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“The Emotions” in Biblical Anthropology? A Genealogy and Case Study with
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2017
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In the late nineteenth century, the British writer Lewis Carroll published a nonsensical poem called The Hunting of the Snark in which an unlikely alliance hunts a fictional animal, which Carroll named the “snark.” Despite the alliance's intense search for the snark and their questions about how to describe and classify it (apparently, “a Boojum”), they do not find it. I want to suggest that any effort to locate “emotions” in the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East is comparable to hunting the snark. If we want our hunt to be successful, we will turn away from “the emotions” and toward something more like the psychological taxonomy that the emotions displaced in the late-modern period: namely, the taxonomy of “passions and affections.” “The emotions” are simply not to be found in the Hebrew Bible or in the historical contexts behind its emergence.
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References
1 Carroll, Lewis, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (London: Macmillan, 1876)Google Scholar.
2 For recent philosophical discussions, see Nussbaum, Martha, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Charles, “Reason, Faith, and Meaning,” Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011) 5–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 For case studies in Josephus and the Testament of Zebulun, see Mirguet, Françoise, “Emotional Responses to the Pain of Others in Josephus's Rewritten Scriptures and the Testament of Zebulun: Between Power and Vulnerability,” JBL 133 (2014) 838–57Google Scholar; and the responses by Pearce, Sarah Judith, “Pity and Emotion in Josephus's Reading of Joseph,” JBL 133 (2014) 858–62Google Scholar; Lateiner, Donald, “Pain and Pity in Two Postbiblical Responses to Joseph's Power in Genesis,” JBL 133 (2014) 863–68Google Scholar; Konstan, David, “The Varieties of Pity,” JBL 133 (2014) 869–72Google Scholar. See also the essays in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2011: Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul (ed. Renate Egger-Wenzel and Jeremy Corley; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011); and Anthropologische Aufbrüche: Alttestamentliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur historischen Anthropologie (ed. Andreas Wagner; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009) 297–358.
4 See the detailed discussion of Andreas Wagner, “Emotionen in alttestamentlicher und verwandter Literatur – Grundüberlegungen am Beispiel des Zorns,” in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2011, 27–68. See also Wolfgang Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions in the Ancient Near East and in Ancient Egypt,” in ibid., 1–25; and Gillmayr-Bucher, Susanne, “Emotion und Kommunikation,” in Biblische Anthropologie: Neue Einsichten aus dem Alten Testament (ed. Frevel, Christian; Freiburg: Herder, 2010) 279–90Google Scholar.
5 Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions,” 1.
6 In Wagner's discussion of the Hebrew Bible, the same must be said of his ability to speak of “eine Einzelemotion,” which he uses interchangeably with “Einzelgefühlen” (“Emotionen,” 33).
7 Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions,” 3. As the discussion below will show, to say that there is no consensus “at the moment” is a major understatement when it comes to defining “the emotions.”
8 E.g., Mackie, Scott D., “The Passion of Eve and the Ecstasy of Hannah: Sense Perception, Passion, Mysticism, and Misogyny in Philo of Alexandria, De ebrietate 143–52,” JBL 133 (2014) 146 Google Scholar and n. 11. Mackie translates πάθος as “emotion.” Likewise, Kruger, Paul A., “On Emotions and the Expression of Emotions in the Old Testament: A Few Introductory Remarks,” Biblische Zeitschrift 48 (2004) 213–28Google Scholar, at 216–18, transitions all too seamlessly between purely physiological theories of “emotions” (e.g., Darwin) to Aristotle's theory of “emotions,” even though Aristotle spoke of the πάθη (“passions”). At the beginning of the article, Kruger calls “emotions” a “fundamental characteristic of human nature [without which] no culture, including that of the Old Testament, can be fully comprehended” (at 213).
9 See Ryan Patrick Hanley, “Review of James A. Harris's (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal (cited online 11 June 2015), http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-oxford-handbook-of-british-philosophy-in-the-eighteenth-century/.
