Answer
Hyperbole is an extreme exaggeration, usually employed for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic expressions are a type of figurative language and are quite common in everyday conversation. Statements such as I’m so hungry I could eat a horse, she waited forever, and he hit that ball a mile are examples of hyperbole.
To be considered hyperbole, an exaggeration must be outlandish to the point of being ridiculous. The statement “I entered the room to find twenty other people crammed in” could be literal—there were actually twenty people present—but it could also be an overstatement—maybe there were only fifteen people there. To make the statement truly hyperbolic, and not just an overstatement, we could say, “I entered the room to find a million other people crammed in.” Such a declaration is obviously not intended to be taken literally; it is hyperbole.
Hyperbole is often found in literature, when an author wants to heighten the effect of his words. Hyperbole can add vibrancy and magnitude to any piece of writing. Hyperbole in literature can produce a serious or comic effect, or it can be used for satirical or ironic purposes. Examples of hyperbole used as a literary device include the following:
• “Thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick).
• “The men’s room had bacteria you could enter in a rodeo” (Dave Barry, “Batting Clean-up and Striking Out”).
• “There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County” (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird).
• “I was quaking from head to foot, and could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far” (Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi).
As a rhetorical device, hyperbole is often used to stress the importance (or unimportance) of a point or simply to arouse interest. Instances of hyperbole in Scripture serve a rhetorical purpose. Hyperbole in the Bible was succinctly described by E. W. Bullinger as “when more is said than is literally meant” (Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, Baker, 1968, p. 423).
Here are several examples of hyperbole in the teaching of Jesus:
“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?” (Luke 6:41).
Jesus’ striking word picture of a “plank” (or a “a beam of timber” or a “large log”) in the eye is an obvious exaggeration meant to emphasize our tendency to criticize others while blinded to our own faults.
“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” (Mark 10:25).
The point of Jesus’ hyperbole is that monetary wealth makes it extremely difficult to see one’s spiritual need.
“If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:29–30).
The Lord is not literally advising anyone to amputate hands or pluck out eyeballs; He is using hyperbole to stress the importance of avoiding sin.
“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3).
It’s not possible for one hand to be unaware of what the other hand is doing, so Jesus’ words are obviously hyperbolic, stressing the need for unselfish motives.
Some other instances of hyperbole in the Bible are as follows:
“We even saw giants there. . . . Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!” (Numbers 13:33, NLT).
The ten faithless spies sent into Canaan used hyperbole to sway their hearers against entering the Promised Land.
“Among all these soldiers there were seven hundred select troops who were left-handed, each of whom could sling a stone at a hair and not miss” (Judges 10:16).
It’s not that these slingers could literally hit a single hair; rather, these troops were exceptionally good marksmen.
“The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River” (Mark 1:5).
John the Baptist was widely known, and his influence was felt throughout Judea. It’s the statement that everyone in Jerusalem was baptized by John that is hyperbolic.
“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written” (John 21:25).
This beautiful, poignant statement at the end of the Gospel of John is an obvious example of hyperbole. With these words, John “intended to let his reader know that, even now that he had done, he felt his materials so far from being exhausted, that he was still running over, and could multiply ‘Gospels’ to almost any extent within the strict limits of what ‘Jesus did’” (Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown, A Commentary, Critical, Practical, and Explanatory on the Old and New Testaments, 1885).
As with any figure of speech, hyperbole needs to be recognized for what it is so that we do not take it literally. A useful rhetorical device, hyperbole increases the intensity of the Bible’s warnings, aids our understanding, and adds fascinating complexity to an already rich text.
