“The Emotions” in Biblical Anthropology? A Genealogy and Case Study with
In the late nineteenth century, the British writer Lewis Carroll published a nonsensical poem calledThe Hunting of the Snarkin which an unlikely alliance hunts a fictional animal, which Carroll named the “snark.” Despite the alliance's intense search for the snark and their questions about how to describe and classify it (apparently, “a Boojum”), they do not find it. I want to suggest that any effort to locate “emotions” in the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East is comparable to hunting the snark. If we want our hunt to be successful, we will turn away from “the emotions” and toward something more like the psychological taxonomy that the emotions displaced in the late-modern period: namely, the taxonomy of “passions and affections.” “The emotions” are simply not to be found in the Hebrew Bible or in the historical contexts behind its emergence.