The liturgy for the Jewish High Holidays, beginning this week, makes prominent use of the expression avinu malkeinu (“our father, our king”), in reference to God. This famously mixed metaphor throws a spotlight on the central place that such symbolism has had in Jewish thought going back to the Bible. Why are such metaphors employed in biblical and subsequent Jewish discourse? And what is the point of shifting about among the different metaphors?
I would like to consider three of the most important metaphorical frameworks employed to describe the biblical enterprise in the Hebrew Bible (and then carried forward into the Talmud), namely, the metaphors of law, covenant, and teaching. These are not the only metaphors that are used in Hebrew Scripture to establish the purpose of these texts, and to position the reader with reference to them. But so far as I know, they are the most frequently invoked.
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