Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 68:2 (NA 2017)
Article: Form And Experience Dwelling In Unity A Cognitive Reading Of The Metaphors Of Psalm 133
Author: Wen-Pin Leow

TynBull 68:2 (2017) p. 185

Form And Experience Dwelling In Unity
A Cognitive Reading Of The Metaphors Of Psalm 1331

Wen-Pin Leow

([email protected])

Summary

This article uses the cognitive approach to analyse the metaphors of Psalm 133 while concurrently using a study of the remaining Psalms of Ascents to understand the underlying world-view that Psalm 133’s metaphors are based on. Such an approach reveals that the subjects of the metaphors of Psalm 133 are connected at a deeper conceptual level. This conceptual relationship allows the psalmist to both describe the blessings of brotherly unity and to provide a literary parallel of the experience of those blessings through the psalm’s form.

1. Introduction

A little poetic gem it may be, but Psalm 133 has nonetheless proven vexatious for its interpreters. As Hossfeld and Zenger observe, the psalm, while ‘so simple at first glance, has been unusually controversial in the details of its interpretation by scholars’.2 One of the major challenges presented by the psalm is its metaphors. Commentators are divided over the extent of the metaphors, the referents of the metaphors’ subjects, as well as the significance of the metaphors, just to cite a few of the complexities of the psalm.3

TynBull 68:2 (2017) p. 186

This article seeks to re-examine the metaphors in Psalm 133 through applying cognitive linguistics. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including its more recent developments in the conceptual blending approach,4 has recently been used profitably to study metaphors throughout the Hebrew Bible,5 especially in the Psalter.6 However, as Van Hecke observes, ‘cognitive metaphor theories are … developed with a view to analyse metaphors in living languages and not in dead languages’.7 So, while it is possible to study modern metaphors via the cognitive approach because we possess the appropriate conceptual domains to interpret them, the same cannot be said of the metaphors of Psalm 133, which draw from conceptual domains separated from its modern readers for more than two millenn...