Figures of Speech Used in the Bible
One of the most useful of Bible study tools, "Figures of Speech Used in the Bible" should be in personal library of anyone who is serious about Bible study. The writers of the Bible often used figures of speech that were common during their time. In fact we often use figures of speech in our everyday conversations without paying much attention to it but we do expect others to understand that we were speaking figuratively and not literally. For example, if we were to say someone is "big as a barn" we would not expect anyone to seriously think they were forty feet long, eighteen feet tall and twenty feet wide. By taking such figures of speech literally it is easy to be lead astray into false doctrines.
The other thing the book is particularly valuable for is literary analysis. The beauty of literature sometimes is its use of various literary devices. Introverted parallelism is an example of a literary device included in the book. This is where two or more items are listed in one order and then in the reverse order. For example Exodus 9:31 where it reads "And the flax and the barley was smitten: for the barley was in the ear, and the flax was bolled." First the order is flax and then barley and then the order changes to barley and then flax. Of course there are a lot of other literary devices such as acrostics, sentences that start or end with the same words, a chapter where each verse starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, or Psalms 119 where there are 22 groups of eight verses where each of the eight verses in that group all start with the same letter.
Whether it is examining these details of the Bible as literature or preventing an exegetic mistake by not understanding a figure of speech, "Figures of Speech Used in the Bible" is highly recommended and should be owned by all Bible students.
Author: E. W. Bullinger
Publisher: Baker Book House Company
PO Box 6287
Grand Rapids, MI 49516
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0801005590
Pages: 982 plus multiple appendixes