Dr. Deena Grant Contributes to Book on Emotions

Dr. Deena Grant, Academic Dean and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, contributed a chapter to Grasping Emotions: Approaches to Emotions in Interreligious and Interdisciplinary Discourse.

The book is relevant today since we have witnessed a global trend towards highly emotionalized discourses across societies and religions. The contributors are scholars in religious studies and theology from different traditions—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—who enter into dialogue with other disciplines, such as psychology, literary studies, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, and historiography.

Dr. Grant’s chapter is titled “Emotion Scripts in the Hebrew Bible: A Case of Hate.”

The abstract reads:

There are two major reasons biblical scholars have been unable to thoroughly unpack biblical conceptions of emotion. First, biblical emotion terms are associated with variegated sets of traits, none of which are necessary and common to all expressions of them. Second, the Bible’s emotion lexicon is culturally specific, which means that modern English and German readers cannot assume that a biblical emotion term possesses an exact conceptual equivalent in our modern languages. In this paper, I will apply the prototype theory of conceiving categories to the biblical term for hate, sn’, in order to exemplify how an approach from the field of cognitive linguistics may elucidate biblical conceptions of emotion.

Congratulations, Deena!