What Your English Bible Can’t Say with Dr. Alison Gray

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today's guest is Dr. Alison Gray. Dr. Gray, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Alison Gray: You're very welcome. It's good to be with you.

Johnny Ova: Wonderful. Let's get to question one. When modern readers open the Psalms or the book of Job, they often treat them like devotional greeting cards or fortune cookies. But these are some of the most emotionally intense texts in all of ancient literature. What are we missing when we flatten Hebrew poetry into something safe and comfortable?

Dr. Alison Gray: That's a great question. The Psalms, first of all, are really unusual, because they're liturgy, still used today in worship, but they're also literature, because we can sit and read the book of Psalms right through from Psalm 1 to 150. Quite often they've been reduced to one line of a psalm on a bumper sticker, as some kind of plaster. But they really need to be read both as whole pieces in themselves and within the collection. The editors took a lot of time and care over which psalm they put next to another. I think a lot of Christians probably don't read them in groups, because why would you unless the Bible indicated you should? But the psalm I spent far too many years of my life on, Psalm 18, is part of a collection that runs from Psalm 15 to Psalm 24, and there's a really beautiful concentric pattern to that group, with the royal psalm and the Torah psalm, Psalm 19, sitting at its heart. So there are all kinds of ways to read the Psalms. That's the structural level. Then zooming in to the level of the text, the power of the images and the words and how they work together throughout each text is often missed, particularly in translation.

Johnny Ova: And the Psalms can be very emotionally charged. You see joy and sadness, grief and despair. I know you spent years studying how metaphor works in the Hebrew Bible, not as decoration but as a core way these writers communicated meaning. Can you walk us through how metaphor actually functions in ancient Hebrew and why it carries so much more weight than we sometimes realize?

Dr. Alison Gray: For sure. One quote I always go back to is from a Spanish scholar, Luis Alonso Schökel. He wrote that what has been written with imagination must be read with imagination. I find that really powerful. These words were written imagining a particular worldview or a particular relationship, and then crafted into words to create pictures for the reader. Another really helpful image comes from Janet Martin Soskice, who writes about metaphor and religious language. She says metaphors so often become lexicalized. They become part of our vocabulary so much that we don't think about them anymore. Oh yeah, the Lord is king, the Lord is my shepherd, da da da. And you need to stop and say, wait, what does that mean? Because it's often part of a much larger scheme. She describes the Psalms as worn by years of stately liturgical ascent, like a marble staircase that has been worn down from being used in worship so often that you forget to admire the marble.

Dr. Alison Gray: In terms of Hebrew poetry, there isn't really rhyme and rhythm the way we have in English. The two main characteristics of Hebrew poetry are metaphor and parallelism. Metaphor is huge for Hebrew poetry, and it combines with parallelism. You get one line that says one thing, and a second line that says a very similar thing in a slightly different way. A bit like binoculars, two shots of the same thing. Or it might be what's called antithetical parallelism, which you get a lot in Proverbs: the wise person does this and this, but the foolish person does this and this. So you often get word pairs or line pairs. We often skip over or ignore them, or see them as repetitive, but they're usually slightly different for a reason. With metaphor, you have to enter their imaginative world, which is sometimes easier said than done. Take Psalm 18. There's a massive conceptual scheme in Psalm 18 where what is high is safe. Height is represented with metaphors of refuge and protection and being in the heights. What is low down is dangerous and scary. You're in the waters, the waves have gone over your head. God has to reach down, literally, to save the king.

Dr. Alison Gray: And yet when he's talking about victory, he says, you've set my feet firmly on the rock, and all my enemies are beneath me. So there's an up and down thing. But there's also a width thing, which we actually miss because of some of the language used. A narrow place is a place of distress. When you're constricted and can't move, it's sometimes described as being in a trap or in cords, but the word for distress in Hebrew actually means narrowness. That makes sense of the metaphors of width and space: you gave me a wide place to stand. Suddenly that's more secure, a safe place. So those are the big spatial examples of how metaphors can work. It gives you a different perspective.

Johnny Ova: Real fascinating. You're right. We say the metaphors all the time, but do we really understand what we're saying, especially around church? You get used to saying amen all the time, or, like you said, the Lord is my shepherd, the Lord is my king. But when you stop and think about what it's actually explaining, what am I saying when I say the Lord is my shepherd, it's really profound when you meditate on it.

