"My Wrath will Burn": The Terminology of Biblical Emotions

Two contradicting approaches provide the basis for the emerging field of the study of emotions in the Hebrew Bible. Both debate whether, and to what extent, modern categories and perceptions of emotions are valid and productive in biblical studies. This paper deals with some of the fundamental methodological issues that have arisen from this debate. It presents a novel philological inquiry into the semantics of חרה , commonly considered to belong to a group of "terms for anger" in Biblical Hebrew. This analysis will show that חרה is semantically flexible, referring to emotions but also to actions; even when denoting an emotion, it is not always anger. A number of linguistic, contextual, and hierarchical parameters are proposed to facilitate the mapping of the diverse meanings of this verb. Finally, I conclude that the diverse senses of חרה derive from the same literal denotation, which receives its metaphorical meanings by using different prepositions in various interpersonal and human-divine contexts.