FIGURATED LANGUAGE
(a) FIGURATED LANGUAGE.
In the Bible, as in ordinary language, metaphors and figures of speech are used to express abstract concepts that escape the senses.
An example in ordinary language is when we talk about “high feelings” or “low thoughts.” These positional expressions taken from the physical world serve to qualify something that does not have positions, but with which we express its qualities in an understandable way.
It should be noted that these uses of language are to clarify and not to obscure. There are numerous figures of speech used in the Bible, coming from daily life and nature. The Lord used intense figurative language in his parables. Paul also uses it on various occasions, such as in the famous Christian armor passage (Eph. 6:11-17).
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus uses a series of vivid figurative language images: “hunger and thirst for righteousness”; “clean heart”; “you are the salt of the earth”; “you are the light of the world”, etc. (Matt. 5).
(b) LANGUAGE
Language in the proper sense (Ex. 11:7; Jas. 3:6; Jb. 29:10, etc.). The tongue is also a mode of expression, language (Gen. 10:5; Acts 2:8).
For a long time after the Flood, Noah’s descendants all spoke the same language (Gen. 11:1). The judgment that fell on men at Babel led to the confusion of their language and their dispersion throughout the earth (vv. 2-9). (See BABEL.) Noah’s descendants began to speak different languages and dialects.
The peoples that emerged from Japheth gave rise to the group of Indo-European languages (Gen. 10:25), which among others include: Sanskrit, Pracrit, and the neo-Hindu languages; the languages of Iran; ancient Greek and its modern derivatives; the Italic and Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Leto-Slavic languages; Armenian, Albanian.
The Semites initiated the different Semitic dialects (vv. 21-31), among others the Akkadian, including Babylonian and Assyrian, Aramaic (v. 22), Hebrew, Ethiopian