dc.description.abstract
This dissertation is on gendered metaphorical language in tannaitic sources. It focuses on images that have women as source domains for matters which are relevant to the rabbinic project, like the Divine, the rabbinic movement itself, the Oral Torah, mitsvot and the calendar. It argues that these metaphors are used to make a claim – about rabbinic identity, values, innovations or peculiar ideas. These are situated within and relate to the frame of Late Antiquity discourses, such as Roman imperial rhetoric and the debates with competing Jewish and non-Jewish groups, that also make use of gendered metaphors. However, the rabbinic usage is particular and modulated on the rabbinic system of law, life, ritual and religion. Through methodologies from conceptual
metaphor theory, gender studies and literary analysis, this study maintains and discusses the importance of the female gender in this cognitive mapping. Women’s experiences are connected to rabbinic ideas about religion as embodied practice and law, the role of Israel and the risks it is exposed to, its relationship with the Divine, the importance of externalization and ritual in piety. Figurative language and gender in metaphors are not just a rhetorical move, but a cognitive process that constructs meaning and adherence to a certain way of life and ideology. Female imagery is used for thinking about communal identity, whereby the woman-image is the subject of the figurative construction. Source domains that refer directly to the experience of the audience achieve the cultivation of intimacy, whereby metaphors rely on the audience’s reception and capability to understand the implied reference. The images collected in this dissertation often show a conscious attempt to create an odd image, through the unsettling of conventional metaphorical associative structures and gendered expectations. This points to an attempt to construct a rabbinic own sense of self and a peculiar role. This analysis tracks down how these metaphors interact with the legal reasoning they are embedded into, and how they are used to construct rabbinic law. They stand at the core of tannaitic approaches to gender and rabbinic ways of law, whereby figurative language allows experimental, unexplored and less conventional ways in the construction of meaning. This dissertation offers tools for the discussion and study of gendered metaphors in tannaitic and rabbinic texts.
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