Imagery and Metaphor

Psalm 18 is a royal song of thanksgiving. Its heading attaches it to the day the LORD delivered David from all his enemies and from Saul, and it appears a second time, with small differences, as 2 Samuel 22. The poem opens with a line found only in the psalm, אֶרְחָמְךָ יְהוָה חִזְקִי erchamkha YHWH chizqi, I love You, O LORD, my strength, using an uncommon verb for love from the root רחם (r-ch-m), the root of compassion. Then comes the anchor verse, and it is less a sentence than a pile of names.

Read it in the Hebrew from the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), word by word. יְהוָה YHWH, the LORD. סַלְעִי sal'i, my crag. וּמְצוּדָתִי umetsudati, and my fortress. וּמְפַלְטִי umefalti, and my deliverer, which is a piel participle of the root פלט (p-l-t), to escape or bring to safety, used here as a noun: the one who gets me out. אֵלִי eli, my God. צוּרִי tsuri, my rock. אֶחֱסֶה־בּוֹ echeseh-bo, I take refuge in Him, a qal imperfect, first person singular, of the root חסה (ch-s-h), the only finite verb in the verse. מָגִנִּי magini, my shield. וְקֶרֶן־יִשְׁעִי veqeren-yish'i, and the horn of my salvation, a construct chain. מִשְׂגַּבִּי misgabbi, my high refuge, from a root meaning to be high or inaccessible.

Two things stand out at once. The first is the suffix. Every title carries the little ending -i, my, or, in the case of horn, is joined to a word that does. This is not a list of things God is in general; it is a list of what God has been to this speaker. The second is the pairing you learned in lesson 1. The verse falls into two halves at its main accent, under בּוֹ, and the halves answer each other: crag, fortress and deliverer in the first; God, rock, shield, horn and high refuge in the second, with the one verb, I take refuge, at the hinge.

Now compare the twin text. In 2 Samuel 22:2-3 the list is longer: after high refuge it adds וּמְנוּסִי umenusi, my place of flight, and מֹשִׁעִי moshi'i, my saviour. And where the psalm has אֵלִי צוּרִי eli tsuri, my God, my rock, the Samuel text reads אֱלֹהֵי צוּרִי elohei tsuri, which taken letter for letter is the God of my rock. The BSB renders both as My God is my rock. That is a reasonable translation, since the construct form can work that way and the parallel invites it, but it is a decision, and only the Hebrew shows you that it was made. Module 8 of this track deals with places where two copies of one text differ; for now, notice that a phone and ten minutes can show you that they do.

The English rock appears twice in Psalm 18:2 because English has one ordinary word where Hebrew had two. סֶלַע sela (H5553) is a crag, a cliff or a rocky height, the kind of place you climb to. צוּר tsur (H6697) is a rock or a mass of rock, and it is the word Israel used as a title for God. Lexicons note that the two overlap a good deal and can stand in parallel, as they do in this verse and in Psalm 31:3, where the BSB again gives rock for sela and fortress for metsudah. You should not build a sermon on a sharp difference between them. But you should know that the poet chose both, and that the English has quietly merged them.

Tsur as a title has a history. The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 is built around it: 'He is the Rock, His work is perfect; all His ways are just.' (Deuteronomy 32:4). Later in the same song, Israel's enemies are said to have a rock of their own, and it is not like Israel's: 'For their rock is not like our Rock, even our enemies concede.' (Deuteronomy 32:31). Hannah takes it up in 1 Samuel 2:2, 'And there is no Rock like our God.' Psalm 18 uses it three times, at 18:2, at 18:31, 'And who is the Rock except our God?', and at 18:46, 'The LORD lives, and blessed be my Rock!' By the time this psalm was sung, Rock was close to a name.

Then there is the landscape. The heading sets the poem in David's years as a fugitive, and 1 Samuel 23-24 tells that story in the vocabulary of the psalm. David stays in the wilderness strongholds, בַּמְּצָדוֹת bammetsadot, a word from the same root as metsudah, fortress (1 Samuel 23:14). He goes down to the rock, הַסֶּלַע hassela, in the wilderness of Maon (23:25), and escapes Saul at a place afterwards called Sela-hammahlekoth (23:28). He lives in the strongholds of En-gedi (23:29). The Judean wilderness is a country of cliffs, ravines and rock shelters above the Dead Sea. To a man hunted through it, a crag was not a symbol. It was where you stayed alive.

