"They are figurative expressions"
The Bible is a composite text with a single Author whose words passed through dozens of voices, filtration through scribes and translators, and conformity of form to various writing or speech conventions at the time of writing/sharing. We know from our own inability to reproduce messages word for word that the same idea understood by different people, can be restated in highly individualized ways. But I think we think a lot less about the impact of genre on the interpretive task. What impact does it have and what does it say about the Author for us to receive prescriptive legalese in a block of instructional text describing parameters of tabernacles or behaviors like Leviticus? Is the impact or is our interpretive approach necessarily different when the text is poetry like the Psalms, or Isaiah? Or when it's a long-form narrative, like the bulk of Exodus or a series of short-form stories like Genesis? How about testimonies like the Gospels, or corrective epistles like Paul's letters? What do the constraints of each of these very different text types do, or spell out as interpretive expectation horizons for us? Debates have raged for centuries about how literally to take the Bible. What does that debate even look like when part of the Bible is expressly written in poetry, for example, where the genre demands that we expect a high level of evocative and figurative elements to the meaning-making enterprise?
Within the Bible itself, we have several examples of passages that change meaning depending on what genre you expect that they are, but which are interpreted for us so we can see how the process works. I'll bring up just one episode: Nathan's parable of the lambs. A guilty king David was sitting in judgment when his respected spiritual advisor used court time to lay out a story that David originally mistook for the genre of testimony--a wealthy rancher had stolen the only lamb of a poor farmer. Because David expected that this was a literal narrative, given to tell immediate truth on its surface, he didn't think to look any deeper, and was immediately angry at the rich man, vowing vengeance upon him in his just wrath. Only after Nathan revealed that the genre was not testimony, but rather parable, did David look deeper into the meaning, find the symbolic key, and discover, to his own shame, that he was the guilty rich man himself.
The Book of Revelation, perhaps more than any other, reveals that there are some limits that the genre of a passage imposes on how understanding can pass from writer to reader. It's dense with symbolic imagery that our current culture has lost most of the interpretive keys to. It sounds like gobbledygook in places, and reads like an intense message that only insiders actually "get." It seems to suggest that we can't possibly take it completely literally, but it defies our modern conception of communication to locate any but the most hesitant of glosses. There are too many fantastical beasts combined with specific numbers, precious stones, prostitutes, prophets, and wars over the souls of humankind to make sense of--and often those who attempt it write even more confusing explications requiring quadruple the length of the original.
But there is a set of interpretive keys, and we have to assume that the messages were plain to the original intended recipients--that John the Revelator and the early churches he was writing to shared the same code for all the references we no longer get. So we can't make the facile assumption the postmodernists do: that the message is lost in signifiers all the way down.
Backing up a step, Swiss father of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, rearticulated and modified a key insight about symbolism and interpretation that may have hearkened back to Plato: the idea that behind each word we use, there is a projection we are trying to connect to it--a concept, a thing, a reference. If I isolate the English word "tree" for example, it's because I want you to imagine a tall, living, wooden structure with a trunk, branches, and leaves or needles, usually green in general color, and often useful for climbing or chopping down for construction materials or fires. This is not ground-shaking as an insight--we intuitively get the point that words mean things--but now connect it to a pair of twin implications: a. that there's nothing natural connecting the monosyllabic sound string "tree" to the object it invokes (because if there were, every other language would use some recognizable local pronunciation of the same sound string, rather than an entirely different string); and b. that the presence of the word necessitates the absence of its referent (we can refer to present objects with the nouns that signify them without simply pointing, but even then the words point to an ideal we imagine, rather than the actual physical object right in front of us, which is merely an exemplar of the idea). These two things give us some deeper theoretical tools to play around with. If a sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, and the signified is always merely a concept, never an actual object, and if the connection between signifier and signified is always arbitrary, then maybe the signified itself is merely a signifier for some deeper idea. And even further, if we do enough work to shift the social meaning convention, we can even enforce a new signified to attach to a previously stable signifier through shifting the social meaning conventions.
