Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Phil King" <phil_king AT sil.org>]

Karl, Isaac, Oun Kwon, Stephen and George,

I'm part way through writing a dissertation on the metaphors used to 
conceptualise emotional distress in Hebrew so find this question interesting, 
particularly Karl's comment: 'is XMH as an emotion limited to anger? Or can 
it refer to other emotions as well, like troubled, or excited?'

But first a comment about metaphors and emotion concepts. My reading has been 
focused on cognitive linguistic approaches, so please forgive that bias, 
concentrating on Zoltan Kovecses (e.g. The cognitive model of anger inherent 
in American English (with George Lakoff), 1987; Metaphor and Emotion, 2000; 
Metaphor, 2002; Metaphor in Culture, 2005) and Anaa Wierzbicka (e.g. Emotions 
across languages and cultures: diversity and universals, 1999). The 
presupposition in Kovecses' research, following Lakoff and others, is that, 
in the language we use, more experientially basic, embodied concepts help us 
understand less experientially basic, more 'abstract' ones. In particular, we 
can draw inferences from the one (source) domain to make sense of the other 
(target) domain. Thus we may draw inferences from our experiences of heated 
fluids in English to make sense of the emotional experiences of anger - 
someone may 'simmer' or 'fume' for a while, but if he or she doesn't 'keep a 
lid on !
 it' they may 'explode'. As Stephen said, these heat / anger metaphors are 
well demonstrated cross-linguistically - Kovecses (2005, 40) cites English, 
Japanese, Hungarian, Zulu, Polish and Wolof and to some extent Chinese, all 
from different families, as using heat metaphors to conceptualise anger. So 
it's not very surprising to find possible evidence of it in Hebrew. Such 
cross-linguistic commonality is argued to come from the physiological basis 
of increased body tmeperature in emotional arousal. There is a PhD thesis by 
Zacharias Kotze precisely on 'The Conceptualisation of Anger in the Hebrew 
Bible' from the Cognitive Linguistic perspective, which I believe is now 
published but haven't been able to get hold of yet. He has published some 
material from it in JNSL - for particular discussion fo ch-m-h in relation to 
cocneptualsiation of anger see the discussion in 'A Cognitive Linguistic 
MEthodology for the Study of Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible', JNSL 31 - as far 
as I remem!
 ber he (unusually) links it more to poison than heat.  

A question raised by George, Isaac and Stephen is how we decide whether some 
experientially basic source domain (here 'heat') is cognitively relevant for 
the conceptualisation of another domain (e.g. anger, more general emotional 
distress, or perhaps city walls(!)). The Cognitive Linguistic approach offers 
some 9 types of evidence that could be searched for in order to argue that 
the source domain may be relevant for drawing inferences in the target domain 
(see eg. the afterword to the 2003 edition of Metaphors we Live By). The ones 
most relevant for studying an ancient text are: generalisations over polysemy 
(a number of words that have meanings in both domains), generalisations over 
inference patterns (inferences drawn in the source domain carry over to the 
target domain across various settings), use of the conceptualisation in both 
conventionalised expressions and more novel metaphors, and the coherence of 
the conceptualisation with larger scale metaphorical systems. FOr !
 the heat / anger conceptualisation in Hebrew there is a generalisation over 
polysemy with other roots like ch-r-h; my instinct is that there are also 
generalisations over polysemy (eg. that the hotter you are, the more intense 
your anger is) but I haven't checked in detail; and the conceptualisation 
comes in conventional forms such as ch-m-h l- and ch-r-h l- but also more 
poetic passages (eg. look at Lam 2.3). This all provides evidence for the 
accessibility of the source domain of heat for generating inferences about 
anger in a Hebrew worldview, generating novel expressions, and possibly for 
online processing of utterances. (Needless to say, I'm not sure I can 
immediately think of any of these evidences that would show a cognitive 
relevance of heat to city walls...)     


But then to the question that I think is most interesting - is heat really a 
metaphor for 'anger' or for something else? Kovecses' approach to emotions 
tends towards the presupposition that there are certain universal basic level 
emotions (eg. happiness, anger, sadness...), so we can readily compare 
cross-linguistic metaphors (although his more recent writings are more 
nuanced). The argument for universal emotions has a fair amount of support in 
the literature, using things like cross-linguistic studies of facial 
expression. However, there are also a number of strident voices arguing that 
the words used to talk about emotions in different languages are important 
and we shouldn't privilege English ethno-categories over other emotional 
paradigms (as, for example, Lutz 'unnatural emotions' or White and 
Kirkpatrick 'Person, self and experience').

The problem of the emotional target domain for the heat source domain is 
evident in some recent articles on depression in Hebrew (JNES, 2005 and 
others), based on some earlier work by Gruber, who argues that ch-r-h l- in 
Genesis 4 means that Cain was 'depressed' rather than 'angry' (BAR, 1980 'Was 
Cain Angry or Depressed?'). It seems to me that asking this question forces 
our English distinction between these two emotions onto a culture where this 
might not be relevant. I work in Papua New Guinea, and I've seen languages 
here where 'hot insides' refer to a more general aroused emotional state than 
specifically 'anger'. 

So, returning to Ez. 3.14, it is interesting that the other two descriptions 
of Ezekiel's state, bitterness and experiencing the strong hand of Yahweh, 
are used elsewhere as ways of talking about general negative emotional 
experience, or 'distress'. There are also other places where the general 
concept of experiencing heat is used to conceptualise a situation of 
emotional distress more general than English 'anger' - eg, psalm 39.3[4], or 
the many references to internal melting in fear/distress, or heat in the 
bones (Job 30.30). There are also several examples in the Hodayot.

So the best I would argue at the moment is that heat does seem to be a 
relevant source domain for conceptualising emotional experience in biblical 
Hebrew, but that while the emotional target domain has considerable overlap 
with the emotion we label anger in English, it also seems to include 
emotional states we would not label that way, so that it may be slightly 
misleading to label Ezekiel as 'angry' in 3.14.

My thoughts anyway,

Phil King
Ukarumpa, PNG