Karolien Vermeulen – författare

The Book of Jonah, perhaps the most popular among the Minor Prophets, turns the world of its audience upside down. In four short chapters, it leaves its readers hanging between a series of binary oppositions. Over the years, the interpretation of Jonah has evolved from rebellious to virtuous and back, with a character searching for a place in the story world, a text challenging the genre and practice of prophecy, and a story with afterlives in different religious traditions. More recently, scholarship on the book has been flooded with ecological concerns, swamped by emotional readings, and held against the postcolonial light. Despite its comprehensible size, Jonah’s outlook still remains ambivalent and ambiguous. This volume engages with this unruliness in a timely manner.

The Book of Jonah, perhaps the most popular among the Minor Prophets, turns the world of its audience upside down. In four short chapters, it leaves its readers hanging between a series of binary oppositions. Over the years, the interpretation of Jonah has evolved from rebellious to virtuous and back, with a character searching for a place in the story world, a text challenging the genre and practice of prophecy, and a story with afterlives in different religious traditions. More recently, scholarship on the book has been flooded with ecological concerns, swamped by emotional readings, and held against the postcolonial light. Despite its comprehensible size, Jonah’s outlook still remains ambivalent and ambiguous. This volume engages with this unruliness in a timely manner.

This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the city image in the Hebrew Bible, with specific attention to stylistics. By engaging with spatial theory (Lefebvre 1974, Soja 1996), the author develops a new framework to analyse the concept of ‘city’, arguing that a set of conceptual images defines the Biblical Hebrew city, each of them constructed using the same linguistic toolkit. Contrary to previous studies, the book shows that biblical cities are not necessarily evil or female. In addition, there is no substantial difference between the metaphorical images used for Jerusalem and those used for other cities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, urban studies, critical-spatial theory and biblical studies (especially Biblical Hebrew).

This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the city image in the Hebrew Bible, with specific attention to stylistics. By engaging with spatial theory (Lefebvre 1974, Soja 1996), the author develops a new framework to analyse the concept of ‘city’, arguing that a set of conceptual images defines the Biblical Hebrew city, each of them constructed using the same linguistic toolkit. Contrary to previous studies, the book shows that biblical cities are not necessarily evil or female. In addition, there is no substantial difference between the metaphorical images used for Jerusalem and those used for other cities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, urban studies, critical-spatial theory and biblical studies (especially Biblical Hebrew).

This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the city image in the Hebrew Bible, with specific attention to stylistics. By engaging with spatial theory (Lefebvre 1974, Soja 1996), the author develops a new framework to analyse the concept of ‘city’, arguing that a set of conceptual images defines the Biblical Hebrew city, each of them constructed using the same linguistic toolkit. Contrary to previous studies, the book shows that biblical cities are not necessarily evil or female. In addition, there is no substantial difference between the metaphorical images used for Jerusalem and those used for other cities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, urban studies, critical-spatial theory and biblical studies (especially Biblical Hebrew).