Literary Strategies in Biblical Literature:  Metaphor

In many ways the Hebrew Bible is the perfect textbook for any class that deals with the techniques of literary interpretation.    Within its pages, readers can find excellent examples of all genres:   prose, drama, essay, philosophy, legal writing, and, of course, poetry.  This group exercise is meant to give you skills you can use to read and interpret poetry, in this case, Jacob's prayer for his children at the end of Genesis.

Poetry is, for many people, an exercise in futility:  why don't poets, students sometimes demand, just say what they mean?  I would argue that this is exactly what poets do.  The problem that most poets must contend with is the problem is expressing ideas in fresh and convincing ways.   In a love poem, for example, repeating the same phrase, "I love you," may express exactly what you feel as a lover, but the recipient may tire of the manner of expression.  So love poets explore the idea of love through metaphor, a comparison between apparently unlike things, without using "like" or "as."    This comparison allows the poet to bring the features and traits of one thing to bear on another, and the result is an expansion and enrichment of the idea of what it means to love.   

Metaphor is a two-term formula, equating two disparate things or ideas.  For example, in the metaphor, "Joseph is a fruitful bough," we might identify the two terms as follows:

The question the metaphor raises then is:    why?  Why is Joseph a fruitful bough?  The nearest answer (or one answer, at least) is that, like a fruitful bough, Joseph brought forth much fruit, in the form of sons and daughters.  A secondary metaphor is thus implied:

This sample metaphor appears in Genesis 49.22.

Poets also make use of personification, a special kind of figurative language (metaphor is a kind of figurative language).    personification always has "human being" as its "B" term, as in "Death be not proud," the title of a poem by John Donne:

The question then becomes:  what kind of human being is Death?

For the portion of Genesis 49 that I assign to you, create a metaphor chart that helps you explore all the dimensions of the comparison (reading aloud is the best place to start).  Then answer the questions below.   These questions will form the basis of our class discussion.

1. What are the "A" and "B" terms for each metaphor in the section?  Create a metaphor chart to help your group establish a concrete relation between the two terms.
2. Why does the poem make an equation between these two things?  What is the logic of the comparison?