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From Literal to Literary

The Essential Reference Book for
Biblical Metaphors

by

James Rowe Adams

 

Available now from Pilgrim Press
a second and expanded edition

All religions are approximately equally inadequate metaphors for the same reality.
—  Rabbi Neil Kominsky

A metaphor is a lightning flash of an intelligence that sees, as Aristotle asserts, connections that can only be sustained by a thought that thereby liberates itself from the immediate. Literalism is the attempt to arrest all of this before it takes hold. Its innermost necessity is the resistance to metaphor.  For with metaphor one enters a world that has the power to unravel the literal mind. — Walter A. Davis

Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrives are reached by the abuse of metaphors.
— Lord Palmerston

Whatever piques our curiosity and holds our interest — useful or not — has cultural or intellectual value. Never sneer at the still, small voice within you that breathes, “So that’s where that came from!” Words are tools to be examined for their provenance and honed to meet expression’s present needs; if meaning-mining loses its attraction, then what’s a metaphor?  And the more we poke around in the language, trying the doors, the more avenues are opened for exploration. . . .  All too often we lurch through our lives, metaphorically wise and etymologically ignorant, using tropes like dopes, seldom lifting the lid of our daily discourse to examine the history within. —  William Safire

 

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From Literal to Literary: The Essential Reference Book for Biblical Metaphors