Dr. Alison Gray: Absolutely. And the use of light and darkness too. Let me turn to Psalm 18.

Johnny Ova: I was going to ask you about Psalm 18. Your book on it talks about word pictures embedded in the Hebrew poetry, so if you could expand on that, because I'm sure people have never thought about the Psalms that way.

Dr. Alison Gray: For sure. Just to give you an example of parallelism, verse 28: for it is you who light my lamp, the Lord my God lights up my darkness. That's an example of parallel lines. The first says you're the one who lights my lamp, and the second says you light up my darkness. You could read that and think, yes, of course, God is the light and we're in the darkness and so on. But there's a lot in there. In the Hebrew it says, for you, you're the one who lights my lamp. Not somebody else. In Hebrew, when you use a verb you don't need to say "you," because that information is contained in the verb. But here it says, but you, you light my lamp. It's emphasizing, I'm not getting my light from somewhere else. Then, the Lord my God lights up my darkness. It's the same idea as darkness being as light to you. There's a lot of that kind of thing. For with you I can run against a troop. This is David saying, I can take on a whole army. You've made me super powered. And with my God I can leap over a wall. Hebrew poetry plays with exaggeration and all kinds of things, and it creates incredible images.

Dr. Alison Gray: One of the really interesting things is the beginning: I love you, O Lord, my strength. That's how it begins, and strength comes up throughout the song. That's another thing you'd probably miss unless you slow down and really look at the individual words and pictures. The next verse is packed with pictures. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. It's like, OK, calm down, that's a bit much. It's every picture of protection and refuge he can possibly summon up. In the Psalms they're not afraid of piling on the imagery to make an impact, but each one has its own nuance. A rock. Why do we call God a rock? Has anyone thought how weird that is? It's a personal God, and we're comparing God to a rocky cliff. That's pretty strange. But then we have to think about what the mountain signified in Israel. If you were an army, where do you want to be for military advantage? Up on the heights. You need to be secure, you need a good vantage point. Your rock or cliff or stronghold needs to be high, out of reach, with a good width around it. That's what he's saying God is.

Dr. Alison Gray: So God is refuge, yes, and also protection and also strength. But something really interesting gets added in this line: the rock in whom I take refuge. It's not just a rock. It's the rock I've chosen to put my trust in. There's a moral dimension to that. If you jump into the middle of the psalm, there's a meditation on why he's been rescued. The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness. I was really great, that's why I got rescued. But the ones who seek to put their trust in God, that's really significant. Where are you choosing to put your trust?

Johnny Ova: One of the things that struck me about your work is the idea of metaphor clusters, where multiple images pile on top of each other in a single passage and create an overwhelming emotional effect. Can you take us inside one of those clusters and show us what the ancient writer was doing?

Dr. Alison Gray: Sure. There's a massive cluster in verse 2. Then in verses 4 and 5 we get sent right down into the depths. He narrates his distress: the cords of death encompassed me, the torrents of destruction assailed me, the cords of Sheol entangled me, and the snares of death confronted me. Then he says, in my distress. So you have mixed metaphors there, because cords are associated with hunting. Suddenly you get the idea of death as a hunter, someone really out to get you. That's squashed together with the idea of the underworld, Sheol, and again traps. It's the idea of these cosmic creatures tracking you down. In a sense those are clusters of similar imagery that strengthen what's happening. For other kinds of metaphor clusters, I've done some work on Deuteronomy 4, which isn't poetry but is full of really powerful metaphors. It uses cosmic imagery too: heaven as a witness over all the earth, and God speaking from the fire. So there's powerful imagery of God's presence through the spoken word. But there's also a lot about the path. Deuteronomy and Proverbs are both full of path imagery. The path is the way you live, so it's a metaphor for ethical behavior, but also a metaphor for the commandments. Don't turn to the left or the right. Keep straight ahead and you'll be on the right path.

