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Pictures from the East

Abraham Rihbany grew up in a Syrian village where customs had remained unchanged for centuries. He emigrated to America before the First World War and in 1919 published a book called The Syrian Christ. In this he describes from his own experience many details of Oriental village life, details which in some respects would have changed little from the time of Jesus.

His observations on the extensive use of figurative speech by Orientals are particularly interesting. He writes, “It is because the Syrian loves to speak in pictures, and to subordinate literal accuracy to the total impression of an utterance, that he makes such extensive use of figurative language.” “Just as the Oriental loves to flavour his food strongly and to dress in bright colours, so is he fond of metaphor, exaggeration, and positiveness in speech”. “He piles up his metaphors and superlatives”.
We only need to think of Jesus’ sayings, which abound with pictures (A sower went out to sow), exaggerations (It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle), superlatives (the last will be first). In particular of course we have the parables. Rihbany says that “Parabolic speech is dear to the Oriental heart. It is poetic, mystical, sociable. In view of the small value Orientals place upon time, the story teller, the speaker in parables, is to them the most charming conversationalist.”
The abiding vitality of Jesus’ teaching surely relates very closely to this genius of the Oriental mind. The pictures live with us.
Anyone who has tried knows how difficult it is to invent an interesting parable, and most of us are perhaps more at home with relatively logical and abstract forms of speech rather than the picturesque. This can sometimes lead to misreadings. Mark 13.24-25 refers to the darkening of sun and moon and the falling of the stars. This is most likely not a reference to some cosmic meltdown but a graphic way of referring to war and political upheaval. This is undeniably how this very same imagery is used in the old testament prophets (e.g. Joel 2.6-11).
Rihbany admires what he calls the genius of the “aggressive, systematic, Anglo-Saxon mind” but notes that it has sometimes failed to appreciate the nature of biblical imagery. “Its unrestrained effusiveness of expression; its vivid, almost fleshy and fantastic imagery; its naive narrations; the rugged unstudied simplicity of its parables - so far as these qualities are concerned, the Bible might all have been written in my primitive village home, on the western slopes of Mount Lebanon”.