10 The soul was addressed and described differently, but one rather consistent feature was its division into higher and lower elements, each of which had specific relationships to, for example, willing, understanding, and desiring. See the tables and charts in Dixon, Thomas’s very helpful book From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 29–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 32, 34, 37, 44, and 48.
11 Indeed, in English, the word became a psychological term. Its earlier usages were not psychological. See the diachronic overview in the Oxford English Dictionary (available online at www.oed.com); and Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 62–66.
12 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 107. Not to be overlooked is that way that the very conception of “matter” changed in early-modern Europe via the theories of people like Galileo (1564–1642) and Descartes (1596–1650), so that matter, at least methodologically, became an exclusively quantitative concept that by definition rules out the qualitative. This methodological exclusion of the qualitative meant bracketing out first-person human experience of the world (i.e., the mind), a move leading eventually, in some circles, to an ontological denial of first-person experience. On these changes and their links to early-modern anti-Aristotelianism, see Feser, Edward, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Heusenstamm: editiones scholasticae, 2014) 12–18 Google Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 35–36, 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gregory, Brad S., The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) 56–64, 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Importantly, Descartes altered the traditional meaning of “passions” in tune with his dualistic anthropology and his more literal talk of the body-soul distinction (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 76–77).
14 Charland, Louis C., “Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of Psychopathology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (ed. Goldie, Peter; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 238–60, at 240–43Google Scholar; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 76–77, 107–8.
15 Hume argued that “passions”/“emotions” belong to the former category (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 104). See further Broadie, Alexander, “The Human Mind and its Powers,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (ed. idem; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 60–78 Google Scholar, esp. 66–70. According to Hume, both impressions and ideas follow from sensation, differing chiefly in the degree of “liveliness” and in the chronological relation to the moment of sensation (66).
16 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 104–9, at 104.
17 Penelhum, Terence, “Hume's Moral Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 238–69Google Scholar, at 243, 247.
18 Ibid., 243; Broadie, “The Human Mind and its Powers,” 62–70. Broadie observes that Thomas Reid likewise aimed to construct a mental science by relying on Newton's work, though the results of Reid's work differed substantially from Hume's (74–76). Broadie states, “Arguably Reid's grasp of Newtonian methodology was more profound than Hume's, and if indeed it was then a likely explanation for this would be that Reid, in contrast to Hume, had spent many years in close study of Newton's scientific writings, and in working intensively in the mathematical and natural sciences” (74).
19 See classically, MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd. ed.; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [orig. 1981]) 147–49Google Scholar. Also, Herdt, Jennifer A., Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 3, 25–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics I.1, 1094a3; for Aquinas, see Summa theologiae Ia.6.1. For both of these writers, the statement that “good is that which things desire” does not mean that “Whatever people desire is therefore good.” “Goodness” here has to do with realizing a natural and specifically a final telos.
21 Discussing the related conception of the soul as involving the faculties of intellect and will, Edward Feser writes that “That is just what will is on Aquinas's account: a power to be drawn toward (or away from) that which is apprehended by the intellect (SCG IV.19).” (Aquinas [London: Oneworld Publications, 2009] 149–51, at 149).
22 See sect. 3 below. In Aquinas's psychology, the will—a faculty of the rational (i.e., human) soul—was the seat of affections.
23 In Hume's words: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” For a contemporary Humean treatment of morality, see Haidt, Jonathan, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2012) 3–106 Google Scholar, at 28, 51, with n. 40.
24 On Hume's account of the passions and their relation to reason, see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 107; Penelhum, “Hume's Moral Psychology,” 250; MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 [orig. 1988]) 303–4Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 135. For Hume's non-teleological conception of desire and human life, see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 307 and n. 4.
25 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 49–50.
26 On early-modern rejections of teleological anthropology, see Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 223.
27 On Hume's 18th-century upbringing as a Scottish Calvinist, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 54; and Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 308–12.
