The Hidden Language of Scripture: A Guide to Biblical Symbolism

Open your Bible to almost any page and you'll find it: light breaking into darkness, water rising from a rock, a shepherd calling sheep by name, a lamb that turns out to be a lion. These aren't decorations. They're a language, one the biblical writers spoke fluently and expected their readers to understand, a language most of us have lost the key to.

The Hidden Language of Scripture: A Guide to Biblical Symbolism hands that key back.

This book traces the Bible's most powerful symbols from their first appearance in Genesis to their fullest expression on the lips of Jesus, showing how a single thread, water, or bread, or a garden, or a name, can run through a thousand years of scripture and still be waiting for you the next time you open the page. You'll see why the manna in the wilderness and the bread Jesus breaks at supper are the same story told twice. Why the psalmist's cry for living water and the woman at the well in John's Gospel are answering the same thirst. Why a burning bush that would not burn out and a voice that says simply "I am" turn out to be the deepest thing scripture ever says about God.

Written for anyone who loves scripture and wants to read it more closely, this is not a book of speculation or hidden codes. It draws on the original Hebrew and Greek, the world the Bible was written in, and centuries of contemplative and mystical tradition, and puts all of it in service of one goal: helping you read the story you already know and discover that it has been saying more than you ever realized.

By the time you reach the last page, you won't just have learned what the Bible's symbols mean. You'll find yourself reading every page differently, alert to a language that was there all along, waiting to be heard.