The scholars disagree about how much of the psalm comes from David, and the Old Testament Survey lesson on the Psalms sets out what the heading le-David can and cannot mean. That question does not need to be settled here. Even a reader who takes the heading as a later editor's guidance has to reckon with the fact that the editor chose to frame the poem in this landscape, and that the images fit it closely. The heading tells you where to stand to hear the metaphors.

The other images have homes too. The shield, מָגֵן magen, is the small round shield an individual soldier carried, and it is God's word for himself to Abram in Genesis 15:1, 'I am your shield.' The horn is the horn of a wild ox, its weapon and its pride (Deuteronomy 33:17). To lift a person's horn is to restore his strength and standing, which is why Hannah sings that her horn is exalted (1 Samuel 2:1) and why Zechariah, centuries later, calls the coming son of David 'a horn of salvation' (Luke 1:69). The Swiss scholar Othmar Keel spent much of a career setting such images beside the pictures that survive from the ancient Near East, in The Symbolism of the Biblical World (German 1972, English 1978), and his work is a reminder that these were visual words for people who had seen the things they named.

A metaphor speaks of one thing in terms of another. The literary critic I. A. Richards, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), gave us two useful names for its parts: the tenor, the thing actually being talked about, and the vehicle, the picture used to talk about it. In the LORD is my rock, the tenor is God and the vehicle is a rock. What the two share, the reason the picture fits, is often called the ground. Most misreading of biblical metaphor is a mistake about the ground.

Richards and those who followed him, notably the philosopher Max Black in Models and Metaphors (1962), argued that a good metaphor is not a decorated way of saying something that could be said plainly. It works by interaction: the vehicle brings a whole set of associations with it, and the hearer sorts through them, keeping those that fit the tenor and setting aside those that do not. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By (1980), went further and argued that metaphor is not mainly a matter of words at all but of how human beings think, so that whole areas of thought are organised by pictures we hardly notice. For the Psalms specifically, William P. Brown's Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor (2002) applies this kind of approach and argues that the images are where the Psalter's theology actually lives.

So how do you find the ground of rock in Psalm 18:2? Not from your own associations first. To a modern city reader, a rock may suggest something hard, cold or immovable. The psalm itself tells you what it means. The verb in the middle of the verse is I take refuge in Him. The danger the poem goes on to describe is drowning: cords, torrents, deep waters (18:4, 18:16). And the rescue ends with the speaker set on high places (18:33). The ground of the image is height and firmness as a place of safety from what is pursuing or engulfing you. That is a reading drawn from the text, and you can show your work.

Notice also that the poet does not choose one picture. After the divine name he piles eight titles together, and some of them do not fit with each other at all: a crag, a building, a person who rescues, a piece of armour and an animal's horn. That is normal in Hebrew poetry and it is part of how the poetry teaches. No one picture is allowed to become the whole truth about God, because each is immediately joined by another that corrects its limits. The fortress is not alive, so a deliverer is added. The rock does not move, so a shield is added, which goes with you into battle. The pile is the point.

The first error is flattening. A reader who turns every image into an abstract quality, so that God is my rock becomes simply God is reliable, has kept something true and thrown away most of what the poet made. The image carries feeling, place and memory that the abstract word does not, which is why people under pressure pray Psalm 18 and not a list of attributes. Translators face this temptation too. The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, often rendered tsur as a title for God without the picture: in Deuteronomy 32:4 it reads God where the Hebrew has the Rock, and in Psalm 18:2 it gives my helper for my rock. Scholars have offered reasons for the habit, and it was not carelessness. The result is that a Greek reader lost the image. When you teach, give your hearers the picture before you give them the principle.

The second error is over-extension: pressing a metaphor past its ground. The inquiry's example is real. Rocks feel nothing, so, the argument runs, God feels nothing. Whatever position one takes on the classical doctrine that God is not subject to passions, and that doctrine has serious defenders who argue it from many texts, this verse cannot carry it, because the same psalm pictures God burning with anger (18:7) and rescuing the speaker because He delighted in me (18:19). The poet who chose the rock chose those lines too. An image means what its context uses it for, not everything that is true of the object.

