ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book disscusses how the theory can be applied to biblical texts. It starts by articulating a queer understanding of how metaphor can work as a means of expressing an ideological message. The book demonstrates from textual evidence drawn from the wider Hebrew Bible that one part of the tenor of the metaphor, the inhabitants of Israel/Judah/Jerusalem, are to be understood as male. It apply these theoretical arguments to the texts of Jeremiah, Hosea and Ezekiel, respectively. A schematic device, which exploits features of grammatical gender in biblical Hebrew in order to explicate the gender structure of the marriage metaphor, is applied to Jeremiah. It will be noticed that in a methodological approach that exploits grammatical features of the Hebrew language, little help can be gained from the Greek of the Septuagint, where the grammatical structure is different.