28 By classical faculty psychology, I mean conceptions of the soul with the faculties of intellect and will. Importantly, this conception of the soul is neither interchangeable with Descartes's early modern conception of the “mind” nor with the popular idea of the soul as something wholly separate from the body. See Feser, Aquinas, 132–42.
29 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 121; Broadie, “The Human Mind and its Powers,” 70–76.
30 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 117; see also 115.
31 See n. 12 above.
32 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 109.
33 Dixon, Thomas, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis,” Emotion Review 4 (2012) 338–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 341; idem, From Passions to Emotions, 122.
34 “Brown's positivist epistemology, derived from his view of the physics of matter, created a mental ontology in which the only solid features were states or feelings of the mind. The mind disappeared from the picture and the reader was left with free-standing thoughts and emotions” (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 122).
35 In view of the etymology of the word “emotion,” which has to do with “movement,” one should not miss the irony of this point. The idea of “movement” fades away with Brown's classification of “emotions” as mental “states.”
36 See nn. 12 and 24 above.
37 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 119; idem, “Keyword in Crisis,” 340–42.
38 James, William, “What is an Emotion?,” Mind 9 (1884) 188–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 124–25; see further Stocker, Michael, “Intellectual and Other Nonstandard Emotions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (ed. Goldie, Peter; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 401–24Google Scholar, at 405.
40 Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions,” 1. Zwickel is of course not alone in making this move. The idea of a very close, if not actually interchangeable, relationship between “the emotions” and “feelings” clearly sets the stage for some of the comments in Gillmayr-Bucher, “Emotion und Kommunikation,” 279–90, at 279, 280 n. 6. Additionally, in Wagner, “Emotionen,” there seems to be little if any distinction between what Wagner calls “eine Einzelemotion” and “Einzelgefühlen” (33).
41 Moreover, it indicates that the accompanying conception of reason itself is likewise different between, e.g., Hume and Brown, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other. On the issue of the Enlightenment's having produced rival rationalities, see MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1–11, at 6: “So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places. . .. Yet both the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors proved unable to agree as to what precisely those principles were which would be found undeniable by all rational persons. One kind of answer was given by the authors of the Encyclopédie, a second by Rousseau, a third by Bentham, a fourth by Kant, a fifth by the Scottish philosophers of common sense and their French and American disciples. Nor has subsequent history diminished the extent of such disagreement. It has rather enlarged it.” See further Thomas Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” Modern Theology 27 (2011) 298–312, at 299; and Taylor, “Reason, Faith, and Meaning,” 17–18, who discusses how Hume's conception of reason largely had to do with “the enquiry as to what makes for utility.”
42 For a historical treatment of this connection between early modern transformations of anthropologies and the consequences for ethics in the West, see Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 180–234, who argues that “a transformation from a substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium” (at 184). The dismissal of teleological anthropology played no small part in this transformation. See further MacIntyre, After Virtue, 49.
43 The ideological motivations behind the early-modern rejection of Aristotelianism have received acknowledgement in various disciplines. E.g., the idea that human life has a normative telos—i.e., the idea that one can and should speak of the good for human beings as such—was seen as a violation of the modern ideal of individualized freedom (= self-determination). Politically, this rejection amounts to a practical denial that there is such thing as the good for human beings as such. See Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 184 Google Scholar; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 54–55, 109–20; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 117; Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 180–234; and Kołakowski, Leszek, Metaphysical Horror (rev. ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [orig. 1988]) 13–22 Google Scholar.
44 Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (3 vols.; Flagg and Gould: 1822) 1:247. Accessible online at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43116.
45 Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” 308. See also the discussion in Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 1–66 Google Scholar, at 16, 23 n. 6.
46 The rose has a “nutritive” soul; the dog has a “sensory” soul; and the human has a “rational” soul, which builds upon, and thus stands in continuity with, the previous two kinds of soul (on these distinctions, see Feser, Aquinas, 137–38).