These theoretical insights are the ball the postmodernists ran with when they spoke of simulacra, deconstruction, and the death of absolute truths. Their linguistic turn noticed how nearly all of the meaning-making processes we use to make sense of the world--on a grander scale than an individual word--rely on this same arbitrary connection between signifier and signified, and its concomitant socially constructed nature. Morality, religion, politics, nationality, gender, class, many of these "grand narratives" are structured like stories we tell ourselves, whose base units are described by this fundamental signifier-signified relationship. And if that follows, then postmodernists can note how, as symbols proliferate, society evolves to ignore more and more of their bottom--the signified gets lost--until we have memes of memes, but don't know the characters from the movies they were freeze-framed from. Worse, we don't care. The original characters, plot, backstories, relationships--in brief, their context--no longer contribute to the meme's current meaning, and we are therefore free to make meaning without the constraints of context. Everyone gets their own truth. Perspectives have no claim to privilege--all are equally relevant and valuable. There is is no anchor point tethering reality to subjective interpretation, because it's all either irredeemably subjective or hopelessly arbitrary all the way down--there's no there there. What's important isn't reality, because reality is impossible to touch--instead what matters is the stories we tell ourselves.
Here's one concrete example: The Rock sitting in the driver's seat of his taxi, looking back at a blonde teenager saying something surprising is a malleable enough image to support any surprising message. It has become a meme that comes up frequently with fresh new connections to some current thing in politics or pop culture, and people laugh about how apt it is to describe the current glaring hypocrisy of a politician, or the current shock normal people feel about a surprising news story. It doesn't matter what the current issue is, the image demonstrates its shocking nature. People have shared various versions of it on social media for hundreds of different issues. But no one remembers that the original surprise wasn't the content of anything she said--everything she said was completely normal and appropriate for the context--it was her presence. She and her brother were already known to the audience as alien beings who merely looked human, but possessed superhuman powers. The Rock's confusion was not coming from any clues his character could put his fingers on, but was memorable for the audience who knew that he should be suspicious. If the image had stayed true to context, it would have to be limited to a smaller range of surprise types than the ones the meme has ended up covering. It has taken on a life of its own, and people make meaning from it without care to attach it to only surprises where the audience is already in on the gag (although some still use it for that).
In a similar way, between the tendency for people to allow oft-repeated references like scriptures to take on a life of their own independent of their original context and the tendency for genres to define culture-specific conventions for the parameters of meaning-making, the symbolism in the Book of Revelation poses a huge danger of eisegesis. What a blessing then that we have section 77 in which Joseph Smith asks the Lord direct, pointed questions about some interpretive keys, and in which we get succinct, direct answers that restore some of them.
I won't detail each of the questions and answers because the text is plain on its own, and because I'd be tempted to do a thorough walkthrough of each symbol specifically--too long for this post. But please note one thing as you do your own re-reading of Revelation with the D&C 77 interpretive keys back in place--please note the Christ-centered story of triumph and encouragement it represents, granting Christians a hope that has endured nearly two millennia already knowing how the war plays out, and which is the winning side--take a step back and notice the genre of what you're reading. There are bold declarations, personal directives, heart-warming examples of personal touches, fire and brimstone speeches, careful and succinct explanations of doctrine and untwisting of false doctrine, encouragements and expressions of trust, and instructional passages outlining practices and parameters of rituals and offices within the 76 Sections we've previously read. There is no other example of a study guide quite like this. The others impart knowledge, inspire awe, and connect theory to practice, this one is ancient symbology test-prep. The others we have to read to prepare to understand and obey, this one we have to read to re-read, or maybe read to check ourselves to ensure we are interpreting correctly. It's an invitation to identify with a prophet--a truth seeker conversing with the Lord--and a manual about how to come to Him prepared with specific questions, and expect clear and unexpected responses. It's a genre that seems to quickly settle matters others have spun wild opinions upon, and to remind us that there is a bottom, there is a key, there is a context, original authorial intent matters, and never just write off what seems hopelessly hermetic, because the Lord wants you to understand and will help you get what He means.
The Lord gave us a vision of things to come through His servant John, and the elements of the story are instructive, and available. There is a decipherable meaning to all prophecy, which is for our profit and learning, but not our private interpretations. The postmodernists aren't wrong that meaning is made through symbols and conventional connections, and that perception of stimuli is filtered through narrative, but the conclusion that there is no truth at bottom is fundamentally either lazy or cynical--do the work, follow the directions, believe the bottom's depths can come into focus as we approach the Source of Truth with honesty, and line upon line it will be added unto you. We are learning His language, He isn't beholden to ours.
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