‘Who Filled His Heart to Do This?’ Conceptual Metaphors of the Self in the Book of Esther

Abstract

This essay responds to Carol A. Newsom's recent call for finer-grained studies of particular formulations of the moral self and agency in biblical and related Second Temple texts in two ways: first, drawing on cognitive linguistic research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, it highlights the embodied metaphorical quality of all forms of self-conception and self-representation; second, it examines the network of conceptual metaphors of the self in the Hebrew text of Esther, especially as they speak to questions of subjective agency. Although the book of Esther draws several of its conceptual metaphors from other Hebrew biblical texts (e.g. the heart as self, the self as fillable, the self filled with wine, the self filled with heat, heat abating or dissipating from the self, etc.), it deploys them in such a way as to call into question any delusion of self-control and agency on the part of its royal patriarchal subjects, Ahasuerus and Haman. Instead of affirming agency, these metaphors conceive of the self as easily manipulated and unsettled, thereby revealing a highly insecure subjectivity that is never fully in possession of itself.