47 Kretzmann, Norman, “Philosophy of Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (repr.; ed. Kretzmann, Norman and Stump, Eleonore; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 130 Google Scholar; Feser, Aquinas, 134–35.
48 See further Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” 128–33.
49 Ibid., 131. Note also Kretzmann's comment that, according to Aquinas, “The union of soul and body may more accurately be thought of as a human soul's constituting some matter as a living human body, something like the way a quantity of electricity (which needs no bulb or wire to exist) constitutes some matter as a lighted lamp” (136, original italics).
50 Ibid., 136.
51 Ibid., 139.
52 Feser, Aquinas, 148.
53 This compound Latin noun reflects the associated Thomistic-Aristotelian idea of natural teleology: ad (“toward”) + petere (“to aim at, desire”).
54 The sense appetite is situated metaphorically “between” the natural and the rational appetite. By “rational appetite,” Aquinas means the will (Lat. voluntas). See Miner, Robert, Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae Ia2ae 22–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 15.
55 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 41–42.
56 Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 16. Importantly, though, Aquinas would not understand this fact to imply that the passions themselves are something negative (in the sense of bad), even though the passions do imply the incompleteness of human moral agents. See further Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 22.
57 See here Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 83; and Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 107 n. 24.
58 Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 94; see also Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 91–97 for a discussion of Duns Scotus and Ockham's medieval revision of the relation between intellect and will—and with it, the revision of the notion of freedom and the value of habituation and the virtues.
59 Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 113 with Table 5.1, and 126–32. Aquinas argues that such apprehensions of goodness may be either perfect, true, or merely apparent. Love, then, may be either rational or irrational, depending on its directedness, the condition of one's will, and one's instruction in the virtues. On the interaction between the sense and rational appetites in Aquinas, see ibid., 95–96.
60 Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” 146. This point highlights the problem of translating either beatitudo or eudaimonia with “happiness,” which in contemporary English usage is largely equated with a subjective sense of “pleasure” that can differ from one person to another in the sense of “individual taste.” See further Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 6, who notes that beatitudo for Aquinas is a teleological matter of final causality. It is not interchangeable with the feeling of pleasure, which is not one's telos but rather one passion among others. Similarly, Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 31.
61 See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 32.
62 Teske, Roland J., “Augustine's Theory of Soul,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (repr.; ed. Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 116–23Google Scholar, at 116–18.
63 Augustine's dualism is not interchangeable with Cartesian or even Platonic dualisms. A crucial caveat in Augustine's thought is that he contrasted “human nature (body and soul) with the perfection of God, rather than [contrasting] body with spirit” (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 33; see further Teske, “Augustine's Theory of Soul,” 122). For Augustine, perfect unity belongs exclusively to God, whereas human nature, which includes soul, is conflicted and divided.
64 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 40.
65 See City of God, XI.10. Like Aquinas after him, Augustine advocated the idea of divine simplicity, meaning that God is absolute, immutable unity, without any divisions whatsoever. Accordingly, for Augustine, there is no distinction between God and God's attributes: e.g., God does not have the attribute of goodness; rather, God is goodness itself. See Davies, Brian, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (3rd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 158–80Google Scholar.
66 See the comments in Couenhoven, Jesse, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 65–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 70.
67 On Augustine's eudaimonism and its relation to teleology, see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 45–71, at 50–58.
68 While Augustine's teleology was in ways quite Platonic (i.e., external teleology), Aquinas's teleology was more Aristotelian (i.e., intrinsic teleology). What matters for present purposes is that each thinker portrayed the passions and affections as at home within a conception of people as having a definite end or telos. See further Feser, Edward, “Teleology: A Shopper's Guide,” Philosophia Christi 12 (2010) 142–59, at 149Google Scholar.
69 The same must be said to apply to ancient Greek, including especially the word πάθος itself, which, as the above discussion has hopefully shown, cannot be translated as “emotion.” Translating πάθος as “emotion” depends on assuming that “passions” and “emotions” are interchangeable terms. This assumption is not uncommon: Mirguet, “Emotional Responses,” 845; and Mackie, “The Passion of Eve,” 146 and n. 11. Note also the index entry for “passions” in Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, which clearly equates the two.
