Pain in Ancient Hebrew: Language, Cognition, and Culture

By combining several linguistic disciplines and theories (i.e., cultural linguistics, frame semantics, conceptual metaphor theory, and cultural scripts theory), this research will provide the very first comprehensive analysis of the verbal expressions of pain in ancient Hebrew, and its underlying conceptualizations, cultural norms and assumptions from prior to the 2nd century CE. The ancient Hebrew language of pain has never been thoroughly and systematically researched from a linguistic point of view, taking all the Hebrew sources at our disposal into account, i.e. the Hebrew inscriptions, the Hebrew Bible, the book of Ben Sira, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The lack of linguistic studies on pain in ancient Hebrew is much more than a merely philological lacuna. Since languages are repositories of shared understandings, cultural attitudes, assumptions, values, and norms, not only does this lacuna imply a lack of knowledge of a significant portion of the Hebrew lexicon; it also prevents us from reconstructing how ancient Israel and early Judaism conceptually and culturally related to such a pervasive human experience. At the crossroads of linguistics and cultural studies, this research will reconstruct how pain was conceived in one of the most influential ancient civilizations.