Popular Post Dan McClellan Posted May 22, 2020 Popular Post Posted May 22, 2020 Hi, everyone! I recently successfully defended my doctoral dissertation for the University of Exeter. It's entitled, "Deity and Divine Agency in the Hebrew Bible: Cognitive Perspectives." The abstract is below. I'm preparing it for publication, but am also looking for feedback in the meantime. If you'd like a PDF, feel free to message me your email address. I'd love to hear what you think! Quote This thesis interrogates the conceptualization of deity and divine agency in the Hebrew Bible, focusing particularly on the problem of the relationship of divine images and representatives to their patron deities. In order to move beyond the tendentiousness of previous scholarship that addresses this problem, I employ an interdisciplinary approach that centers cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion, and also includes biblical criticism, archaeology, anthropology, materiality studies, and other disciplines. I begin in Part One with a methodological discussion that describes the approaches being taken and interrogates some of the conceptual frameworks that have governed the previous scholarship on the question, such as “religion” and the practice of definition. It then moves on to discuss the concepts of agency and personhood, and how contemporary anthropological research on both can help inform our interrogation of the ancient world. Part Two begins the interrogation of the generic concept of deity, demonstrating that such concepts are products of the engagement of our intuitive and reflective reasoning with our cognitive ecologies, and that they build on our everyday conceptualizations of agency and personhood. These dynamics facilitate a view of divine agency as separable and communicable, which will be demonstrated to undergird the unique relationships understood to be shared by deities and their divine images. Chapter 4 employs a cognitive linguistic lens to propose semantic bases, domains, and profiles for the generic concept of deity in the Hebrew Bible. Part Three applies the models developed in Chapters 3 and 4 to an interrogation of YHWH as a deity and of YHWH’s divine agents, such as the ark of the covenant, the messenger of YHWH, and the very text of the Torah itself. The Conclusion summarizes findings and discusses implications for further research. 7
CV75 Posted May 22, 2020 Posted May 22, 2020 4 hours ago, Dan McClellan said: Hi, everyone! I recently successfully defended my doctoral dissertation for the University of Exeter. It's entitled, "Deity and Divine Agency in the Hebrew Bible: Cognitive Perspectives." The abstract is below. I'm preparing it for publication, but am also looking for feedback in the meantime. If you'd like a PDF, feel free to message me your email address. I'd love to hear what you think! Way over my head, but made me think (perhaps tangentially) of some questions: What is the conclusion (Part 3)? Given the means of conceptualizing deity described in Part 2, how does the text indicate that Adam might be doing that? Or is Adam to be taken as a symbol that serves as an agent of those who first conceptualized their deity and then told this story? What is the role/relationship of revelation with this conceptualization (or the distinction between them)? From Part 1, are there any assumptions as to whether those of the ancient world used intuition and their gut-level synthesis more or less than reason and analysis in how they went about conceptualizing things, or whether they were just as successful as we are using these approaches? Thank you -- 1
Dan McClellan Posted May 22, 2020 Author Posted May 22, 2020 20 minutes ago, CV75 said: Way over my head, but made me think (perhaps tangentially) of some questions: What is the conclusion (Part 3)? Given the means of conceptualizing deity described in Part 2, how does the text indicate that Adam might be doing that? Or is Adam to be taken as a symbol that serves as an agent of those who first conceptualized their deity and then told this story? What is the role/relationship of revelation with this conceptualization (or the distinction between them)? From Part 1, are there any assumptions as to whether those of the ancient world used intuition and their gut-level synthesis more or less than reason and analysis in how they went about conceptualizing things, or whether they were just as successful as we are using these approaches? Thank you -- Well, the description of Adam as being created from the dust of the earth and having God breath life into him is parallel to the creation of divine images in other cultures, so the book of Genesis presents Adam (and thus all humanity) as a living divine image, or an entity with God's spirit/agency within it, and thus the capacity to exercise God's agency and authority. I am not writing for a Latter-day Saint context, so I don't discuss things like revelation. People anciently were far less likely to subordinate their intuitions to their reflective reasoning, apart from reflective reasoning that had to do with authority and identity politics. 2
CV75 Posted May 22, 2020 Posted May 22, 2020 3 hours ago, Dan McClellan said: Well, the description of Adam as being created from the dust of the earth and having God breath life into him is parallel to the creation of divine images in other cultures, so the book of Genesis presents Adam (and thus all humanity) as a living divine image, or an entity with God's spirit/agency within it, and thus the capacity to exercise God's agency and authority. I am not writing for a Latter-day Saint context, so I don't discuss things like revelation. People anciently were far less likely to subordinate their intuitions to their reflective reasoning, apart from reflective reasoning that had to do with authority and identity politics. Thank you!
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