Bøger i Forschungen Zur Religion Und Literatur Des Alten Und Neuen Testaments serien

In this study, Travis Bott makes a fresh contribution to the understanding of Hebrew praise language in the Psalms. In addition, he devotes sustained attention to the neglected topic of metonymy in the Hebrew Bible. The theoretical framework for investigating both of these topics and exploring their interaction is cognitive semantics, a major branch of the cognitive movement in contemporary linguistics. Bott defines metonymy as a cognitive process in which one entity (the vehicle) provides mental access to another perceptually contiguous entity (the target). He also draws on recent theoretical developments, such as conceptual metaphor and metonymy, metonymy as a prototypical category, metonymy in lexical polysemy, and the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions (metaphtonymy). A cognitive-semantic approach to the Psalms reveals that metonymy profoundly shapes the concepts and language of Hebrew praise. Bott considers metonymy at both the lexical and contextual levels. At the lexical level, he finds that the two most important nouns for praise in the Psalms, tehillah and todah, exhibit polysemy that is governed by conceptual metonymies. In addition, at the contextual level, he treats the objects and subjects of the four most common verbs for praise in the Psalms (hll, ydh, zmr, brk). He finds that conceptual metonymies drive figurative characterizations of YHWH, the preeminent object of praise, as well as the many praising subjects of Israel. Bott demonstrates that metonymy is both more common and more varied than scholars of the Hebrew Bible have previously supposed.

Critical spatial approaches - particularly those informed by the scholarship of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja - have significantly impacted biblical scholarship over the last twenty years. However, these spatial approaches have been limited due to the methodological challenges inherent in transposing the social-scientific approaches of the aforementioned scholars to the task of biblical interpretation. This volume adapts conceptual metaphor theory as a methodological bridge to address such constraints. The first half of the volume begins by surveying the field of critical spatiality in biblical studies, arguing for the need for fresh methodological development. Thereafter, the volume delineates a particular critical spatial approach, inspired by Lefebvre and Foucault, for which conceptual metaphor theory is proposed as a methodological bridge. The second half of the volume begins by proposing the Psalms of Ascents as a case study upon which the method could be applied. It is then argued that the proposed method - if efficacious - should provide insight on corpus' "Zion theology" and its so-called pilgrimage character. Using the proposed method in conjunction with conventional historical-grammatical tools of poetic analysis, each psalm is analysed with regard to its metaphor and spatiality. The volume concludes that the case study demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed methods by allowing a rich reading of each psalm, especially by explicating the spatial narratives and/or spatial metaphorical conceptualisations that underlie each text, and providing fresh insight on the collection as a whole.