Metaphor Problems
"the pot calling the kettle black"
As a person who enjoys poetry, I appreciate metaphors and idioms. They are a way to convey messages. But if I were to approach an idiom like a scientist—take the phrase apart and analyze the words separately—I might miss the message an idiom is trying to convey.
For example, let’s say that while I’m making dinner, I’m snacking on my ingredients. I crunch the raw vegetables, sample roasted potatoes, and test my broth. Let’s say my husband, Phil, comes in, sees dinner isn’t ready, opens the snack drawer, and grabs a fistful of crackers.
“Don’t eat those!” I say, “You’ll spoil your dinner. Besides, I’m almost done.”
Let’s say my husband has been watching me sample my ingredients, and so he replies, “Looks like the pot is calling the kettle black!” And then he races out with the crackers. This is an entirely made-up scenario, by the way. We do not stoop to these levels (hehehe).
Let’s say I record this event in my journal: “Phil and I had another disagreement in the kitchen today because he was snacking right before dinner. He said I was the pot calling the kettle black. But every good cook tastes his dishes before serving them.”
If someone were to read my journal, they would understand the idiom “the pot calling the kettle black.” We understand English and can piece together the context from what we read.
Now, let’s pretend that 2,000 years from now, someone is trying to understand what I wrote in my journal. These people from the future do not know English or the context, but they’ve had my journal translated and they’ve read some American History. They know that Americans once called people of African-American descent black, and that for a time we own slaves from Africa.
Let’s say these future people have also learned that upper-class Americans hired slaves and servants to do their cooking.
Thus, if they were interpreting my journal with this limited information, without the proper context or an understanding of English, they might deduce that the idiom “the pot calling the kettle black” has to do with snacking, dinner, and slaves. They might think my husband was calling me a slave for tasting ingredients. They might think that snacking before meals is only something slaves and servants do. They might think that tasting one’s food before dinner must be done by slaves.
If these future people thought my journals were instructions for life, they might think I meant that only servants can snack before meals. Or maybe the commandment is: don’t spoil your dinner; it’s a low-down thing to do. Which is true. Don’t spoil your dinner by snacking, especially if I’m cooking. But that’s not what the journal entry meant. Without the context and an understanding of English idioms, the meaning gets lost.
It sounds like this may be happening with the New Testament and Paul’s use of the word “head.” Do we understand how the Greek word “head” was used in Koine Greek? Do we understand the relationship between men and women at that time? Do we understand the meaning behind the words that Paul was using or are we getting stuck on the words themselves and using our twenty-first-century values to interpret what we think Paul was writing to the churches? How might we discover the truth?
It seems like we have access to enough ancient texts and databases to discover what the real meaning of “head” is.