Berman (Bible, Bar-Ilan U., Israel) begins by introducing and explaining narrative analogy and the metaphor plot and how those concepts are manifested and analyzed in biblical studies. Then he takes a
The Babylonian exile in 587-539 BCE is frequently presented as the main explanatory factor for the religious and literary developments found in the Hebrew Bible. The sheer number of both ‘historical’
This book examines the long-debated issue of the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern myths. Using an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology that combines theories of metaphor and narrative, Paul Cho argues that the Hebrew Bible is more deeply mythological than previously recognized. Because the Hebrew Bible contains fragments of the sea myth but no continuous narrative, the study of myth in the Hebrew Bible is usually circumscribed to the level of motifs and themes. Cho challenges this practice and demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible contains shorter and longer compositions studded with imagery that are structured by the plot of sea myths. Through close analysis of key Near Eastern myths and biblical texts, Cho shows that myth had a more fundamental influence on the plot structure and conceptual framework of the Hebrew Bible than has been recognized.
The Hebrew Bible offers a metaphor of marriage that portrays men and women as complementary, each with their distinct and 'natural' roles. Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebre
McWilliam (theology, U. of Exeter) has made only minor corrections and literature updates to his 2006 PhD dissertation for the University of Exeter. In it, he subjects the sexual imagery used to descr
Sin, often defined as a violation of divine will, remains a crucial idea in contemporary moral and religious discourse. The apparent familiarity of the concept, however, obscures its origins within th
Since the idea of the "kingdom of God" in the Bible's New Testament is generally assumed to be founded upon the understanding of Yahweh's kingship in Second Temple Judaism, which in turn is primarily
In this book, Yitzhaq Feder presents a novel and compelling account of pollution in ancient Israel, from its emergence as an embodied concept, rooted in physiological experience, to its expression as a pervasive metaphor in social-moral discourse. Feder aims to bring the biblical and ancient Near Eastern evidence into a sustained conversation with anthropological and psychological research through comparison with notions of contagion in other ancient and modern cultural contexts. Showing how numerous interpretive difficulties are the result of imposing modern concepts on the ancient texts, he guides readers through wide-ranging parallels to biblical attitudes in ancient Near Eastern, ethnographic, and modern cultures. Feder demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary and psychological research can be applied to ancient textual evidence. He also suggests a path of synthesis that can move beyond the polarized positions which currently characterize modern academic and popular debates beari
Taking Samuel as a case study, Weiss (Bible, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York) investigates what marks a sentence in the Bible as a metaphor, and how such a sentence differs
Aaron systematically examines God-related idioms in the Hebrew Bible to determine whether a particular idiom is meant to be understood metaphorically. Aaron challenges current methodologies that domin
This is the first attempt in biblical studies to apply the tools developed by theoreticians of metaphor to the common biblical metaphor of God as king. The extent to which elements of human kingship a
Sharon Moughtin-Mumby explores the complex, and potentially subversive, power of metaphor as a tool of persuasion in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. Often, such language is used to speak of t
