ABSTRACT
First published in G.J. Brooke, A.H.W. Curtis and J.F.H. Healey (eds) Ugarit and the Bible (UBL 11, Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1994) 395-419.
Religious language is intrinsically metaphorical. It consistently applies images drawn from human experience to the metaphysical world, using them to construct, in P. Berger’s words, ‘a towering edifice of symbols’.1 While the choice of such imagery is very broad, it tends to concentrate on those dimensions of human behaviour and feeling which express the deepest emotions, so that the old joke that it always boils down to sex and violence has a measure of truth in it: these are precisely those areas in which most is at stake, and therefore in which most emotion is invested. It scarcely needs a formal projection theory to recognize the self-evident truth of the principle that such symbols, once objectified and reified in the external or abstract world, are then reappropriated in the subjective world, shaped into the form of paradigms, sacred images, and social norms.