Dr. Alison Gray: If you travel on the straight path, you'll be upright. If you travel on a crooked path, you'll become crooked. The path makes you crooked. So there are these clusters, and this is a point Lakoff and Johnson make in their popular book, Metaphors We Live By. We use these metaphors so commonly that we forget to stop and think about them. He's over the hill. He's in a dead-end job. It's all using the idea of life as a journey. He's gone off the rails. It's all downhill after 40.

Johnny Ova: That's what that means. People say that about me all the time, and I always wondered what it meant. We just finished a sermon series called Words, and the whole series took words in popular verses and went deep into the original intent of those words, because it really shifts the way we hear them, at least here in America, and I'm sure worldwide. Philippians 4:13, Jeremiah 29:11. You take out the context, the culture, and sometimes the words. One of the points of the series was, thank God for translators, because we don't even have words that properly explain the depth of what some Greek or Hebrew words are trying to express. So English translators have to make choices, and every choice loses something. What are some of the most significant emotional and theological losses that happen when Hebrew poetry is translated into English?

Dr. Alison Gray: Oof, that is a good question. We'd start with the obvious bit, which is that any sound patterns are lost. We can't replicate how it sounds in Hebrew. If I read you the beginning of Lamentations, in English it's: how lonely sits the city that was full of people. She has become like a widow. She who was great among the nations, she who was a princess, has become a slave. It's sometimes described as a city lament, so there's this sense of mourning. In Hebrew you hear this sound, which is beautiful but also quite tragic: eikhah yashvah vadad ha'ir. You can hear it. That's the first thing that gets missed. The other thing in the Psalms, Proverbs and Job is that they have quite a pattern of accents and intonation. The Masoretes, who wrote the dots and dashes above the letters around the ninth and tenth centuries, were preserving an oral tradition of how the texts are spoken. They're called te'amim, taste marks, so you can actually taste the words by how you hear them. The way poetry is spoken really affects how you feel and how you relate to it, and in English it just doesn't do the same thing. That's the first way we miss out.

Dr. Alison Gray: Secondly, the translator is always a traitor. That's the Italian phrase: traduttore, traditore. How can you translate a metaphor into another language?

Johnny Ova: It's hard. I don't envy those positions, because you know what you want to say, but you can't express it enough.

Dr. Alison Gray: With parallelism you can get close. You can have a go at saying the same thing in slightly different ways. But what makes up the artistry of the poetry is always really hard. A lot of Psalms translators have tried to give some kind of equivalent. The metrical psalter, for example, was an attempt to give us English poetry as we recognize it. A lot of people grew up with a version of the Psalms that rhymes, and that's what they learned and came to appreciate. The rhyme isn't in the Hebrew, but it gives a similar kind of effect for those of us reading them in English. So that's an interesting thing. No, carry on.

Johnny Ova: You've written about the affective dimension of these texts as well, the way they were designed to make you feel something, not just think something. You briefly mentioned a couple of things. How does that challenge the way most pastors and teachers approach the Old Testament today?

Dr. Alison Gray: That's a really interesting point. When we come across metaphors, it's worth thinking about their function. Any metaphor has an informative function: what's the content, what is it saying? But there's also a performative function. Is this metaphor designed to make you feel something? Is it designed to make you do something? Go back to the pathway. Well, I don't want to be crooked, so I don't want to go on a crooked path. A lot of Proverbs and even Psalms work like that, and that's partly why people find it difficult. Some of the language about the righteous and the wicked, or the wise and the foolish, can feel a bit judgmental, and maybe we don't want to associate ourselves with those words. I think the poets are just saying, well, which side do you want to be on? It's very clear. Here's some black and white imagery so you know which one to pick. It's didactic literature, meant to teach you something. So the metaphors often have this performative function. They're designed to make you think, hmm, which side am I on? Psalm 1, at the beginning of the Psalter, starts with three different pictures. Where are you sitting? Where are you standing? Where are you walking? It tries to capture the whole of life.

Dr. Alison Gray: Some translations don't do such a great job with this, and you lose the sense of what the Hebrew says. Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. For a start, what does it mean to walk in the counsel of the wicked? You're walking in somebody's advice. Where are you walking? Then, nor stand in the path of sinners. OK, which path am I standing on? Whose company am I keeping? Then, nor sit in the seat of the scoffers, the mockers, the ones who look down on other people. So where am I sitting? Am I looking down on people? Am I with others who look down on people? It has this ethical challenge just by giving you a picture and making you think.

