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)

9781108986540, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 February 2024

196 pages
21.5 x 13.8 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

'This study is the result of Hanne Løland Levinson's intense, and personal, work on texts that daringly express human's lament and prayer when experiencing distress and challenges. … The work fits well into the current debates around biblical characters' emotions. The analytical approach avoids hasty psychological speculations about the characters' feelings. Using detailed assessments of how conversations can be interpreted and a range of methods, the complexity of such expressive conversations is highlighted.' Martina Weingärtner, Theologische Literaturzeitung (ThLZ)

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]