Dangerous Emotions: A Multi-Disciplinary Look at Anger, Jealousy, and Hate in the Hebrew Bible

Dear Colleagues,

Throughout the Bible, acts of violence are precipitated by emotions. Cain gets angry and kills Abel; God is jealous and strikes Israel; Amnon hates Tamar and rapes her. We cannot assume, however, that the same sensations and thoughts that stand behind /ḥrh/, /qn’/, and /sn’/, terms that are typically translated as anger, jealousy, and hate, stand behind their modern iterations. This is because, as current researchers agree, only some elements of emotions are universal; others are culturally bound. Indeed, while we are all working with the same “hardware,” that is, the human body and brain, the “software” of the ancients, that is, their cultural inputs, differs from our own.

Since we cannot simply rely on modern definitions of anger, hate, and jealousy to lay bare the sensations and thoughts that precipitate violence in the Bible, we must take a multidisciplinary approach; we must seek out our answers in the confluence of discoveries from a variety of fields. This project aims to do just that. We are collecting papers that approach biblical anger, jealousy, and hate, with an eye toward psychology, cognitive linguistics, cultural anthropology, affect theory, and more. Peering through multiple lenses at once, we can begin to illumine the experience and motivations behind the violent acts of passion that suffuse the Hebrew Bible.

Dr. Deena Grant
Guest Editor

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