To know in the biblical sense

Isn’t it interesting that this phrase has the idiomatic meaning that it does, today? We joke sometimes about “knowing” someone in the biblical sense–and in those jokes we’re referring to the passages in the Bible where a man and woman are said, almost euphemistically to our ears, to “know” one another. By “knowing,” the text often means, sexually.

But that idiomatic, perhaps euphemistic, meaning, has a deeper meaning, too. To “know” in the biblical sense is not to just know something in our brains, intellectually, but to experience it, to engage deeply with it, to intensely come to understand it from the inside out.

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