Personification is a literary device that assigns human traits to plants, animals, inanimate objects, abstract concepts, and impersonal beings. A writer or speaker using personification will treat something nonhuman as though it were a person with human qualities, physical features, and emotions. This technique, also called prosopopoeia, has been employed universally in every age of literary expression. The Bible contains countless examples of personification.
Scripture writers used personification to illustrate, add meaning, draw a connection, and better explain complex topics and intangible ideas. For example, by giving human qualities to wisdom and folly, the author of Proverbs draws the reader to choose between two paths, one that leads to abundant life and the other that ends in calamity.
Throughout biblical poetry, personification portrays forces of nature wearing clothes, singing, shouting, rejoicing, speaking, and revealing knowledge:
• “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge” (Psalm 19:1–2).
• “The seas have lifted up their voice” (Psalm 93:3).
• “Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it. Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy” (Psalm 96:11–12).
Personification depicts body parts such as the lips, mouth, and tongue as walking, strutting, boasting, setting fire, and being restless:
• “They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth” (Psalm 73:9, ESV).
• “The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. . . . The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil. . . . It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. . . . It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:5–8).
Personification allows abstract concepts such as destruction and death to “speak,” sin to “crouch” and “give birth,” and desire to “conceive”:
• “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7).
• “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15).
Using personification, virtues such as love, faithfulness, righteousness, peace, and wisdom come alive:
• “Out in the open wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square; on top of the wall she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech” (Proverbs 1:20–21).
Inanimate objects take on relatable human characteristics through personification:
• “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).
When emotions are personified, the effect is a heightened emotive impact:
• “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5, ESV).
• “Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
Collective personification in the Bible highlights God’s relationship with different people groups. The “nations rage” against the Lord’s anointed (Psalm 2:1–2), Jerusalem is empty and alone “like a widow” (Lamentations 1:1), and “Zion spreads out her hands” in suffering (Lamentations 1:17).
These examples only scratch the surface of the range of things personified in the Bible. Personification is a highly effective literary device that turns abstract ideas into vividly concrete images. An illness becomes more personal and terrifying when personified as “the disease that stalks in darkness” (Psalm 91:6, NLT). Blood that “cries out to me from the ground” depicts a more disturbing murder scene (Genesis 4:10). Whatever is personified becomes a person in our imagination, giving a face, feel, and voice to the endless array of life experiences.
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