Symbolic reading is good and helpful but cannot operate without a set of guardrails. Those guardrails would include the rule of faith that should guide all hermeneutics, but we expect the other guardrails to rise from attentive reading of the text itself.

When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain.

What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those meanings you find into each occasion you find that word in a sentence. The breadth of things a word could mean is its ‘semantic domain.’

The absolute novice looks up a biblical word online and decides that it carries all of those meanings with it to each place it occurs. That’s not how languages work, for all the breadth of the domain itself can be informative in understanding how the word functions differently among a set of abstract concepts than it might in your own language.

I’ve mentioned before the idea of symbolic domain. This is my term for the way that Biblical symbols function. A given symbol—bread, trees, sea, etc.—carries with it a set of meanings.

Wine, for example, carries blessing, cursing, and wisdom as its set of meanings. These meanings are found in the Old Testament and arise solely from how wine functions in biblical texts. They’re connected, in fact they arise in the Biblical witness one from the next (cursing arises from blessing, and wisdom from the dialectic between blessing and cursing), but that doesn’t mean that every time we read wine in the Bible we can insert all of the above. I’ve heard plenty of preachers say, ‘wine equals blood,’ but if we’re assuming that the Lord’s Supper has a background in the Old Testament then that isn’t an obvious reading at all.

Wine, unlike some symbols, has its meanings arise in a sequence in dialogue so deciding the appropriate meaning is fairly easy by paying attention to story: wine is initially blessing and joy, the prophets invert that symbol as a curse which is appropriate due to the way alcohol itself is a gift that can become a curse when abused, and the wisdom literature uses wine for wisdom because of the blessing/cursing dynamic. Intriguingly, that means the three meanings line up with the Priest/King/Prophet dynamic across the progression of the Old Testament, though not all symbolic domains are that neat.

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