Johnny Ova: Making you think, where am I? What path am I on? It's good. The book of Job came to mind as you were talking. It's a very misunderstood book of the Bible, and I know you've read Job through the lens of trauma literature. What opens up when we stop treating Job like a theology lecture and start reading it as the story of a man in genuine crisis?

Dr. Alison Gray: Great question. There's a lot of research in biblical studies now using trauma as a lens of interpretation. If we think that most of the Bible may well have been written either during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century or shortly afterward, however old the oral traditions are, and many go back a long way, then how does that help us make sense of it? For Job, if we read him in some ways as a trauma survivor, someone who has experienced trauma, then for a start I hope it gives us more compassion, because he often gets bad press. But it's also about making sense of what's happened. Trauma theologians talk about remaking as a meaning-making exercise. He's remaking his life and what has gone on. Trauma studies look at maybe three things. First, what does a trauma-informed reading look like? What does it look like to read Job with someone who has been through trauma? Second, what in the text might be indicators of trauma? Does he seem confused at times? Does he contradict himself? Is there a loss of coherence, or gaps somewhere? Sometimes he says, God is my enemy, he's turned against me, you're persecuting me. And then he says, but I know that my redeemer lives.

Dr. Alison Gray: You get pulled back and forth. Is this hopeful or not hopeful? Is the redeemer God, or somebody else he's waiting for to come and rescue him? I think that can really help make sense of the more challenging parts of the book. Third, there's what's behind the text. What does it look like to view Job as Israel wrestling with its own identity? Was the book of Job written to reframe Israel's own story of itself, how it understands itself? In trauma literature there's often a need to identify the perpetrator, because that helps you gain a sense of control. If you know who or what caused it, you can do something about it. In Lamentations, for example, we see it's Israel's fault, it's God's fault, it's the nations' fault. There's this flipping between them, like, we just want to blame somebody and figure out what's going on. You can also get a lot of self-blame, because if I caused it, then I can also be in control of stopping it. It gives me agency. So there's some of that as well.

Dr. Alison Gray: With Job, I think trauma is a really helpful lens because it raises all the questions and maybe explains why we have what Carol Newsom describes as polyphony. There's a polyphony of voices in Job. We have the narrator, Job, Job's comforters, another friend who appears later on unannounced, and God in the whirlwind. Then we have the wisdom poem in the middle, and I don't know who's saying that. It's in the words of Job, but in a very different way. We have dialogue and we have monologue. This fragmentary nature of the book makes sense if it's trauma trying to make sense of things.

Johnny Ova: One of the issues we have, in my opinion, especially in America, is this understanding of the Bible as if God was in heaven with his feather-tip pen, writing on paper, folding it up and throwing it down, and we caught this book, and now it's a letter from God to everybody in the world. On Long Island, where I'm from, teaching the Bible any other way is a lightning rod, unless you believe the Bible is the inerrant, direct, verbal transmission from God to mankind. I think that's an extremely dangerous mentality when trying to understand Scripture, because it misunderstands what, quote unquote, God's word is actually doing. We teach it two ways: prescriptions and descriptions. Sometimes God is prescribing things for us to do. Other times the Bible is just describing things that actually happened. If you wrote the story of my life, I promise you my actions weren't all prescribed by God, although I'm doing OK right now and you can see God moving.

Dr. Alison Gray: Hallelujah!

Johnny Ova: Praise the Lord. So I think it's about getting a healthy relationship with the Bible again, for lack of a better phrase. When people read Job, the question I always get is, well, who's Satan at the beginning? Why are God and Satan going back and forth? I say, it's not literal. They're not literally up there negotiating over us. There's a story taking place. And like you said, with the fragmentation of some of these books, you miss the trauma of some of those verses. I taught on the verse that says, blessed are those who dash your babies against the rocks. If you think God wrote this and is prescribing it, you're attributing complete insanity to God. But if you understand the broken heart of the man writing it, whose family was just killed, all of us can relate: God's going to get you back, and blessed will be the ones who smash your babies against the rocks. You can really get behind the heart of that. There's a long tradition in the church of sanitizing lament, turning psalms of agony into psalms of quick resolution, like, here's a quick example, repeat this. Why is that impulse so dangerous, and what did the original Hebrew writers understand about suffering that you think we've lost?

