The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible
Rhetorical Strategies for Survival

This book investigates the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die.

Hanne Løland Levinson (Author)

9781108833653, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 September 2021

275 pages
22.2 x 14.5 x 1.6 cm, 0.39 kg

'… an important and worthwhile study.' David G. Firth, Review of Biblical Literature

This is the first book to systematically investigate the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die. Contrary to previous scholarship on these texts that assumed these death wishes were simply a desire to escape suffering, Hanne Løland Levinson employs narrative criticism and conversation analysis, together with diachronic methods, to carefully hear each death-wish text in its literary context. She demonstrates that death wishes embody powerful, multi-faceted rhetorical strategies. Grouping the death-wish texts into four main rhetorical strategies of negotiation, expression of despair and anger, longing to undo one's existence, and wishing for a different reality, Løland Levinson portrays the complex reasons why characters in the Hebrew Bible wish for death. She concludes that the death wishes navigate the tension between longing for death and fighting for survival - a tension that many live with also today as they attempt to claim agency and autonomy in life.

1. Introduction
2. Death wish as a negotiation strategy
3. Death wish in despair and anger
4. Wishing away one's birth
5. Death wishes as wishful thinking
6. Wishing for death or fighting for life?

Subject Areas: Jewish studies [JFSR1], Judaism [HRJ], Biblical studies & exegesis [HRCG], Old Testaments [HRCF1], Bibles [HRCF]