My understanding of the Bible once rested on a fairly simple assumption: taking it seriously more-or-less meant taking it literally. Well, not everything literally, of course. I knew God wasn’t actually a rock, nobody expected the trees to start clapping their hands, and no one was checking Jesus for hinges when he claimed to be a door.¹⛰ Side Trail: These images are easy to recognize as metaphor because taking them literally would be almost impossible to miss. The Psalms call God “my rock” (Psalm 18:2), Isaiah imagines trees “clapping their hands” (Isaiah 55:12), and Jesus says “I am the door” (John 10:9). None of these images becomes less true because it isn’t literal. In fact, the metaphor is precisely what allows the language to say more. God’s stability becomes something we can picture, creation’s joy something we can hear, and dependence on Jesus something we can almost taste. The metaphor isn’t hiding the meaning. It’s carrying it. Poetry could be poetry, parables could be parables, and Revelation could be whatever in the world Revelation was.²⛰ Side Trail: Poetry and parables made metaphor relatively easy to accept because their genres practically invited it. Nobody worried that Jesus was compromising truth by telling a story about a Samaritan who stopped beside the road (Luke 10:25–37), or that the psalmist believed God literally had feathers when describing refuge beneath God’s wings (Psalm 91:4). Revelation made things even stranger. Dragons, beasts, lampstands, horns, and a lamb with seven eyes made a relentlessly literal reading difficult to sustain (Revelation 1:20; 5:6; 12:3). I already knew, in other words, that Scripture sometimes communicated truth through images and stories. The harder question was how far I was willing to let that insight travel. But when the Bible seemed to be telling me a story about something that happened, the safest and most faithful response was to believe, well… that it happened. Looking back, I don’t think the instinct behind that was foolish. I took the Bible to be trustworthy, and historical factuality seemed like the natural consequence of taking that trust seriously. So when I first encountered the idea of reading Scripture metaphorically, it sounded suspect. Metaphor was fine when the language was obviously figurative (though biblical images of God as a mother could still raise a few eyebrows³⛰ Side Trail: Maternal imagery for God appears more often in Scripture than many Christians realize. God compares himself to a woman who cannot forget her nursing child (Isa. 49:15), comforts Jerusalem “as a mother comforts her child” (Isa. 66:13), and cries out like a woman in labor (Isa. 42:14). Deuteronomy even describes God as the one who “gave you birth” (Deut. 32:18). Jesus similarly compares his desire for Jerusalem to a mother hen gathering chicks beneath her wings (Matt. 23:37). None of this requires calling God biologically female. It shows how biblical metaphor stretches our language for God beyond any single human image.), but reading an entire narrative that way felt different. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was being explained away. It seemed like an all-too-convenient fallback used when taking the story at face value became difficult, a way to soften what the Bible said without admitting you no longer believed it. And to me, that hardly sounded like taking Scripture seriously.

Yet, ironically, it was reading the Bible historically that first began to loosen that suspicion. Because the more I entered the worlds these texts came from, the harder it became to assume I already knew what their stories were trying to do. I’d treated history as the obvious default and metaphor as an alternative explanation when history became difficult. But reading historically taught me that the categories I brought to a story didn’t always reflect the kind of story I was actually reading. Some stories intend to report events, while others use poetry, symbol, or something in between to make their point. And, as it turns out, that distinction matters. If I’m reading a news report or asking which one of my kids broke the lamp, I very much care about whether the story matches what actually happened. But I was beginning to realize that ancient stories aren’t always trying to do that, and that asking whether a story literally happened wasn’t necessarily the same as asking whether it was true. Maybe insisting on the most literal reading wasn’t actually taking the Bible more seriously. Maybe it was actually preventing me from seeing what the story was actually trying to say.

