God has a long nose.
I realize how that sounds, so let me say it again properly. When Moses hides in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God passes by, God proclaims his own name:
“The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.”
(Exodus 34:6)
Where your English Bible says “slow to anger,” the Hebrew says God is erech apayim, “long of nostrils.” Your English Bible is not wrong. In Hebrew, anger lives in the nose. The same word, af, means both “nostril” and “fury,” and the reason is easy to picture: a bull before it charges, head lowered, nostrils flared and snorting. The rage shows up in the nose before it shows up anywhere else. It flares there, the way we say someone’s blood boils or their temper flashes. Nobody thinks blood reaches an actual boil. Nobody in ancient Israel pictured the Almighty with impressive nostrils. They heard what we hear when a friend says, “Count to ten.” A long nose is a long fuse, and a bull with a nose that long never quite gets around to charging.
But notice what the picture does that the explanation cannot. “Slow to anger” is a fact about God. A long nose is a story about you. It means the fire has a long way to travel. It means that between your worst day and heaven’s response there is distance, built in on purpose, measured in mercy. Israel would test that distance for a thousand years. So would I. So will you.
This is how Hebrew talks. It would rather show you a picture than hand you a definition, because definitions inform you, but pictures involve you. The Bible rarely says “God is patient” and leaves it there. It says God’s nose is long. It says he carried Israel through the wilderness “as a father carries his son” (Deuteronomy 1:31). It says mercy comes from the womb, because the Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, grows straight out of rechem, a mother’s womb. God’s mercy, in Hebrew, is the feeling a mother has toward what her body carried. You do not analyze that. You feel it somewhere below the ribs, which is exactly where Hebrew aims.
So here is the rule, and it may be the most enjoyable rule in this book: when the Bible hands you a picture, do not rush to trade it for a concept. Stand in front of it a while, the way you would stand in front of a painting. Ask what it shows before you ask what it proves. The concept is the receipt. The picture is the meal.
A Short Gallery of Hebrew Pictures
Since we are standing in a gallery, let me walk you past a few more frames.
Israel is stiff-necked (Exodus 32:9). Not “stubborn” in the abstract: an ox that locks its neck against the yoke, so that no pull of the reins can turn it. Any farmer in Moses’s audience winced at the picture, because a stiff-necked animal is useless to its owner and a danger to itself. The word for a heart problem is a farming problem.
Hearts and ears can be uncircumcised. Moses pleads, “Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer” (Deuteronomy 10:16), and Jeremiah diagnoses his generation with uncircumcised ears (Jeremiah 6:10). Most modern translations tidy Jeremiah’s picture into “closed” ears, which is accurate the way a taxidermied lion is a lion. The picture says more: there is a covering that was supposed to come off, a sign of covenant that never reached the organ that needed it most. A man can be circumcised in the one place that satisfies the surgeon and uncircumcised everywhere it counts.
Your kidneys have opinions. “Even at night my heart instructs me,” says Psalm 16:7 in the NIV, but David wrote that his kelayot instruct him: his kidneys. The King James, bless it, says “my reins.” Ancient Israel located the deepest self in the gut and the kidneys, the hidden organs, the ones you cannot flex or display. Where we moderns point to the head or the heart, Hebrew points deeper and darker, to the parts of you only God has ever seen.
Your soul, meanwhile, begins at the throat. The Hebrew nefesh, usually translated “soul,” is in its most physical sense the throat and the breath that passes through it, which is why a drowning David can cry, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck” (Psalm 69:1), same word. A Hebrew soul is not a pale ghost temporarily inconvenienced by a body. It is the needy, breathing, thirsty self: souls in the Bible get hungry, get tired, and get waterlogged. Whatever you were taught about the soul, the word itself starts with your windpipe.
A horn is strength. “My shield and the horn of my salvation” (Psalm 18:2): the picture is an ox or a wild bull at full charge, head down. A horn is the animal’s power concentrated into a point. When Hannah and Mary sing about horns being lifted up or the proud being scattered, they are talking about power changing hands, in barnyard language everyone understood.
God has a face, and what the face does is the whole relationship. The blessing Israel’s priests still pronounce asks that “the LORD make his face shine on you” and “turn his face toward you” (Numbers 6:25-26): the picture is a parent’s face lighting up when one particular child walks into the room. Its dark opposite, the hidden face, is the Bible’s picture for warmth withdrawn for a season (“God’s wrath”). Theology textbooks file this under divine favor. The Hebrew just watches the face.
And God has an arm. Every Passover, Israel retells its salvation in body language: “the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 26:8). A systematic theology would say that God acted decisively in history. Israel’s creed does not define omnipotence; it shows you an arm with its sleeve rolled up.
