Hyperbole in the Bible

Nonsense. Your research was a complete waste of time. I don't want to know the details. You may have found some buffoon who had that stuff on his web site, but you might as well have been reading about General Relativity on Conservapedia.Would it not be hyperbole if I said that "I was hungry enough to eat a live frog?" Is that feat impossible or merely so ridiculously improbable and difficult to believe, that few would take it literally?From Hyperbole in English: A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration By Claudia Claridge (Emphasis and typos added by me)

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Hyperboles involving extremes are the most obvious to recognise (often without or with only minimal context) and perhaps the most frequent, but hyperbole can use any part of the scale in order to express something bigger, more, etc., than is the case,as long as the contrast between what is and the stated point is significant, i.e., large enough... It is impossible to fix a general lower limit for hyperbole

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I'll admit that I didn't read much of Bailey's post, and it is possible that I missed some sarcasm. If so, I apologize in advance for being an osmium head.

Just because the method can often be applied by inspection does not mean that were using Justice Stewart's "I know it when I" see it standard. But yes, actually seeing the language is part of the method, but so is a bit of analysis.Figurative language is merely language that is not intended to be taken literally. I described two methods for identifying figurative language. 1) Comparing the literal meaning of the words with the context. 2) Identifying idioms commonly in use by the writers. You may or may not be able to perform those two steps by mere inspection.My proposition is that using those two methods catches the vast majority of literary devices used in the Bible. There will be some false negatives and false positives, but the method is fairly reliable, which is all that I promised.

Wrong. Whether or not eating a live frog is understood to be an exaggeration depends on the audience. But whether or not the speaker was exaggerating depends only on the speaker's intent. For some audiences it may be necessary to use a particular inedible/venomous species of frog.Is the distinction between hypebole and exaggeration really all that important?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

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Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance. In this broader sense, antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile would all be considered types of metaphor.

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I have to take a nit picking issue with the above statement. Simile is defined in a way that it is completely distinct in form from metaphor. I have no problem with using metaphor in the broader sense used here, but when we do so, we should be aware that using this broader definition to refute earlier arguments that metaphor, exaggeration, and hyperbole are all metaphors is equivocation. Apologetics has a negative connotation only because of a fairly recent attempts to pass off creation science and intelligent design as real science. But every person who believes that a miracle as described in the Bible literally occurred must use apologetics when defending his belief. Or maybe the encounter involved some/most but not all of the Amelekites on earth. I don't see how we can apply your principle to this particular text until we rule out at least the most likely possibilities that the text is literal true.