Chapter 2 continues.
Section C: The Impression of Things
Part 4: Personification in the Old Testament
Boman insists that the Hebrews did not literally personify the forces of nature, but that it was simply a figure of speech. It seems he was totally unaware of the broad ANE assumptions about the world and our communion through the sensory heart. While the modern science about this arose long after he published the original version of this book, the notion that our hearts can perceive the natural world directly was well established by studies in ANE literature going back centuries.
Once again, Boman brings his cultural bias into the picture. He plows through a substantial mix of passages from the Old Testament that insist the natural world rejoices at the demonstration of God’s power. For him, it’s just metaphor. Nature itself fought for Israel plenty of times, but he says it’s just lyrical drama. To deny it is a western bias, and arises from a lack of belief in miracles.
Boman cites modern poetry (Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson of Norway) that is loaded with similar imagery, but it’s from a pagan background. It reflects the superstitions of pagan Germanic peoples, so it’s not quite the same thing as the Hebrew Scriptures. In this, Boman almost trivializes the whole question. He waxes lyrical about how this still somehow gets at the truth, referring to a mystical and unexplainable unity in Creation that somehow reflects the divine nature, but his affirmation of the Scripture still gravely misses the point. This is the common western approach of spookifying something the Hebrews clearly understood.
Then again, I didn’t expect much better.
When Jesus rebuked the storm and the sea, it obeyed. This was no mere poetic metaphor. Every time He made a demand of the natural or spiritual world, it was the exact same thing. He treated nature as if it were literally alive and capable of responding to Him personally. It was His domain; that’s the Hebrew outlook.
It bears only a superficial resemblance to the superstitious outlook of the pagan Germanic and Scandinavian countries who feared the forces of nature. When Christian religion came to those northern lands, they did not fully absorb the Hebrew outlook, but a very paganized Christian understanding. The Bjørnson mentioned in the book, while a major literary giant in Norway, was a socialist materialist, using the old superstitions to sell poetry.
