Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1271 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Mastering the Bible - Written By Literary Artist - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1271 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God and His Word.  Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better.  When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.
Mastering The Bible – Written By Literary Artist

Insight Nineteen: The Biblical Writers Were Literary Artist
Most of us can remember taking a course in high school or college about English literature. For Dr. Heiser, his experience was the course where he was first introduced to techniques used by writers beyond straightforward prose sentences. To be blunt, there are reasons why Shakespeare doesn’t sound like the newspaper. Fine literature like Shakespeare, and the Bible, is what it is because of deliberate techniques and strategies used by the writer.

The biblical writers use an amazing array of literary techniques. Some are familiar to us, like similes and metaphors, which are techniques that draw comparisons. Others, such as alliteration, are lost in translation. Alliteration is the intentional repetition of the same initial sound of nearby words. Familiar examples include “dead as a doornail” and “pretty as a picture.” The biblical writers use alliteration many times, but they do so in Hebrew and Greek.

Most literary techniques in the Bible, however, are easily discerned if one knows what to look for. The verse in 2 Chronicles 1:15 is illustrative of this. “The king made silver and gold as plentiful in Jerusalem as stone. And valuable cedar timber was as common as the sycamore-fig trees that grow in the foothills of Judah.” This verse is a clear use of hyperbole, a deliberate exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Biblical writers frequently employ merism, a combining of opposite parts, to signify a totality. The phrase “heaven and earth” (Exodus 31:17; Matthew. 5:18), which signifies all of creation, is a well-known example. At times, biblical poetry is organized by an acrostic, a succession of lines that begin with consecutive letters of the alphabet. Psalm 119 is a huge acrostic. The first eight lines begin with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the second series of eight begin with the second letter, and so on through the entirety of the Hebrew alphabet. Psalm 119 wasn’t downloaded into the head of the writer; it took deliberate planning and creativity.

Two of the most common literary techniques are associated with prophetic messaging. Both Old and New Testament writers use symbols known broadly in the ancient world. The book of Daniel describes four beasts coming up out of the sea (Daniel. 7:1-8). The beasts symbolize earthly empires. This technique is known from other ancient books outside the Bible that ...