Toward a Poetics of the Biblical Mind: Language, Culture, and Cognition (original) (raw)
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Selecting and Analyzing Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible: Cognitive Linguistics and the Literary
In Cognitive Linguistics, it is customary to stress the ubiquity of conceptual metaphors. In literary studies, however, critics tend to highlight the special character of specific metaphors in texts. Exegetes using the tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory have thus far been at odds with the ubiquity of conceptual metaphors in literary texts: do all conceptual metaphors (and they are many) deserve equal attention? Do they all equally affect the text and the reader’s experience? In this article, we study what is needed to discuss literary metaphors in Biblical Hebrew texts based on the theorems of cognitive linguistics. We combine Steen’s findings on the deliberate use of metaphor with those of Pilkington on the range and strength of mappings. As such, we introduce criteria to first select and subsequently analyze metaphors in the biblical corpus. We advocate for explicitness and illustrate our point with an example from the book of Job (6:14–21).
A Cognitive Linguistic Methodology for the Study of Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible
Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, 2005
This article puts forward a procedure for the identification and analysis of conceptual metaphor and metonymy in Classical Hebrew. It is designed to stimulate an appreciation for the figurative nature of Classical Hebrew and serve as a fitting tool to study idealised cognitive models of abstract phenomena, such as religion and emotion. This step-by-step routine should also help the student of Classical Hebrew guard against common errors in the translation and interpretation of the source language while focusing attention on the cultural basis of the metaphoric process.
Lexicography and Cognitive Linguistics: Hebrew Metaphors from a Cognitive Perspective
DavarLogos, 2004
Resumen En 2000 las Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas lanzaron un nuevo proyecto: A Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (de aquí en más SDBH). Este diccionario es, hasta cierto punto, comparable con el Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament de Louw y Nida, si bien su metodología es un tanto diferente. La obra de Louw y Nida está basada en el modelo semántico al que generalmente nos referimos como análisis componencial del lenguaje. Este nuevo diccionario se basa básicamente en perspectivas de la lingüística cognitiva. Como resultado de esto, la metodología subyacente está basada en una distinción entre los campos semánticos léxicos y contextuales. Este trabajo se concentra mayormente en la forma del SDBH de tratar las metáforas. En primer lugar se brindará una descripción de las metáforas y de otras extensiones del significado desde un punto de vista cognitivo. La segunda parte se ocupa de la perspectiva cognitiva en las metáforas del hebreo bíblico. Finalmente, se dan algunos ejemplos de la forma en que el SDBH procura tratar las metáforas.
Metaphor Research and the Hebrew Bible
Currents in Biblical Research, 2021
This article provides an overview of metaphor theories and research on their own terms, as well as their use in Hebrew Bible (HB) studies. Though metaphor studies in the HB have become increasingly popular, they often draw upon a limited or dated subset of metaphor scholarship. The first half of this article surveys a wide variety of metaphor scholarship from the humanities (philosophical, poetic, rhetorical) and the sciences (e.g., conceptual metaphor theory), beginning with Aristotle but focusing on more recent developments. The second half overviews studies of metaphor in the HB since 1980, surveying works focused on theory and method; works focused on specific biblical books or metaphor domains; and finally noting current trends and suggesting areas for future research.
Unipolar Conceptual Metaphors in Biblical Hebrew
Journal for Semitics, 2022
The cognitive approach to metaphor has faced many challenges. One of these challenges is a lack of more cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research that needs to be done to better understand the claim of the cognitive approach that abstract concepts and abstract reasoning are partly metaphorical. This study exploits the claim of Cognitive Linguistics that a universal spatial metaphorical system exists and confirms that the theory of conceptual metaphor largely accommodates the findings. However, the theory of conceptual metaphor accounts only partially for the Biblical Hebrew verbs "descend" (yrd) and "ascend" (ʿlh), which embody the conceptual typology of motion with typicality effects, and needs to be rethought. An important contribution to the theory is that linguistic data from Biblical Hebrew extends the existing knowledge of conceptual metaphor. Specifically, it expands the knowledge concerning verbs containing two conceptual components, that is, MOTION and PATH. This study discusses evidence from the Hebrew Bible, and argues that the verbs yrd and ˊlh's bipolar lexical concepts MOTION DOWN and MOTION UP, respectively, may split into two unipolar lexical concepts MOTION and DOWN and MOTION and UP, respectively, and in which only one unipolar lexical concept, that is DOWN or UP, respectively, is used for metaphorical conceptual mapping.
Old Testament Essays , 2004
The article focuses on the conceptualisation of anger and lust in American English and Classical Hebrew. By comparing the metaphor systems of these emotions in English with those found in the Hebrew Bible, culturally specific dimensions of metaphorical conceptualisation and expression of emotion and attitudes are investigated. In both languages anger and lust share several source domains, a characteristic which indicates that they can be conceptually linked. The main meaning foci of these metaphors in English and Hebrew are diverse, however, and should be seen as products of peculiar cultural experience.
Hypotheses Revisited: The Cognitive Theory of Metaphor Applied to Religious Texts
The main tenets of the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor are summarized in the form of nine hypotheses (cf. Jäkel 1997). Then, instances of the JOURNEY metaphor with its underlying PATH schema from the latest English version of the Bible are analyzed by way of a semasiological approach. The findings of this empirical case study are finally brought to bear on the theoretical claims. While as a result most of these tenets are seen to be corroborated, the "invariance hypothesis" (cf. Lakoff 1993) in particular appears highly suspect.