long time. Or it could be that it's new to me, new to my community, or it's maybe there are corners of the Christian tradition that have noticed things that went unnoticed over here, but there are things noticed here that went unnoticed over here. And so in that sense, there's similarity and difference within the body of Christ in the journey. So that Jesus and the apostles gave us a center ground when Jesus said that... The scriptures are about the Messiah who would suffer and be raised in the glory so that repentance and forgiveness of sins could be announced in his name to all nations. So the reason why I'm engaging ancient Jewish literature at all is because I follow Jesus. I think Egyptian literature is cool and I have met people along the way who are really into Egyptian literature, but I have a personal investment in this and I want to learn about these texts because I want to hear in them what Jesus heard in them. So the newness of discovery sometimes happens where a community begins to discern something in a pattern of scripture that hasn't been emphasized before elsewhere in the tradition. And this is a lot of where the development of theology and doctrine happens in history, and that is a whole other class of how that process unfolds. But I think it's good to be open to say, I don't know everything that there is to know, so of course there's going to be a discovery. But whether it's just new to me, or new to my tradition, or new to the history of the Jesus movement, I think that's where the communal nature of biblical Haggah really comes into its

own, where odds are that probably someone else has seen this before. But that doesn't make my discovery of it any less special. It's a great question. Other thoughts on that, or other reflections? I was just thinking how important it is to sort of understand our own paradigm when we come to scripture, and how often that comes up, even what you were saying Nassim, just when we assume it to be something, we need something from it, we want it to be an answer book, or whatever that is. And recognizing what that paradigm is, because there is just such depth, like you've mentioned, just the diamond, that there's so many facets and ways to look at it. And it doesn't make those new reflections wrong or right, it's just a different, another understanding, or another depth, or layer to it. Trying to be aware of what I'm bringing into it already, and intentionally setting that aside, so I could listen better. That's really hard to do, especially without community. Yeah, I mean just to land the plane. So there's an interpersonal element where if you were stargazing last night, and you read Psalm 33 6, and you have this moment, like, I want to hear about that, I will be enriched by hearing about that. And then there will be this moment, you know, where Melissa notices something about the symmetry of the lines, and that is something I've never seen, and then that will enrich me too. I guess what I'm trying to say is, the subjective and objective really are two layers, two distinct, but the experience of a text always is the swirling of them both. And depending on where and when you've encountered the Bible in your own journey, you were perhaps in a tradition that balanced those really great, great for you, that tended towards one or the other of them. And what I found is that this is a reading tool set, and a set of assumptions that have really allowed both to fully be engaged, but specifically recovering the how of the biblical authors is what we're going to do with the rest of our time. Not to cancel the other part, but just to enrich it all the more, and to give it its own voice at the table, as it were. So, there you go. Session one and two, theory is behind us. It will just get reinforced and embodied as we read Psalm 1 and 2, shall we? Okay, all right, let's pause, and we'll dive into Psalm 1 and 2.