Sentiments as Culturally Constructed Emotions: Anger and Love in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract This article explores the language of the sentiments of anger and love in biblical Hebrew, English and Japanese, where sentiments are defined as emotions that are culturally defined and organized. Its leading questions are: To what extent do people in different societies experience the same and different emotions because of their cultural backgrounds? And what does language reveal about emotional thought and its cultural construction in the Hebrew Bible? It is argued that anger in biblical texts is related to the mouth, nose or face and expresses an uncontrollable fury in someone's head that leads prototypically to retributive actions. It is also argued that the love between a man and a woman in the Hebrew Bible is conceptualized as love of a man for a woman. The semantic values of both sentiments seem to materialize in a hierarchical framework of thinking. Emotions may break in into generally accepted hierarchical structures: anger may get hold of someone and love can defy determined positions. Nonetheless, cultural conventions are developed and used to defend the hierarchical order as a natural order. This explains why women are never said to be angry in the Hebrew Bible, and why it is only rarely expressed that a woman loves a man.