Study
The featured studies
The studies in The Symbolism of Scripture, The World and the People In It, sorted by the kind of thing each one teaches.
Summary
The Symbolism of Scripture, The World and the People In It holds 24 of the site's 1112 featured studies, in 2 of the ten kinds.
- 5 studies ask where a place stood and what happened on that ground.
- 19 studies ask what one word or picture carries wherever Scripture uses it.
The studies by kind
The ground a story stands on: what was built there, what was found there, and what Scripture makes of the name afterwards.
5 studies, 4 as cards, 1 in the register
EdenThe garden read as the first sanctuary, with the river, the gold, the guarded east gate, and the tree that returns on the last page of Revelation.
BabylonOne city from the plain of Shinar to the last book of the Bible: the tower, the empire that burned the temple, and the name John gives every power that trades in souls.
The CityBabel, Sodom, Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem read as one line: what a city is for in Scripture, and what makes one stand or fall.
Outside the CampWhere the sin offering was burned, where the leper waited, and where Jesus died: one place in the law that Hebrews turns into a call.
The register: 1 more studies of this kind
Symbols and words
A picture or a word traced across the canon, from its first mention to the place it comes to rest.
19 studies, 0 as cards, 19 in the register
The register: 19 studies of this kind
- The Door & the GateThe door is Scripture's picture of controlled access: a way in that is real, single, and not always open.
- The Firstborn
- The Flesh'Flesh' in the New Testament does two jobs, and running them together produces a serious error in one direction and a lazy excuse in the other.
- The HarlotThis is the most uncomfortable image in the Bible, and it is regularly misread as an insult about sexual morals.
- The Heart
- The HouseA house in Scripture is two things at once, and the Hebrew makes it almost impossible to keep them apart: bayit is a building and a family, and it shares a root with the words for son, daughter and 'he built'.
- The Judge
- The KingIsrael is the only nation whose law describes its monarchy before the monarchy exists , and describes it in restrictions.
- The Mountain
- The Priest
- The RaceWhen Paul writes to Corinth about running a race, he is not reaching for a general picture of effort.
- The ShadowScripture uses 'shadow' for two things that sound like opposites.
- The ShepherdThe shepherd is the Bible's picture of someone responsible for lives that cannot look after themselves.
- The Stars
- The StoneThe stone is the Bible's picture of something fixed that a person has to do something about.
- The WatchmanA watchman in Scripture is the man on the wall at night.
- The Widow, the Orphan & the Stranger
- The Wilderness
- Zion & JerusalemZion enters the Bible as a piece of military real estate: one fortified hill inside one town, taken by David in a single sentence.
Keep studying
On this page
People and groups1
The text itself3
The roster is the site’s own build manifest, so no study can be missing from it. A study leads its kind when it carries a line of its own and more of the other studies link to it; a register row with no line of its own borrows the first sentence of the study’s own summary. The pictures are public domain: engravings by Gustave Doré from Doré’s English Bible(1866), and paintings held at Wikimedia Commons. Each is named in full on the study’s own page.