The third error is allegorising every detail: deciding that the crag stands for one doctrine, the fortress for another, the shield for faith because Ephesians 6 mentions one, and the horn for the cross. Each step may sound devout, and some of the later connections may even be true elsewhere in scripture. But they are not what Psalm 18:2 is doing, and a congregation taught to read this way learns that the Bible's pictures are a code that only the preacher can break. The safer rule is the one you used in the last section: find the ground in the text and its world, and stop there unless another text gives you a reason to go further.

None of this makes the images thin. Read rightly, Psalm 18:2 says more, not less, than an abstract statement. It says that the God of Israel had been, for one hunted man, the high place the enemy could not reach, the wall around him, the person who got him out, the shield in his hand, the strength that put him back on his feet. And it says this in the first person, so that whoever prays it is invited to say the same.

Everyone agrees that God is my rock is a metaphor. The live question, and it is genuinely live among theologians, is whether some language about God is not metaphor at all, and if so which. The answer shapes how a preacher handles the images, so you should know the main positions as their own defenders state them.

The classical position is set out by Thomas Aquinas in the first part of the Summa Theologiae, question 13. Aquinas distinguished words said of God metaphorically, such as rock or lion, which apply to God only by a likeness drawn from creatures and can also be denied of him, from words said of God properly, such as good, wise and living, which belong first to God and only secondarily to creatures, though we speak them in a human way and by analogy. On this view the metaphors of the Psalms are true and given by God, and they rest on literal or analogical truths about God that they do not replace. Much Catholic, Reformed and evangelical theology stands broadly here, and it argues that without some non-metaphorical speech, such as there is one God, we could not tell a fitting metaphor from an unfitting one.

A second position holds that all human speech about God is metaphorical through and through. Its best-known recent form is Sallie McFague's Metaphorical Theology (1982), which argued that every theological statement is a model, a metaphor that has been extended and stabilised, and that forgetting this turns metaphors into idols. McFague went on to argue that some dominant biblical models, such as king and father, should be supplemented or set aside in favour of others. Many who share her starting point do not follow her to that conclusion. What the position at its strongest insists on is real: the Bible itself piles images and never lets one stand alone, which suggests that no single picture captures God.

A third position stands between them. Janet Martin Soskice, in Metaphor and Religious Language (1985), argued that a metaphor can be genuinely reality-depicting: it can refer truly to God and tell us something real about him without claiming to tell us everything, much as a scientist's model of an atom refers truly without being a photograph. Soskice holds, against the second position, that metaphorical speech is not a lesser kind of truth, and, in a different emphasis from the first, that we do not need to translate every metaphor into literal terms to know it is true.

For Psalm 18:2 all three positions agree on the reading you have done: the rock is a picture of refuge, given in a particular landscape, joined to other pictures that correct its limits. They disagree about what lies underneath. The first says a rock image rests on a literal truth about God's faithfulness; the second says faithfulness is itself a further model; the third says the rock image already tells the truth about God without needing to be reduced. A preacher can teach the psalm faithfully from any of them. What he should not do is speak as though the question did not exist.

Take the practice poem you set out in lines last week, or your capstone passage if it is a poem. On a new notebook page headed Images, list every picture the poem uses, for God, for the speaker, for enemies, for danger and for rescue. Give each its verse.

For the two or three images that matter most, open the interlinear and tap the Hebrew word. Write down the Hebrew word in your best letters, its transliteration and its Strong's number. Check whether the English uses one word for two different Hebrew words, as rock does in Psalm 18:2, or two English words for one Hebrew word. Then use the concordance in the tool to read the word in three or four other places, and note what kind of object or place it names in ordinary use.

Next to each of those images, write three short lines. Tenor: what is actually being talked about. Vehicle: the picture. Ground: what the two share, with the verse in your poem that tells you so. If you cannot find the ground in the text, write that down rather than inventing one.

Last, write one sentence on each of the three errors from section 4, saying where a careless reader of your poem might flatten an image, over-extend one, or allegorise one. Keep the Images page with your Lines page. Together they are the first two parts of the poetry section of your capstone study.