And the first place that realization really began to hit home was, perhaps unsurprisingly, at the very beginning. As I mentioned last time, I’d spent years reading the opening chapters of Genesis with my attention fixed largely on what literally happened: Did God really create everything in six days? Were Adam and Eve really the first two humans? Was there really a garden? A talking serpent? Reading historically, however, already helped me see it less as an answer key to modern questions and more as an ancient story speaking from within an ancient world; wrestling with questions about God, creation, and what it meant to be human.⁴⛰ Side Trail: Genesis 1–3 addresses questions far larger than the mechanics of material origins. Its world is populated by ancient images: waters of chaos, a garden, sacred trees, dust, divine breath, and a serpent. Read alongside other ancient Near Eastern creation traditions, both similarities and striking differences become visible. Genesis presents one sovereign God ordering creation and calling it good (Gen. 1:1–31), humans bearing God’s image (1:26–27), and humanity placed within creation with responsibility for it (2:15). Historical context doesn’t tell us that these chapters mean less. It can help us notice what their ancient authors and audiences may actually have found remarkable about them. And the more clearly I began to hear what those stories were saying in their world, the more I started noticing how strangely familiar they sounded in mine. Here were people who wanted more than they had, hid when they felt ashamed, pointed fingers when things went wrong, and struggled to trust one another. They made choices they regretted, hurt the people closest to them, and discovered how quickly fear and selfishness could turn connection into distance.⁵⛰ Side Trail: Genesis 3–4 moves remarkably quickly through patterns that remain painfully recognizable. Humans grasp what they desire (Gen. 3:6), hide when exposed (3:8), blame one another (3:12–13), experience fractured relationships (3:16), and soon encounter jealousy escalating into violence (4:3–8). The story then widens until violence fills the earth itself (6:11–13). Whatever conclusions we reach about the historicity of these narratives, their portrait of humanity is difficult to confine to an ancient past. Adam means “human” or “humanity,” while adamah means “ground,” an intentional Hebrew wordplay in Genesis 2:7. The story begins ancient, but its mirror can feel remarkably modern. The more I looked, the less distant it seemed. I knew this world. I could see it in families and communities, in the world around me, and, uncomfortably enough, in myself. And that’s when it clicked. Maybe a story didn’t have to be factual in order to be profoundly true. I could approach it not only by looking at it and asking what actually happened, but by looking through it and asking what it allowed me to see.

Once I began learning to look through a story that way, I began noticing how often Scripture itself did the same. And I didn’t have to look much farther to find one of the best examples. Because whatever precise history may or may not lie behind it, there’s no doubt that the Exodus became one of the defining stories through which Israel understood its past.⁶⛰ Side Trail: The Exodus becomes something like Israel’s foundational vocabulary for understanding God. The Ten Commandments begin not with abstract theology but with a story: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt” (Exod. 20:2). Israel is repeatedly told to remember its slavery and liberation (Deut. 5:15; 15:15; 24:18). Even generations who never personally lived in Egypt are invited to speak as participants: “The LORD brought us out of Egypt” (Deut. 6:20–23). The past becomes communal memory. Israel doesn’t merely remember information about an ancient rescue. The community continually locates itself inside that story. Yet, importantly, that story didn’t simply stay in the past. It also became a pattern: bondage and liberation, wilderness and provision, leaving an old world behind and journeying toward something new. Its images and rhythms kept resurfacing in new and surprising ways across Scripture, often in places and circumstances far removed from Egypt itself.⁷⛰ Side Trail: The prophets repeatedly reuse Exodus language for events that occur centuries later. Isaiah imagines Israel’s return from exile as a new journey through the wilderness, complete with a way through the desert and water in barren places (Isa. 40:3–5; 43:16–21). Hosea recalls Israel being called out of Egypt (Hos. 11:1), language Matthew later applies to Jesus (Matt. 2:15). Jeremiah even imagines a future restoration so significant that it will rival the memory of the original Exodus (Jer. 16:14–15). The original story hasn’t disappeared. Instead, its images have become a vocabulary through which entirely new experiences of deliverance can be understood. Metaphor, I realized, wasn’t simply what remained when history disappeared. A story remembered as history could also become more than history, gathering meaning as people came to see new experiences through it. The question, then, wasn’t always whether something was historical or metaphorical. Sometimes history itself gave rise to the metaphor. Israel’s story could become a lens for recognizing liberation, wandering, and new beginnings whenever those same patterns appeared again and again, giving language to experiences foreign to the original story itself.