Dr. Alison Gray: Gosh, that's a complex question. Why is it so dangerous? Certainly in the UK, and probably in America, I think Walter Brueggemann put it as putting your church face on. You go to church and put your church face on, and your church face doesn't make room for lament or sadness or grief or anger or rage or shame. There's something so honest and real about the Psalms, particularly the psalms of lament, and, as you said, the imprecatory psalms, the cursing. I don't think God wrote those, but he allowed them to be spoken in his presence. There's every reason not to read them in public worship. That's a whole other question, what's suitable and edifying to read in a worship context and what should be set aside for Bible study in small groups. But the curses are there in the sense that God's big enough to take however you feel about your enemies. We don't need to hide. You don't get an honest relationship with God if you're withholding the darkest bits. There are really different views about psalms of lament. Some Christian scholars say this is part of Israel's history and we don't need to own it as Christians. In fact, we shouldn't, because it doesn't fit with Jesus' teaching about loving your enemies.

Dr. Alison Gray: I think they're missing the point that the justice is being handed over to God. It's not, Lord, give me permission to go and deck my neighbor back. You're saying, this is how I feel, this is the reality of how I feel, and I'm giving it to you in prayer because I'm in a trusting relationship with you. So that's the first part. I've forgotten the second part of your question, I'm afraid.

Johnny Ova: The second part was, what did the original Hebrew writers understand about suffering that we may have lost?

Dr. Alison Gray: The sense I get from the psalms of lament, and from Job actually, is that they're desperate to hold on to the relationship with God. They're incredibly tenacious. The prayers we get in the Hebrew Bible are often raw, sometimes even bolshy. Certainly in my tradition we don't have that kind of freedom to pray, Lord, you know what, you should really help right now, because I know you can, because you did it before. In the psalms of lament there's a huge amount of trust in coming before God in the first place. How long, Lord, how long? Why are you treating us like enemies? That's how they felt, and they're just not shy about saying how it really is. Maybe one other reason they've been sanitized for us is that our lives in the West are, on the whole, comfortable. We don't really know. Given the current climate, things might be changing in terms of our experience of war, but on the whole we're not living hand to mouth or in desperate fear for our lives. Obviously there are pockets and communities that are. So I think it's a great way for those of us who are comfortable to have solidarity with those who aren't. It's an invitation. Some people say, I don't want to say a psalm of lament, I don't feel sad. And I say, that's great that you don't. Enter into it and have compassion for somebody who feels like this right now.

Johnny Ova: Great point. Now, for our listeners, Dr. Gray is an amazing woman, and we're going on to a lighter, awesome question. You're involved in the British Sign Language Bible Translation Project, which means you've had to think about communicating Scripture through an entirely different medium. What has that work taught you about the physicality and embodiment already built into the Hebrew text?

Dr. Alison Gray: That's a great question, and it's an amazing project. I need to confess that I'm not fluent in BSL. I'm one of the Hebrew scholars who serves as a consultant on the project, although I am learning and working toward my level 2. Watching the process and being present with people signing, trying to sign God's word, is truly humbling. It's an incredible thing to be part of. Imagine signing Genesis 1, trying to somehow convey God's Spirit hovering over the face of the waters. Listeners, I'm sorry you can't see what I'm doing with my hands right now, but I'm making waves.

Johnny Ova: Just trust me, it's amazing.

Dr. Alison Gray: I think it blows apart the idea that we need to restrain God's word into words. BSL has so many layers, and perhaps one reason I love it is that I love metaphor, I love poetry, I love visual things, and it's very, very visual. But it's interesting in terms of translation, because, like you said, we have to make translation choices, and in BSL so much of the communication comes through your face and your body language that you're making interpretations just by whether you smile or not. That's fascinating, because quite often in Hebrew narrative there are no emotions given to you. You don't know whether the narrator approves or disapproves of a character. Usually it's just, this happened, and you're left to ask, was that a good thing? So it opens up very different questions for translation.

Johnny Ova: Amazing. I have a couple more for you before we go today. Ancient Near Eastern culture had a completely different relationship with emotion than modern Western culture does. How does understanding the cultural context reshape the way we hear these poets expressing anger, grief, joy and hope?

