Biblical Metaphor Reconsidered: A Cognitive Approach to Poetic Prophecy in Jeremiah 1–24 by Job Y. Jindo (review)

Are metaphorical expressions within the Hebrew Bible the icing on the cake, or are they the batter? One can bake a cake without icing, after all, but not without batter. This (admittedly tortured) metaphor about metaphor serves to capture a question that is of guiding importance to Job Jindo’s study: namely, in what manners and to what extents can the human mind invoke metaphor in order to craft ideas, rather than simply convey them? Jindo’s monograph (stemming from his 2006 Jewish Theological Seminary doctoral dissertation) offers sustained and substantive arguments that metaphor often functions as a core structural and conceptual component of the cognitive dynamics animating Biblical Hebrew poetic texts.

Chapter 1 includes a review of previous scholarship on metaphor (pp. 5–21) in which Jindo discerns a historical tendency, following Aristotle, to treat metaphor “as ornament superadded to the content of the utterance” (p. 6). Although he acknowledges some notable exceptions over the centuries, he argues that most thinkers have traditionally defaulted to the metaphor-as-speech (propositional) model rather than to a metaphor-as-thought (orientational) paradigm. The latter approach gained a foothold only with the advent of a new theoretical (n.b., not “theological”; p. 8) framework and analytical tools provided by cognitive linguistics. Biblical scholars have since employed theory-, subject-, and text-focused approaches to metaphor studies, with varying results. What has remained lacking, Jindo contends, is an integrative method-oriented approach that is “exegetically pragmatic” (p. 16) capable of comprehending metaphors not only within their biblical expressions, but also with respect to the underlying cognitive–cultural dynamics that informed such expressions.

Jindo, in chapter 2, presents the theoretical framework for his subsequent analyses of poetic metaphor in the book of Jeremiah. He draws synthetically (pp. 27–35) from cognitive linguists as well as philosophers of language, although he devotes scant attention to recent contributions by cognitive psychology. This is unfortunate, given the productive scientific studies of metaphor that have been conducted by psychologists including Karin Moser, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, and Raymond Gibbs (the last of whom Jindo mentions cursorily). Controlled experiments have garnered empirical data about cerebral processes involving neural suppression and enhancement, cognition–behavior links, and nonlinguistic inferences. Such data might well assist with validating (or vitiating) linguistic and philosophical claims about metaphor which—for all their observations and ruminations—remain largely descriptive, intuitive, and self-reported. As things stand, Jindo’s applications of received terminology—like “conceptual domain” and “metaphorical concept” (pp. 29–30), along with “frame” and “script” (pp. 50–52)—are unvetted, and they risk becoming notionally fuzzy and ad hoc. What brain-based, explanatory mechanisms exist for these constructs as applied to contemporary minds or (via texts) to ancient Near Eastern minds? Absent such evidence, what theoretical clarifications and methodological qualifications would be prudent for operationalizing metaphor in projects such as this one? By no means should Jindo be held solely accountable to the need of cognitive linguistics for more rigorous and verifiable constructs; but neither should biblical scholars rest content with slippery notions of mental causeand-effect.

Jindo understands metaphors not only as conceptual and orientational, but also as “semantically open entities” (p. 44) that are capable of contextual fluidity and intertextual resonance. When applied to biblical prophetic poetry, metaphors assume a dialogical dimension by inviting (indeed, challenging) their audience to enter into the imaginative reality that emerges out of the prophet’s collaborative relationship with Yahweh. Prophetic metaphor, Jindo seems to be suggesting, is a quintessentially emic mode of language. Within this mode, furthermore, particular “local” metaphors can nest within a guiding “global” metaphor, respectively conveying points of view from the “character worlds” and the “text world” (p. 50). Jindo devotes the heart of his monograph to exploring where and how such metaphors function to bring literary cohesiveness and cognitive coherence to the ostensibly eclectic contents of Jeremiah 1–24...