A house can be a dynasty, and on that double meaning hangs one of the finest plays on words in the Bible. David, finally at rest in his cedar palace, offers to build God a house. God’s answer through Nathan begins with a gentle tease: “Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in?” (2 Samuel 7:5), and then turns the word around: “The LORD himself will establish a house for you” (2 Samuel 7:11). David is thinking architecture; God is thinking genealogy. David offers cedar; God counter-offers sons, a line of them, leading where all of Scripture leads. The whole theology of the Messiah, son of David, rides on a pun about real estate.
And because the Bible is more polite than many of its readers: when King Eglon’s servants find the door locked, they assume their king “must be relieving himself” (Judges 3:24). The Hebrew says, delicately, that he is “covering his feet,” which is what a man in a robe does in that situation. The King James kept the idiom; most modern versions explain it. Either way, you have just learned that the Hebrew Bible has a euphemism for the bathroom, which means it has manners, and also that it is funnier than your Sunday school let on.
One gallery, nine frames, and not an abstraction in sight. Noses, necks, kidneys, throats, horns, faces, arms: the Hebrew Bible talks about God and the soul in the vocabulary of a body, because bodies are the one dictionary every reader owns. That is not an accident of style. It is a theory of knowledge, and it is the next stop.
Why Pictures?
When the Hebrew Scriptures want to teach you something, they almost never hand you a definition. They hand you a story, a scene, a smell. Ask the Bible “what is monarchy, and should Israel have one?” and it does not produce a treatise on political theory. It produces Saul, a head taller than everyone and hollow at the center, and then David, radiant and ruinous, and lets you watch both reigns to the end. By the last page of Kings you hold a more honest political science than most lectures could give you, and you learned it the way humans actually learn: by watching people.
The Psalms do the same thing with theology itself. “Taste and see that the LORD is good” (Psalm 34:8). Not “conclude and affirm.” Taste and see. The Bible’s theory of knowledge is a dinner invitation. It does not define love; it feeds you lamb and tells you a story until you cry, and that is the definition.
Ask Scripture what love is, in so many words, and the closest it comes to a lecture is a poem: “love is as strong as death… It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame” (Song of Songs 8:6). The Bible’s marriage counseling smells of vineyards and henna. It has outlasted every diagram.
There is a practical genius in this. Pictures travel. A definition is fragile cargo: it depends on its century’s vocabulary, its philosophy, its fashions. A picture crosses millennia with its luggage intact. Thirty centuries later, a shepherd still makes sense to a child in Seoul or São Paulo. Aristotle requires a syllabus.
Knowing the Way Hebrew Knows
Go one level deeper and the pictures turn out to be hiding a whole philosophy.
Take the Hebrew verb “to know,” yada. It covers knowing a fact, knowing a craft, and knowing a person, all the way up to the most intimate knowing there is: “Adam knew Eve his wife,” says the King James of Genesis 4:1, “and she conceived.” (The NIV translates “made love to,” which is accurate and slightly embarrassed.) The same verb that counts sheep also conceives Cain. That is not sloppiness. It is a claim: that real knowledge is not a spectator sport, and that to know something truly is to be involved with it, changed by it, answerable to it.
Now listen to what that does to the prophets. When Hosea indicts his generation, the charge sheet reads: “no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land” (Hosea 4:1), and when he names what God actually wants, it is “acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6). The word behind “acknowledgment” is da’at, knowledge, the noun of yada. Hosea is not complaining that Israel failed theology class. He is a husband describing a marriage. That is why the book’s great accusation is not “ignorance” but “adultery.” In Hebrew, not knowing God is not a gap in your education. It is a betrayal in your covenant.
Or take truth itself. The Hebrew word is emet, and it grows from the same root family as amen and emunah, “faithfulness”: a root whose physical sense is firmness, something solid enough to lean on. When you say “amen” to a prayer, you are not saying “I find that statement logically valid.” You are putting your weight on it, the way you put weight on a bridge. Greek asks of a claim: is it airtight? Hebrew asks: will it hold me? One tests for leaks in the argument. The other tests for load.
Even remembering is a muscle movement in this language. When the flood story turns, it turns on one sentence: “But God remembered Noah… and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded” (Genesis 8:1). God had not misplaced Noah’s file. In Hebrew, to remember, zakhor, is to act on someone’s behalf; remembering starts engines. Which is worth carrying with you the next time you hear a rabbi from Nazareth lift the cup and say, do this in remembrance of me. He is not asking to be thought about fondly. He is asking, in good Hebrew, to be remembered the way God remembers: with wind and receding waters.
And even “peace” is a picture once you dig to its root. Shalom is not the absence of noise; it grows from a root that means wholeness, a thing with no missing pieces. Modern Hebrew still runs on the picture: when an Israeli pays a bill, the verb is le’shalem, to make whole, to restore what was lacking. So when the priestly blessing we visited in the gallery ends by asking God to “give you peace,” it is not requesting a quiet afternoon. It is asking that nothing in you be missing. Try fitting that into a definition without losing the music.
