“Is this literal or figurative?”
That’s an important question to ask about any passage of scripture. Indeed, it’s fairly obvious that some things in the Bible are figurative (“I am the vine; you are the branches.”) and that some are literal (“Jesus wept.”)
And some are certainly slaves to literalism, while others recognize that both types of language are used.
But I think that we all still make the mistake of answering this question incorrectly from time to time. Indeed, the error seems to come quite often in simply not asking the question about a passage we’re reading. We have a nasty habit of assuming that we “just know” (to quote Severus Snape).
Surely, there are passages that we always take as either literal or figurative, that were actually intended the other way. Are we not often surprised to find a deeper meaning in a passage than we had previously thought it to have? Yet we miss these things when our reading is not a re-examination, but a mere recital.
I think we should always ask the question of every verse we read.
