Full Description
In continuity with the previous BETL volumes on biblical metaphors,
namely Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible edited by Pierre Van Hecke
(BETL 187; 2005), and Metaphors in the Psalms co-edited by Pierre
Van Hecke and Antje Labahn (BETL 231; 2010), this third volume intends
to contribute to and foster biblical research on metaphors by focusing
on a phenomenon that has only received scant attention thus far, namely
the relationship and interplay between different metaphors in the texts
of the Hebrew Bible. Biblical metaphors very often come in chains,
especially in poetry, in which individual metaphors may interact in a
number of ways, e.g. they may modify, reverse, shift, and even
contradict or reinforce the previous ones. Biblical metaphors often
create families of metaphors that form a genuine repertoire of images to
think and talk about a specific target domain from multiple viewpoints.
The same source domain often inspires clusters of thoughts about a wide
variety of realities. The same "root metaphor" may run throughout an
entire book or a section of a book, emerging on the surface level of the
text in many ways and interacting with other metaphors along the text
continuum. Networks of Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible investigates
biblical metaphors not as "isolated events of discourse" but as
constantly intertwining and shaping a network of multiple interactions
between the figures.