70 Anderson notes that a similar conceptual disconnect characterizes the conceptions of “joy” and “grief” in the Hebrew Bible. See Anderson, Gary A., A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) ix–xiiGoogle Scholar and 1–18.
71 Whether the Hebrew Bible contains conceptions of “soul” is a long-debated question that often focuses on individual terms like and . Biblical scholars’ hesitance toward adopting language of the soul often has to do with arguing that the , for example, can only exist with a body and is therefore not a “soul.” However, what is less often noted is the fact that presuming the soul's utter separation from the body likely reflects the modern influence of Descartes (who coined what is called the “mind-body” problem, not the “soul-body” problem) more so than premodern thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and perhaps even Plato. The Cartesian and Platonic conceptions of soul are not the only conceptions of soul (nor are these two even the same), so that rejecting their relevance to the Hebrew Bible is just that and no more. It would therefore be a non sequitur to say that, since the Hebrew Bible may not entertain the idea of bodiless souls, the concept of soul was altogether foreign to the writers of the Hebrew Bible. On issues of the soul with reference to the Hebrew Bible, see Schüle, Andreas, “The Notion of Life: and in the Anthropological Discourse of the Primeval History,” HeBAI 1 (2012) 483–501 Google Scholar, at 485–88 and n. 10; Krüger, Thomas, “ach ja die Seele: Der Verlust der Seele - ein Gewinn für die theologische Anthropologie?,” in Das Menschliche Herz und die Weisung Gottes: Studien zur alttestamentlichen Anthropologie und Ethik (Zürich: TVZ, 2009) 83–89 Google Scholar; Wolff, Hans W., Anthropologie des Alten Testaments (Munich: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2010) 43–44 Google Scholar, who notes that the is the subject of words like “love,” “hate,” “joy,” etc., an observation with fairly obvious similarity to the passions of the soul. See also Barr, James, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) 56 Google Scholar. Barr notes that “the Old Testament provides thoughts and aspects out of which ideas of the immortality of the soul could naturally and easily develop.” In this book and elsewhere, Barr criticized the still influential tendency to presume a gulf between “Hebrew” and “Greek” ways of thinking (ibid., 46–47). See earlier, idem, The Semantics of Biblical Language (repr.; London: SCM Press, 1983 [orig. 1961]) 8–20. One should point out that refusing to presume this gulf between Hebrew and Greek thought is not the same as conflating the two: rather, a case by case approach is necessary. Given the premodern (and thus non-Cartesian) dualism in classical Greek sources, one should also note the argument of Steiner, Richard C., Disembodied Souls: The Nefesh in Israel and Kindred Spirits in the Ancient Near East, with an Appendix on the Katumuwa Inscription (ANEM; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015) 1–22.Google Scholar
72 See further Prov 15:33; Job 28:28; Ps 111:10; Sir 1:14, 16, 18, 20, 27, 19:20, 21:11.
73 I do not claim that Grk. φιλοσοφία is synonymous with Heb. . The important point is that in both ancient Jewish and ancient Greek contexts, one finds statements about wisdom, knowledge, and philosophy as having their “beginning” in , on the one hand, and in τὸ θαυµάζειν, on the other. Each demonstrates the complex yet complementary relationship between passions and rationality. Still, select usages of (i.e., ) were translated in LXX as forms of τὸ θαυµάζειν. See Ex 15:11, 34:10; Ps 44:5 [MT 45:5], 64:5 [MT 65:5–6], 67:36 [MT 68:36]; Dan 9:4.
74 On as the starting point and end point of , see 1:7; 2:5 (with the verb ); and 9:10. On “desiring” ( ) Wisdom, see 1:25, 30; on “loving” ( ) knowledge, see 12:1; by contrast, on “hating” ( ) knowledge, see 1:29. And for Wisdom's desire for love of ( ) and delight in ( ) human pupils, see 8:17 and 8:30–9:1, 4.
