Customer Reviews

The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Essential Guide for Recognizing and Interpreting Symbols of the Gospel

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After reading/studying this book you will understand the Bible more fully than before. Colors, numbers, names, events, etc. take on a meaning and understanding that highten, enlighten, and underscore the meaning and interpretation of the people, events, miracles, parables, metaphors, similies, and allegories contained in the Bible.

Most of my life I have read snippets on symbolism especially related to the scriptures in various commentaries and brought up in discussions in classes, but have never read a good general summary of symbols until now. I received this book as a gift, and was initially not too interested, but started to read it anyway during some convalescence. It turned out to be a very good read, not too deep, but covered a lot of symbolism in a nice organized way. The chapters on numerology and directions were very interesting to me. I had often taken numbers too literally in the scriptures. The ancient meaning of directions was also interesting and added a lot to my understanding of certain scriptural passages. The other chapters covered names, animals, colors, and other symbols. I highly recommend this book for someone wanting a quick overview of symbols that will greatly aid them in their understanding of the gospel.

This is one of the best LDS books on symbolism available. I love this book and have recommended it to friends and family.
I won't repeat what the other reviewers have said, but I find that symbolism is very often overlooked in our "quick fix" society. This book helped me to get a different perspective on the scriptures. I had a new perspective on reading more interpretively. I agreed with most of the author's interpretations, but more importantly learned a new perpective which to interpret scriptures.

Awesome!

I had no idea about the many symbolic things were have in the gospel. It is interesting to learn about symbolism and to be able to teach my children. This book helped me prepare my son for the temple.

This book is intended for an L.D.S. (Mormon) audience and is organized as something of a dictionary of symbols (loosely defined to include the meaning of names) where readers can look up a symbol and see its meaning. The basic premise is that readers need to be able to understand what items in the Bible and Book of Mormon may have meant to the authors or those texts and to their period readers. Gaskill argues that modern readers do not appreciate the symbolism of these texts and therefore miss out on the deeper meaning of scriptural texts. This is a fine premise, as far as it goes, but Gaskill's book has some serious flaws, both in its concept and its implementation.

The first, and most irritating, flaw is that the book is largely NOT about the symbolism of the texts: instead it is about Gaskill's readings of the text inspired by symbolic meanings. As such, the book is full of countless extended sermonettes on modern doctrinal issues that make only tenuous reference to the symbols in question, such as a passage that addresses the symbolism of aprons but spins out into a diatribe against birth control, surely an issue not high on the list of topics thought about in anitquity). Whatever one may think about the theology espoused, such digressions are not about understanding the texts on their own terms, but rather about trying to score doctrinal points and make the texts "mean" things that in many cases are highly unlikely.

The second problem with the book is the underlying assumption that one can identify *the* meaning of symbols and say what they mean in a dictionary format. Most of the listings specify one meaning, treating symbols as essentially a kind of code to hide a single recoverable meaning from the text. I would argue, however, that this approach encourages a kind of covert literalism and absolutism in reading that does not do the texts justice since symbols provide an interpretive tool that allows them to be fundamentally polyvalent and resistent to superficial equivalences of any sort. By stating this, I am not arguing that one should *not* know about the meanings that Biblical authors may have intended, but rather that one needs to be open to the *range* of meaning available and to the inherently open nature of the texts. Symbols are used not to hide a single recoverable meaning, but instead to open the text up to generate meanings. (This stance, I should note, does run contrary to the essentially fundamentalist interpretive strategies employed by many L.D.S. readers, so many potential readers would disagree with me on this point.)

Next, the book is full of basic errors and speculative readings. As an example of the former, Gaskill states that the name Felix means "deceptive" or "deceitful." With a PhD in Biblical Studies, Gaskill should know better: certainly any first year Latin student would know that Felix simply means "happy" (whence English "felicitious" and "felicitations"). The speculative readings Gaskill employs are odder, for in some cases he simply asserts things that are simple unknowable (e.g., the name Sherem in the Book of Mormon means "pugnosed" and refers to the appearance of the individual in question - which raises the question of where Gaskill got his early Nephite dictionary), or that are based on rather dubious sources (e.g., his analysis of "weasel" as immoral people seems to be based on the Epistle of Barnabus, which specify that weasels are a symbol for women who engage in oral sex). There was scarcely a page I looked at that did not have something that was obviously an error or which stated a speculative conclusion as though it were fact.

In sum, the level of analysis in this book is such that it would get drummed out of an introductory religious studies course. I wonder what sort of review DB engaged in before deciding to publish the book since basic errors slipped through. I realize that this is no worse than some of the books put forth by Zondervan (which plays a role similar to that of DB, but for an evangelical audience), but the book is endorsed and produced in a way that makes it look like it is a popular scholarly account (including a glowing endorsement by J.F. McConkie). As such I think it is fundamentally misleading since the book does not meet even basic scholarly standards.