Abstract
This dissertation analyzes patterns in the metaphorical condemnations of Israel and Judah in the prophetic corpus. It demonstrates that the prophetic authors deployed their audiences’ own conceptions of their homeland against them to condemn the kingdoms for a failure to properly serve their deity, YHWH. In nine metaphorical passages, the author constructs a national identity for the people of the kingdom based on one of three images that were positively associated with Israel and Judah: a vineyard; a grape vine; and the pairing of grape vines and fig trees. While the details of each constructed identity vary, most include a narrative about the nation’s past as descended from a common stock and planted in their homeland, a description of the nation’s current culture as degenerate, and an announcement of doom that incorporates warfare imagery into the flora metaphor. Finally, an analysis of viticulture metaphors suggests that wine and intoxication metaphors in expressions of YHWH’s divine wrath became more popular as the conceptualization of Israel and Judah as a vineyard or vine became more conventional.The chapters include two broad, new surveys of metaphorical material in the Bible: 1) they examine a set of metaphors in the biblical corpus that speak of divine and human conflict in terms of individual combat, burning, and eating; and 2) they employ the findings from the review of biblical conflict metaphors to analyze flora metaphors in prophetic condemnations. Grasses and trees (both fruitless and fruit-bearing) emerge as the most common plants incorporated into prophetic expressions of the metaphor PEOPLE ARE PLANTS. Blending the language and imagery of individual combat, burning, and eating into these flora metaphors provides a conceptual connection that helps the audience understand the depiction of warfare or a divine attacks in terms of forestry and crop farming.
Further analysis of the prophetic material highlights images of grape vines and fig trees as sources for the most elaborate depictions of Israel and Judah. It also finds that financial, social, and environmental factors made the two woody plants particularly prominent in Israelite and Judean conceptions of their homelands. Subsequent chapters provide new in-depth studies of vineyard, grape vine, and fig tree metaphors in the prophetic condemnations of kingdoms that offer explanations of how metaphors about Israel and Judah based on these images developed. In addition, the analysis includes new interpretations of several condemnations of Israel and Judah that employ these metaphors.
A combination of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Blending Theory (BT) provides the methodological framework for the analysis of the metaphors in this dissertation. CMT uses conceptual domains to describe the relationship between the metaphor’s target, which is the literal subject of the metaphor, and its source, meaning the image used to speak about the subject. This dissertation argues that semantic frames are often more helpful for analyzing metaphorical expressions, because the focus in Frame Semantics on situations, viewpoints, roles, and relationships in frames encourages a thorough analysis of the source and target for each metaphor. National identity theory supplements this methodological framework by providing a structure and language for describing how the more complex flora metaphors create and strategically deploy national identity to condemn Israel and Judah.