75 An interesting question here is whether one should speak of an implicit teleological anthropology in Prov 1–9, according to which human life finds its telos in the embrace of divinely-generated Wisdom. Barton, John, Ethics in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 174–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a focus on Ben Sira, see further Kaiser, Otto, “Die Furcht und die Liebe Gottes – Ein Versuch, die Ethik Ben Siras mit der des Apostels Paulus zu vergleichen,” in Gott, Mensch und Geschichte. Studien zum Verständnis des Menschen und seiner Geschichte in der klassischen, biblischen und nachbiblischen Literatur (BZAW 413; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010) 305–40, at 306–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Becker, Joachim, Gottesfurcht im Alten Testament (Rome: Päpstliches Bibelinstitut, 1965)Google Scholar: “Im Zuge dieser Entwicklung geht das Moment eigentlicher Furcht fast ganz verloren; Gottesfurcht wird Äquivalent für Religion und Frömmigkeit” (75).
77 See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 133–34. On the issue of intentionality in Stoic thought, see Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 24–32. For a comparable Neo-Aristotelian view, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 149, who notes that “Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.” For a contrasting Neo-Humean view, see Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 51–56 and n. 40.
78 One should also add in a particular role, i.e., as the lesser party.
79 The specific verses in 2 Kgs 17 along with the objects of are as follows: v. 7 ( , “other gods”), v. 25 ( , “YHWH”), v. 28 ( , “YHWH”), v. 32 ( , “YHWH”), v. 33 ( , “YHWH”), v. 34 ( , “YHWH”), v. 35 ( , “other gods”), v. 36 ( , “YHWH”), v. 37 ( , “other gods”), v. 38 ( , “other gods”), v. 39 ( , “YHWH your God”), v. 41 ( , “YHWH”).
80 For a recent recognition of these positional nuances of with a focus on iconographical connections, see Strawn, Brent A., “The Iconography of Fear: Yirʾat Yhwh ( ) in Artistic Perspective,” in Image, Text, Exegesis: Iconographic Interpretation and the Hebrew Bible (ed. de Hulster, I. J. and LeMon, J. M.; New York: T&T Clark, 2014), 91–134 Google Scholar, at 96–98, 124–29.
81 Among the 44 occurrences of in the Hebrew Bible, it is associated seventeen times with . See Deut 7:21, 10:17, 21; 2 Sam 7:23; Joel 2:11, 3:4; Mal 2:23; Ps 96:4, 99:3, 106:21, 145:6; Dan 9:4; Neh 1:5, 4:8, 9:32; 1 Chr 16:25, 17:21. This collocation continues at Qumran in the non-biblical scrolls. See e.g. 1QM 10:1; 1QHa 5:31; 4Q286 frag. I 2:5; 4Q364 frag. XXI a-k 5; also 4Q372 frag. I 29.
82 For as a marker of hierarchical standing, see Zeph 2:11; Ps 47:2–4, 66:5, 89:7–8, 96:4–6; 1 Chr 16:25–27; 4Q405 frag. 23 1:13. For marking hierarchy even without this prepositional phrase, see Exod 15:9–11. And for overlapping with royal , see Ps 45:4–7 (additionally, Ps 96:1 and 1 Chr 16:27). On both and as resembling Akk. melammu, see Aster, Shawn Zelig, The Unbeatable Light : Melammu and Its Biblical Parallels (AOAT 384; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012) 173–78, 255–57.Google Scholar
83 Instructively, in Ps 89:7–8 cited above, the expression actually emerges in a context explicitly denying comparability.
84 Discussing different aspects of that relate to its positional nuances, Strawn makes the following comment: “It is worth noting at this point that Yhwh is never said to fear any other entity, a point that is in contrast to the comparative data where the gods are often said to fear other gods” (“The Iconography of Fear,” 126 n. 51, with citations of relevant primary sources).
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