Expressing Suffering in Words. The Use of Metaphor in the Conceptualisation of Suffering in the Book of Job.

The book of Job deals with human suffering and problematizes God’s credibility in the face of suffering. Both human suffering and divine involvement are described in highly metaphorical terms throughout the book of Job. A profound familiarity with these metaphors is an indispensable condition for its interpretation.

The project “Expressing Suffering in Words” aims at providing an analysis of all the metaphors used to describe Job’s condition in order to gain a better understanding in the way in which suffering is conceptualized in the book of Job. The objectives in doing so are three-fold:

1.       Firstly, to provide an overview of all the metaphors of human suffering in the book of Job.

2.       Secondly, to provide a thorough semantic and conceptual analysis of each of the individual metaphors. Two more specific goals are related to this second objective:

a.       On the one hand, the aim to offer a more adequate lexicographical description of some of the lexical items involved in the metaphors;

b.       On the other hand, the aspiration to solve the interpretational cruces that have been caused by an erroneous or limited understanding of the metaphor’s conceptual structure.

3.       Thirdly, to relate the use of the different metaphors throughout the text with the book’s argumentative development.

The goals of this project are not only to gain a better understanding of the Joban metaphors in their historical context and to advance the semantic knowledge of the Hebrew language, but also to provide a critical and hermeneutically sound basis for a renewed contemporary reflection on existential human suffering.

The methodology will draw on the insights in the functioning of metaphor as described in cognitive linguistics, which postulates that metaphors are not in the first place stylistic ways of embellishing literary texts, but fundamentally reflect the way in which people conceptualise reality.

This project is part of the research project 'Depicting Suffering, Imagining God. The Use of Metaphor in the Conceptualisation of Suffering and of the Divine in the Book of Job.

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