The Torah/Law Is a Journey

An analysis of metaphor in the legal texts of the Old Testament using the tools of cognitive and cultural linguistics. The Old Testament is rich in metaphor. Metaphorical expressions appear not only in places where you might expect them, like the poetic verses, but also in the legal texts. They appear in the preambles to collections of laws, in their final summaries, in general considerations on compliance with and violation of the law, in texts concerning the meaning of the law, and those dealing with topics now reserved for legal theory and legal philosophy. These metaphorical expressions reveal how the authors of the relevant Torah/Law texts understood their function in society and what the society of the time preferred in the law. Anchored in cognitive and cultural linguistics, The Torah/Law Is a Journey investigates Hebrew metaphorical expressions concerning the key Old Testament concept of Torah/Law. Ivana Prochazkova identifies Hebrew conceptual metaphors and explicates the metaphorical expressions. She also uses cognitive linguistic analysis to look at modern translations of selected metaphorical expressions into Czech and English. Prochazkova closes with an analysis of the metaphors used in the Council of Europe publication Compass: Manual for Human Rights Education with Young People to conceptualize human rights.