And once I saw how a story could reach beyond its past, other familiar stories read differently too. Job, for example, became far more interesting when I stopped approaching it mainly with questions about whether there really was a man by that name, whether Satan literally appeared before God, or exactly how all those conversations could have been recorded.⁸⛰ Side Trail: Job itself gives us reasons to pay attention to literary form rather than rushing immediately to historical questions. After a prose introduction (Job 1–2), most of the book unfolds as highly structured poetic dialogue between Job and his friends (Job 3–31), followed by additional speeches and God’s dramatic response from the whirlwind (Job 38–41). The book is clearly doing sophisticated literary and theological work regardless of what historical circumstances may lie behind it. Ezekiel later mentions Job alongside Noah and Daniel as paradigms of righteousness (Ezek. 14:14, 20), while James remembers Job for perseverance (Jas. 5:11). Scripture itself can reuse a figure because of what the story reveals. The story places a good man in a world where everything falls apart, surrounds him with religious friends who are absolutely certain they know why, and then spends chapter after chapter dismantling their tidy explanations.⁹⛰ Side Trail: One of Job’s great ironies is that his friends often say things that sound perfectly religious. Their basic assumption is simple: God rewards righteousness and punishes wickedness, so Job’s suffering must reveal hidden guilt. Eliphaz asks, “Who that was innocent ever perished?” (Job 4:7). Yet readers already know something the friends don’t: Job’s suffering is not punishment for secret wickedness (Job 1:1, 8). At the end, God explicitly rebukes the friends for failing to speak rightly about him (42:7). The book therefore forces readers to sit with a deeply uncomfortable possibility: confident religious explanations can sound orthodox and still misunderstand another person’s suffering. Then there’s Jonah, which does something different but equally unsettling. A prophet runs from the God he claims to serve, reluctantly watches his enemies receive mercy, and ends the story angry because God turned out to be more compassionate than he wanted God to be.¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: Jonah’s strangest feature may not be the fish at all. It’s the prophet. Jonah runs because he apparently suspects from the beginning that God might forgive Nineveh. When that actually happens, he complains that God is “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Jonah 4:2), quoting Israel’s own cherished description of God (Exod. 34:6). What normally sounds like wonderful theology becomes Jonah’s complaint when divine compassion reaches people he despises. The book ends with God asking whether Nineveh should receive compassion (Jonah 4:11), and remarkably, Jonah never answers. Perhaps that is because the question has quietly passed from Jonah to the reader. I could certainly still ask what history might stand behind either story. But as I sat with them longer, that no longer felt like the most interesting or important question. The stories were doing something. They created worlds I could inhabit, and allowed me to experience questions about suffering, certainty, mercy, enemies, and God by seeing what the stories revealed rather than simply asking what they described. And once I started reading this way, I began finding the same thing everywhere: in Esther and Ruth, in the stories of David and Elijah, and in all sorts of places I’d heard for years without realizing how much I’d been missing.¹¹⛰ Side Trail: Esther becomes more than a tale of palace intrigue: it is a story of courage, vulnerability, and surprising reversal (Esther 4:13–16; 7:9–10). Ruth becomes more than family history: it opens onto loyalty, belonging, generosity, and the unexpected places grace appears (Ruth 1:16–17; 2:10–12). David and Goliath becomes a story about confronting powers that appear impossibly large (1 Samuel 17:41–47). And Elijah’s encounter at Horeb imagines the divine presence arriving not through spectacle, but through the sound of sheer silence (1 Kings 19:11–13). Whatever their history, these stories can become windows through which we see ourselves, our world, and perhaps even God differently.

