Hate in Biblical Discourse from the Perspective of Social-Scientific Criticism: The Honour-Shame Cultural Code and the Concept of Power/Strength

This article presents a study of hatred in the Bible in light of quantitative discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The study relies on the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament. Two traditions provided the theoretical framework: (1) the honour-shame cultural code, derived from anthropological research and already known in international biblical studies; (2) the striving for a sense of power/strength, derived from the philosophical and psychological Lvov-Warsaw School. Although the primary emphasis is on the explanatory propositions of the Lvov-Warsaw School, both traditions offer coherent, complementary explanations of the changing role of hatred in the Old Testament Judaism and the New Testament pre-Christianity. The analyses indicate that in New Testament discourse, hatred changes (loses) its former regulatory function in the social relations of ancient Israel. They also demonstrate the significant (and often underappreciated) importance of the concept of power/strength in the social world described in the Bible. It also appears that the variable power/strength can and should be incorporated into the discourse of socialscientific criticism as an extension of the conceptual framework of contemporary biblical studies.