This week, I was reading a fascinating paper on deliberate metaphors.[1] You remember from your school days what a metaphor is? Those descriptive words that often personify a thing 'the wind marched' or simple similes 'like a puff of smoke'. They are often linked to certain traditional ideas—'as dark as death' and we tend to expect certain metaphors to appear—'he took a wife' (where he did not, literally, go to a house and take a wife, but rather he married a woman). The thing that's fun with deliberate metaphors, is that they take descriptions that are usually linked with a particular subject (think of death: cold, dark, silent) and they are then used with a completely different subject. Which means, when someone reads the final text, they subconsciously link the two themes, even though they are not explicitly stated. Advertisers and poets use this a lot. The same works with car adverts and sleek beautiful bodies, or having fun zooming on things as a child, and they link those ideas to the car—so we see the car as either beautiful (it's a car for goodness sake!) or an instrument of fun (though it will spend lots of hours in traffic jams and on the school-run).
There has also been lots written about whether metaphors apply mainly to speech, or if they are an unconscious element when we think. Therefore examining metaphors used by a particular culture or historical group, might give us clues into how they thought. For example, today when we describe relationships we use lots of metaphors that relate to travel, so we seem to view relationships like a journey. We start a relationship, they can go through a bumpy patch, we can get them back on track despite many obstacles. Likewise an argument or discussion is described using fighting metaphors: his points hit the target, he defeated the opposition and defended his case.
When the descriptive words are unrelated to the thing being described, we call them metaphors. (So fire and emotion are unrelated, but we say someone burned with anger.) If they are connected, we call them metonyms. So 'I pay with plastic, not cash' —(a credit card is made of plastic, so this has used a metonym not a metaphor). Or we might say that 'Washington has passed a law' — the Senate is in Washington, so this is another metonym.
Now, if we look at ancient texts, the same principles apply, but we often miss the subtle links because we are either reading a translation, or we don't understand how the ancient culture would have used those words. So when we read 'The LORD is my shepherd' we have a completely different response to the ancient audience, who might link a whole bevy of different experiences to each of those words. Which I find very interesting.
Fascinating huh? It feels a little scary to finish my MA, the time has gone so fast, and there is so much still to learn. I do hope I can find a way to continue studying, but we shall see. I hope your plans are clear this week. Thanks for reading.
Take care.
Love, Anne x
[1] Ellen van Wolde, 'A network of conventional and deliberate metaphors in Psalm 22,' Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 44 (2020), 642-666 (p.642) <https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089219862816> [Accessed 6/10/23].
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