Yet, nowhere did this way of seeing become more striking than in the Gospels. They told Jesus’s story through stories and images that had come long before him. Jesus is described as a child threatened by a murderous ruler, carried into Egypt, called back out, and then passing through water before entering the wilderness, all echoing Israel’s older story of Exodus.¹²⛰ Side Trail: Matthew seems to arrange Jesus’s early story so that Israel’s older story echoes beneath it. A murderous ruler threatens children (Exod. 1:15–22; Matt. 2:16–18). Jesus goes into Egypt and is called out again, explicitly connected to Hosea 11:1 (Matt. 2:13–15). He then passes through water in baptism (Matt. 3:13–17), enters the wilderness for forty days (4:1–2), and answers temptation using passages from Israel’s wilderness experience in Deuteronomy (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10). None of this requires denying that Matthew is narrating events. It means he is also interpreting those events by telling Jesus’s story in Israel-shaped ways. Elsewhere Jesus is portrayed as a shepherd,¹³⛰ Side Trail: The shepherd image carries an enormous amount of biblical history. God is Israel’s shepherd in the Psalms (Ps. 23:1; 80:1), while Israel’s failed leaders are condemned as bad shepherds who exploit the flock (Ezek. 34:1–10). Ezekiel then promises that God himself will search for the sheep and appoint “my servant David” as their shepherd (34:11–16, 23). Against that background, Jesus declaring “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11) becomes much richer than a pleasant pastoral image. The metaphor draws together ideas about divine care, Israel’s leadership, Davidic hope, protection, sacrifice, and belonging. The older imagery supplies much of the claim’s meaning. speaks of rebuilding the temple,¹⁴⛰ Side Trail: When Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days,” his hearers understandably assume he means the Jerusalem temple (John 2:19–20). John immediately tells readers otherwise: “the temple he had spoken of was his body” (2:21). This is an unusually convenient example because the Gospel itself explicitly identifies the metaphor. The physical temple was understood as a unique place of God’s presence among Israel (1 Kings 8:10–13, 27–30). John takes that enormous symbolic world and applies it to Jesus. The point isn’t that temples are secretly bodies. The temple becomes a lens through which John interprets who Jesus is. celebrates Passover on the eve of his death,¹⁵⛰ Side Trail: The Gospels deliberately place Jesus’s final days within the world of Passover. The Synoptic Gospels describe the Last Supper as a Passover meal (Mark 14:12–16; Matt. 26:17–19; Luke 22:7–15), while Paul explicitly calls Christ “our Passover lamb” (1 Cor. 5:7). Passover itself remembered Israel’s liberation from slavery and the night of deliverance from Egypt (Exod. 12:1–32). Early Christians therefore inherited a ready-made biblical vocabulary for understanding Jesus’s death: deliverance, covenant, sacrifice, freedom, and a people being brought into something new. Once again, an older story doesn’t simply predict a later one. It supplies images through which the later story becomes intelligible. and describes his coming death and resurrection through the image of Jonah.¹⁶⛰ Side Trail: Jesus himself uses Jonah metaphorically when discussing his coming death and resurrection. Matthew records him saying that “as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish,” so the Son of Man would be “in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40; cf. Jonah 1:17). Elsewhere the “sign of Jonah” is connected with Jonah’s preaching to Nineveh (Luke 11:29–32). Interestingly, the image isn’t used in exactly the same way everywhere. Jonah’s story becomes a flexible scriptural pattern through which Jesus’s identity, message, death, and vindication can be understood. An older narrative acquires new meaning without ceasing to be Jonah’s story. The more echoes I noticed, the harder it became to read the Gospels as though their writers were simply recording events as they happened.¹⁷⛰ Side Trail: Saying the Gospel writers interpret Jesus shouldn’t be confused with saying they simply invented him. Ancient historical writing routinely involved selecting, arranging, and interpreting material. Luke openly acknowledges earlier accounts and explains that he has investigated the traditions and arranged an account for Theophilus (Luke 1:1–4). John is even more explicit about purpose: he selected particular signs so readers might believe Jesus is the Messiah (John 20:30–31). The evangelists aren’t pretending to offer camera footage without perspective. They are telling the story as believers who think it means something. Their theological interpretation isn’t necessarily an obstacle between us and the story. It is part of the story they wrote. They were deliberately drawing on Israel’s Scriptures, using familiar stories and images to help their communities understand who they believed Jesus was.¹⁸⛰ Side Trail: The New Testament writers constantly reach backward into Israel’s Scriptures to explain Jesus. Matthew repeatedly uses fulfillment formulas (Matt. 1:22–23; 2:15, 17–18, 23). Luke depicts the risen Jesus interpreting “Moses and all the Prophets” in relation to himself (Luke 24:27). Paul says the gospel concerning Christ was promised beforehand in the Scriptures (Rom. 1:1–4), and 1 Corinthians summarizes Jesus’s death and resurrection as occurring “according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). This means early Christian interpretation of Jesus was deeply scriptural from the beginning. They understood something new by reaching for the stories, symbols, hopes, and vocabulary they had inherited from Israel. Stories I’d known about for years suddenly had older stories humming beneath them, as though Jesus could be seen through Israel’s story even as Israel’s story was being seen differently through Jesus, with one becoming part of the language through which another could be understood.