Both are gifts, and both are in your Bible, because the church was born bilingual. But it is worth saying out loud, gently, that the church grew up mostly in one of those languages. Within a few generations, the people reading Israel’s Scriptures were trained in Greek definitions and Greek logic, and they met the faith of Jesus in translation. Much was gained; the creeds are real achievements. But something slipped: the instinct to stand in front of the picture. We will visit the full story of that slippage later in this book. For now it is enough to notice which question your own tradition trained you to ask first: is it airtight, or will it hold me?
One honest guardrail before we go further, because I can hear a linguist clearing her throat. None of this means Hebrew speakers cannot do logic; the Talmud is one long logic seminar with snacks. And none of it means Greek speakers cannot tell stories; ask Homer. Language is not destiny, and grammar does not program the brain. The claim here is smaller and sturdier: the Bible’s diet is pictures, and a reader raised on definitions and Roman categories will misjudge a book that speaks in images, the way a man who reads only receipts will misjudge a love letter.
The Rabbi Who Spoke in Pictures
If Rule #5 needed a patron, it would be Jesus.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
(Matthew 19:24)
That is not a measurement; it is a cartoon, drawn on purpose: the largest animal in the country and the smallest opening in the house. The disciples’ jaws drop, which was the point. (You may have heard of a famous explanation involving a small gate in Jerusalem’s wall called the Needle’s Eye, through which a camel could pass if it knelt. It is beloved, it is preached every year, and it is fake. Chapter twelve holds the funeral; bring flowers.)
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
(Matthew 7:3)
Remember who is talking: a builder, a man who had spent years around beams and sawdust. This is a carpenter’s joke, told by a carpenter, complete with workshop props. The crowd laughed, and then stopped laughing, which is what the best jokes do.
I am the vine. You are the salt of the earth. A door, a shepherd, a hen gathering her chicks. And then there is the yoke. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” he says, “for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). We hear a farm tool. His first hearers heard their own prayer life, because in the Mishnah, to recite the Shema is to “accept upon himself the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven,” and to live the commandments is to take up “the yoke of the mitzvot.” Torah as a yoke was never an insult. A yoke is how an animal shares its master’s work and walks a straight furrow. Into that world steps a rabbi who says: mine fits. Mine will not chafe you. Pull with me, and the field gets plowed and your shoulders survive. A picture, resting on an older picture, answering a question every laborer in the Galilee carried in his body.
Jesus teaches the way his Scriptures taught him: picture first, and often picture only. To read him flat, scanning his sentences for extractable doctrines, is to miss that you are reading poetry delivered by a builder. The kingdom of God suffers no shortage of theologians. Its founder preferred painters.
How This Rule Gets Broken
Every rule in this book earns its keep by what happens when it is ignored, and this one is no exception. The failure mode is simple: somebody takes a picture and files it as furniture.
Consider Psalm 91:4: “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.” Here is the remarkable thing: in all the centuries Christians have loved that verse, there has never been a denomination of the Feathered God. Zero. Readers meet the image, feel the warmth of it, a bird’s fierce tenderness over her nest, and nobody drafts a doctrine of divine plumage. Which proves something important: readers are perfectly capable of handling metaphor. The machinery works.
The trouble starts when a tradition needs the picture to be furniture: when a debate hardens, and suddenly a hand must be a literal hand, a throne a literal throne, a fire a literal furnace, because somebody’s system requires it. The reader did not fail; the system leaned on the picture until it broke. Watch for the difference. It usually announces itself with the words “the Bible clearly says,” spoken while pointing at a poem.
So what do you do instead, practically, when a biblical image stops you? Three questions, in order. First: what would this picture mean to the people who first heard it, people who owned oxen and drew water and buried children? Second: what does it make you feel, because the feeling is usually the freight. Third: what does the surrounding text do with the picture, since the Bible is perfectly capable of explaining its own images when it wants to (ask Nathan’s lamb). Only after those three do you reach for a concept, and by then the concept will be the right one, and smaller than the picture it came from.
How to Read the Bible
When the Bible hands you a picture, stand in front of it before you translate it into a concept. Ask what it shows before what it proves.
Expect the body: noses, necks, kidneys, horns, wombs. Hebrew carries meaning in flesh, and the flesh is part of the message.
Let the verb “to know” keep its Hebrew warmth. Knowing God is covenant, not trivia; its opposite is not ignorance but unfaithfulness.
Test truth the Hebrew way too: not only “is it airtight?” but “will it hold my weight?”
When a teacher insists a biblical image must be literal furniture, ask who needs it to be, and why the text does not.
Three questions for any picture: what did it mean to its first hearers, what does it make you feel, and what does the text itself do with it. Concept last.
Pictures, then. Stand in front of them; let them work on you the way they worked on shepherds and kings. But pictures are made of words, and words are slippery little creatures with lives of their own. Before you can trust a picture, you have to catch the words that carry it. Bring a net. That is the next rule.
This was a free chapter from my book Read Like a Jew: 8 Rules of Basic Bible Interpretation for the Christian. If you enjoyed it, get the book. I think you will love it.
