Reply to Poll for Bible readers: Do you take the Bible literally?

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[quote=Anonymous]Conservative Jew

We are told to read the bible in four different ways

1 P'shat - "directly"  This is close to literally but not really.  Because it allows for obvious metaphors and figures of speech. Do you really think that that woman's neck was like the tower of David?

2. Remez - allegory. G-d speaks to us about ethical and philosophical things via allegory

3.  Drash -  "hermeneutics"  The bible is divine, right?  Ergo every single word, every letter, every punctuation mark (in the Hebrew, obviously), has meaning. If  a word is repeated in one  sentence it means something different each time. If there as an odd punctuation, that it to tell us something.  But how do we know?  The rabbis, divinely inspired, and using logic and imagination, compared texts in one part of the bible to texts in another and explained the hidden meanings.

4.  Sod - mystical meanings.  The bible contains clues to a mystical reality that is not described in the pshat meaning. The essence of this mystical meaning comes to us through the Zohar (whose oldest text is medievial, but is attributed to early rabbin Shimon Bar Yokkai)

The four meanings are different, yet ALL are "true".  The acronym for the four approaches happens to be "Pardes" - Paradise, a garden.  The point is to enter in and experience.

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