The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do, Part 32

We turn now in our continuing consideration of the implications of the various literary styles utilized in the Bible for artists to a consideration of the use of visionary literature in Scripture.  There are two broad categories of literature which exist in Scripture (and everywhere else, for that matter): realistic literature, which attempts to form a likeness of existing Reality, and literature which constructs an alternative to existing Reality, normally called fantasy literature.

Most of the literary types which comprise Holy Writ tend toward realism.  However, there are also some literary types present in the Bible which Christian literary analysts normally consider to be fantasy.  Those types, which include both prophecy and apocalypse, can be considered together under the common penumbra of visionary literature (though there are of course important differences between prophecy and apocalypse: their similarities are greater than their dissimilarities). Visionary literature depicts events, persons (human or otherwise), and backgrounds which differ significantly from normal Reality.  

Many Evangelicals believing (as I do) that Scripture is Inerrant, object strenuously when they hear someone describe parts of God’s Infallible Word as fantasy, thinking that this description means that the events so described didn’t actually happen in history past, or will happen in the future.  However, the word fantasy is not being used here, as it frequently is, to describe something that couldn’t or didn’t happen historically, but is rather used as a literary type,  which doesn’t preclude the historical reality of the events depicted in visionary literature.

Fantasy, as used in this sense, refers to the type of literature which describes events which have happened, or could happen, or are happening, by means of symbolic events, backgrounds, and characters which would generally never happen in our observable, empirical Reality.  These fantastical characters, events, and backgrounds represent events, backgrounds, and characters that have, do, or might occur in normal Reality.

For instance, in Daniel 8:9-10, a ram’s horn grows to the sky to displace some of the stars, knocking them to the ground, and trampling on them.  Most responsible scholars of prophecy agree that this horn represents Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a Seleucid Greek ruler who reigned from 175-164 BC, and who severely persecuted the Jewish people represented by the stars in the sky which were knocked to the ground by the ram’s horn, killing numbers of them (the ram’s horn tramples the fallen stars) in an effort to suppress the true worship of God during the intertestamental period in Israel.  

Genesis 37:9-10 tells how Joseph dreamed that the sun, moon, and eleven stars (symbolizing Joseph’s father, his mother, and eleven brothers) all bowed down to him.  Both Joseph’s dream and Daniel’s prophetic vision though they were given as fantastical symbolic scenarios (since the sun, moon, and eleven stars did not literally bow down to Joseph, and a ram’s horn did not literally grow to the sky and knock down and trample stars in our normal, empirical Reality) did, in fact, come true historically, in the sense that what they represented came true.  

From this we can conclude two things: (1) that historical truth can legitimately be symbolically related in an artistic fashion, with no loss of truth in the representation of it, and (2) that imagination is a critical factor in apprehending and using visionary literature.

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