The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible

Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-108-83365-3
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 275 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 385 g

Reihe: Society for Old Testament Study Monographs

This is the first book to systematically investigate the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die. Contrary to previous scholarship on these texts that assumed these death wishes were simply a desire to escape suffering, Hanne Løland Levinson employs narrative criticism and conversation analysis, together with diachronic methods, to carefully hear each death-wish text in its literary context. She demonstrates that death wishes embody powerful, multi-faceted rhetorical strategies. Grouping the death-wish texts into four main rhetorical strategies of negotiation, expression of despair and anger, longing to undo one's existence, and wishing for a different reality, Løland Levinson portrays the complex reasons why characters in the Hebrew Bible wish for death. She concludes that the death wishes navigate the tension between longing for death and fighting for survival - a tension that many live with also today as they attempt to claim agency and autonomy in life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levinson, Hanne Løland

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Bibelwissenschaften Altes Testament: Exegese, Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction; 2. Death wish as a negotiation strategy; 3. Death wish in despair and anger; 4. Wishing away one's birth; 5. Death wishes as wishful thinking; 6. Wishing for death or fighting for life?

Über Autor(innen)

Levinson, Hanne Løland
Hanne Løland Levinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her first book Silent or Salient Gender? (2008) received the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. Her research interests include gender, metaphor, narrative analysis, and death in the Hebrew Bible. She co-founded the Society of Biblical Literature program unit on Metaphor Theory and the Hebrew Bible.