The Motif of God’s Wrath in Zephaniah’s Prophecy about the Day of Yahweh (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ch. Goodblatt - H. Kreisel (eds.), "Reading the Bible in the Pre-Modern World: Interpretation, Performance and Image" (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2021), pp. 379-409.
It is evident, and acknowledged by a vast critical tradition, that the literary image of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is loaded with inner contradictions and ambiguities that are often left unsolved. The most relevant tension of this kind is possibly the one between the divine qualities of wrath and mercy. How did post-biblical Judaism, in its various forms and traditions of knowledge, try to make sense of this ambiguity within God himself both as a literary character and a religious concept? Answers can be found in early Rabbinic homiletic-exegetical tradition (targum and midrash) about such Biblical narratives as the destruction of Sodom and the punishment for the worshippers of the golden calf. Here, the aim of conveying a consistent, reassuring image of God to the masses is pursued by stressing only one aspect of his literary personality, usually his mercy, though sometimes also his severity is exhalted and preached. A deeper awareness of God’s ambiguities is seen in early Rabbinic mysticism as attested in some passages of the Talmud. Later, an articulate doctrine of divine wrath is formulated in the Zohar, where the idea of an “other side” of God – an idea that could easily generate dualistic theologies – finds mediation and solution in the representation of the Godhead as an organism, and is ultimately credited with a positive role. Early Qabbalah conceives of God’s inner tension as a polarity or a dialectic between different energies—a conception that is most productively investigated by resorting to the categories of Jungian analytical psychology, such as those of syzygy and integration.
"My Wrath will Burn": The Terminology of Biblical Emotions
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2024
Two contradicting approaches provide the basis for the emerging field of the study of emotions in the Hebrew Bible. Both debate whether, and to what extent, modern categories and perceptions of emotions are valid and productive in biblical studies. This paper deals with some of the fundamental methodological issues that have arisen from this debate. It presents a novel philological inquiry into the semantics of ,חרה commonly considered to belong to a group of "terms for anger" in Biblical Hebrew. This analysis will show that חרה is semantically flexible, referring to emotions but also to actions; even when denoting an emotion, it is not always anger. A number of linguistic, contextual, and hierarchical parameters are proposed to facilitate the mapping of the diverse meanings of this verb. Finally, I conclude that the diverse senses of חרה derive from the same literal denotation, which receives its metaphorical meanings by using different prepositions in various interpersonal and human-divine contexts.
This article is a revision of my 2010 SBL Annual Meeting (Atlanta) presentation, “More on Covenant Vocabulary in Akkadian.” It is an extended reflection on the metaphorical (unemotional) aspect of human hate (zêru) in Akkadian. The introduction identifies the disparity between modern American and some ancient instances of hate. Modern hate functions with intense negative emotion, while the ancients understood a non-literal aspect to the word. This metaphorical aspect appears, when hate is used as a covenant vocabulary word. The article’s second part (“Love and Hate as Covenant Terms”) contextualizes the larger discussion, by highlighting interpreters (most notably, William L. Moran), who recognize the covenant nuance of love and hate. The third section presents a matrix for correctly interpreting metaphorical instances of hate and is followed by a brief conclusion.
"The Apotheosis of Rage: Divine Anger and the Psychology of Israelite Trauma"
Recent psychological research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has demonstrated that one of the most common symptoms of the disorder is heightened or even uncontrollable anger. In the past decade, various works in biblical studies have assessed the effects of trauma on the ancient Israelites and on the texts of the Hebrew Bible, but these have not fully explored either the connection between anger and PTSD or that between anger in the Hebrew Bible and Israelite trauma. This article seeks to demonstrate the close relationship between trauma and rage and argues that biblical authors often locate their own traumatized rage in the figure of Yahweh. The emotional response of Yahweh toward the Israelites is frequently presented as one of rage, blame, and contempt—a trio of socially distancing emotions. This depiction of Yahweh results in a “theology of distance” wherein Yahweh’s furious emotionality negates the sympathy of audiences toward the traumatized Israelites.
A cognitive linguistic approach to the emotion of anger in the Old Testament
This article reviews several approaches to the study of anger in the Old Testament. It focuses on the use of methodology in these trends with specific reference to the common neglect of Classical Hebrew terminology and expressions relating to the emotion of anger. Such styles lead to an impoverished understanding of the ideal cognitive model of anger as reflected in Classical Hebrew. By contrast, the few recent cognitive linguistic studies on the same subject prove to be far more successful in giving a detailed account of the ancient Israelite conceptualisation of this emotion.