Dr. Alison Gray: That's a really interesting question. I'm not convinced we know how they experienced emotion, and it's very difficult for us to get away from our own baggage and assumptions when we come to the text. In terms of making sense of the word pictures, we can get a certain way by looking at the materiality. We can look at the geography of the land. Job describes his friends as, I think it's sometimes translated as a freshet. I'm sure there's a better word, like a torrent or a riverbed. What does that mean? Well, they had flash floods. So his friends come and go in a flash. They're fickle. Similarly with torrents, there's a beautiful line in the Psalms where God feeds and nourishes people with the torrent of his delights. Usually that's translated as rivers, and I say, wait, this isn't rivers. God's blessings are like a torrent coming at you. Delicacies, really fine food, but a torrent of them. If you want a picture of abundance. Now, back to ancient Near Eastern emotions. There are some really interesting metaphors of anger. The word for anger is the same as the word for nose. Think about snorting with rage. If it burns in you, or burns in your nose, you're angry.

Dr. Alison Gray: I don't know whether that's massively different from how we conceptualize anger, because we have phrases like snorting with rage. But where we lose it is in the description of God. It's often translated as God is slow to anger, but in Hebrew he actually has a long nose.

Johnny Ova: Thank God for translations. I'd be like, my God's Italian like me. Oh boy.

Dr. Alison Gray: But he has a long nose because it takes a long time for the steam to come out. So he's slow to anger. The fire doesn't come out, because thankfully he has a long nose.

Johnny Ova: Fascinating way to describe anger. Thank God for translators. You founded the Winter School in Ancient and Biblical Languages at Westminster College, Cambridge, bringing people in to learn Hebrew from scratch. When someone starts reading these texts in the original language for the first time, what's the moment that usually hits them hardest?

Dr. Alison Gray: Ooh, that's interesting. It's probably at the level of individual words. Learning the divine name and the wordplay in Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks who he is and God says, I am who I am. That's all built around the verb to be and the divine name, and it's often a moment of, ooh, Hebrew is cool. Then there are things like rachamim, the word for compassion, and learning that rechem, the singular form, if you like, means womb. So God's compassion is like wombs, plural. That shows you how pictorial Hebrew is. For a start it's quite startling imagery, because we usually think of God as male, and some people might find the idea of wombs really jarring. But it's incredible how nurturing, protective and holding that image is. God's compassion holds you. Think of a baby in the womb. The baby doesn't have to do anything. The baby is just provided for, cared for, held, looked after, fed. It's a place to rest. So that kind of word often makes people say, Hebrew is really different. It has quite a small vocabulary, so lots of words have many functions. Rosh, for example, is a head. It can also mean the beginning of something, or a leader, as well as the physical head. So it's a very fun language to learn.

Johnny Ova: I'm sure. All right, my final question, Dr. Gray. If the Hebrew poets could sit in a modern church service and hear how their words are being read and sung today, what do you think they would say to us?

Dr. Alison Gray: I'm not sure they would understand the British choral tradition. That might make them either rejoice or weep, I'm not quite sure which. If they heard people speaking the Psalms in deadpan, monotonous voices, I think they'd be very confused, because that seems far from their own experience. If we understand that a lot of the Psalms were set to music or designed to be chanted with different intonation, then I think they'd find the way the Psalms are spoken, when they're not sung, really quite strange. But I hope they'd be glad the Psalms are still being read and sung. I feel like they can be proud of that legacy. I don't know what they'd make of contemporary worship music.

Johnny Ova: They'd be like, what is this?

Dr. Alison Gray: They'd say, we're all in favor of repetition, but you're taking it to an extreme.

Johnny Ova: Too funny. Dr. Alison Gray, this has been an absolute pleasure. How can people get hold of you if they need to? Are you on social media at all? Do you have a website?

Dr. Alison Gray: I'm not great with social media, if I'm honest. I just direct people to the Westminster College, Cambridge website. They can get in touch with me through that, and our winter school is advertised on the college website as well.

Johnny Ova: Perfect. Dr. Gray, it's been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate the time today.

Dr. Alison Gray: No problem at all. Thanks for having me.