And that movement didn’t end with Jesus. Just as Israel’s stories served as metaphors that helped his followers understand him, his story became a metaphor to help them understand themselves. Paul could speak of his readers having been crucified with Christ, buried with Christ, and raised with Christ without suggesting they had literally been nailed to crosses, placed in tombs, or physically raised from the dead.¹⁹⛰ Side Trail: Paul’s language makes metaphorical participation remarkably explicit. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he writes in Galatians 2:20. Romans says believers were “buried with him through baptism into death” so that they might “live a new life” (Rom. 6:4), while Colossians similarly describes Christians as having died and been raised with Christ (Col. 2:12; 3:1–3). Paul obviously isn’t claiming that every Christian physically experienced Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Instead, Jesus’s story becomes a pattern through which believers understand their own transformation. His death and resurrection are not merely events they believe happened to him. They become a story Christians learn to see themselves inside. The movement of the story could now illuminate something happening in their own lives. To be crucified and buried with Christ could describe the ending and leaving behind of an old identity and an old way of being, and to be raised with him could describe the beginning of a new identity and a new way of being.²⁰⛰ Side Trail: Paul can speak about resurrection both as future hope and present reality. In 1 Corinthians 15, he emphatically connects Christian hope to a future resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:12–23, 42–55). Yet elsewhere resurrection language describes something already happening. Christians have been “raised with Christ” (Col. 3:1), are being made alive with him (Eph. 2:4–6), and are invited to “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). Those meanings don’t have to compete. A story or belief about what God has done and will do can simultaneously become a way of describing transformation now. Future resurrection gives present life a vocabulary: death giving way to life, and old creation becoming new. They could put on Christ, walk in newness of life, become a new creation, and even understand themselves together as the body of Christ. The particular images changed, but each allowed something from the story of Jesus to illuminate experiences far beyond the events themselves. In short, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus had become more than events in someone else’s story. They had become a way of imagining transformation itself: what it meant for something old to end and something new to take its place. What they believed had happened to Jesus could now help them make sense of what they believed was happening within themselves.

Taken together, all of this inevitably changed the way I thought about truth itself. From Genesis and Exodus, to Job and Jonah, to Ruth and Esther, and eventually to Jesus and Paul, I kept encountering stories whose meaning couldn’t be neatly contained by the question of what literally happened. I realized I’d been carrying around something like a ladder of truth without ever knowing it. At the top was literal, historical truth: this really happened. Somewhere below it was metaphor, still meaningful perhaps, but a rung or two down from “the real thing,” somewhere people could retreat to in order to salvage whatever truth remained. But the more I followed these stories, the less that tidy little hierarchy actually made sense. A story might describe an event that literally happened, but it could also tell an imaginative story that didn’t, or emerge from some ancient mixture of history, memory, theology, and storytelling I could no longer neatly untangle. In any of those cases, metaphor could still take a particular story and open it onto truths beyond the literal: a garden could illuminate grasping, hiding, and blame; wilderness could name places far beyond a desert; exile and return could describe movements of the human heart; and death and resurrection could become patterns through which people understood their own transformation. Metaphor wasn’t less-than-literal, it was more-than-literal. Not because it added something extra to history, but because its truth was never limited to history in the first place. What I’d once feared would mean seeing less in these stories had actually taught me to see so much more.

But learning to see more left me with yet another question: what if seeing isn’t the end of it? Sometimes Scripture seems to do more than give me a new way of looking at the world. Sometimes, I find myself confronted, comforted, invited, or somehow addressed. What if something can actually happen in that encounter, something more than simply understanding the words differently? That’s the question that opened yet another way of reading Scripture, one that moves beyond what I see in the text toward what might happen through it. But that’s a story for next time.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.