ABSTRACT
Vision is an important biblical concept that occurs frequently in the Scriptures and is involved in some of the key episodes of the biblical narrative. Similar to how the notion of mental imagery was broadened in the scientific domain to include different modalities and cognitive functions, visionary experiences in the Bible also subsume a much wider scope than one would initially expect. It will be shown that biblical vision constitutes more than divinely inspired images received by prophets and marked with explicit visual imagery terminology. Auditions, dreams, visitations and certain revelations may also belong to the broad domain of vision, since they involve receiving divine communication that utilises the faculty of mental imagery, and there is good reason to also extend the “visionary mode” to prophetic perception in general. In the final part, we address the question of how initial visionary experiences are related to the specific vision reports recorded in Scripture. It will be argued that several confounding factors are involved in the way an initial visionary experience is conveyed to readers in the written canon, and as a result, vision reports unavoidably carry the mark of their recipients in one way or another.
