The body, its organs and senses: a study of metaphor in medieval Hebrew poetry of praise*

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of metaphor in medieval Hebrew poetry. Departing from an understanding of metaphor as a matter of thought, more than a matter of speech, it brings into sharp focus one of the most common conceptual metaphors, that which projects the structure of the human body onto the social body and explores its manifestations in language. Sharing in Ricoeur's conviction that metaphor works at different levels, the study is divided into two sections. The first section analyses the use of body-based metaphor at the level of the word and the sentence. The second part explores how this metaphor works throughout a poem. All the examples provided are either poems of praise or elegies, written from the 10th to the 12th centuries. Because these examples are considered against the backdrop of liturgical poetry, this article ultimately intends to present a reflection on the use of metaphor in the intersection between the secular and liturgical poetical domains.