Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Jealousy and anger

“The statistical evidence linking jealousy with anger in the Hebrew Bible is remarkable. Of the 70 verses in which קנא ,קנאה or קנוא [qn'h, qn', qnw'] appears in the Hebrew Bible, 23 contain a word for anger. Thus, in approximately one-third of the appearances of קנא and its cognates in the Hebrew Bible, anger is also explicitly mentioned. As a point of reference, consider צדקה/צדיק/צדק [tsdq, tsdyq, tsdqh] (‘righteous[ness]’) and מׁשפט [mshpt] (‘justice’), which many interpreters have recognized as being closely related to one another. The Hebrew Bible links קנא ,קנאה and קנוא [qn'h, qn', qnw'] with terms for anger with greater frequency (33% of the time) than it links דקה/צדיק/צדק [tsdq, tsdyq, tsdqh] with מׁשפט [mshpat] (twenty-one percent of the time). In fact, words from the root קנא [qn'] are approximately 15 times more likely to appear in a verse that refers to anger than in a verse from the Hebrew Bible as a whole.”— From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis , page 65

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