Isaiah 40-55 deals with various important themes related to Israel's salvation. However, in spite of the great number of works on these chapters, there are still many unsolved debates. This is because chs. 40-55 are written in excellent poetic language, which, although terse, is full of imagery, parallelism, personification, and rhetorical questions. These poetic and rhetorical devices were very effective for communicating to the original audience but often prevent readers in modem times from understanding the meaning of the text. In particular, when these devices are approached from purely historical-critical perspectives, continued misunderstanding and increased debate is often the result. Taking these concerns into consideration, this project has employed a linguistic approach which deals with mental frames and cognitive metaphors which are based on the cognitive world of the ancient people. In interacting with God, who is the main speaker, the three closely related metaphors, "Jacob-Israel," "Servant," and "Zion," play a very important role in the rhetorical development of chs. 40-55. This project has tried to integrate these metaphors within the frame "the relationship between God and his people." While this frame is fundamental in the Bible, there are also various sub-frames such as king/subject, parents/children, husband/wife, judge/litigant, master/servant, shepherd/sheep, and potter/pottery. Within chs. 40-55, by employing these various subframes with three main metaphors, "Jacob-Israel," "Servant," and "Zion," the prophet tries to communicate and persuade the addressees, the exiles, to accept God's message. While the three metaphors are the main figures in the text, each of them has different connotations. In addition, they are closely related to the addressees themselves (the exiles); thus, the prophet seeks to make them identify the three figures with themselves. By observing, criticizing, and comforting these three figures, the prophet responds to the potential complaints of the exiles and persuades them to return to God. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis addresses the question of how to interpret instances in Hebrew prophetic literature in which one speaker quotes another speaker. Speech quotations of this kind occur almost 300 times across the prophetic corpus and exhibit a wide range of quoting and quoted participants with modal and temporal variations. In order to examine this phenomenon and to formulate a method for its interpretation, the thesis conducts an exegetical case study of Jeremiah 2.1-­‐3.5 which is distinguished by its high number and density of quotations (twelve instances in forty-­‐two verses). With a few notable exceptions, the phenomenon of prophetic speech quotation has not received any attention in its own right but was subsumed under other research concerns, such as prophetic conUlict or the form-­‐critical genre of disputation speech. Across these and other studies, the interpretation of quoted speech is marked by two principal procedures: a) on the basis of their assumed authenticity, quotations are frequently employed as a way to gain direct access to expressions of Israelite religion; b) in most studies, the approach to quoted speech is deUined by extracting the quoted words from their literary environment and by assigning them to a Uixed number of categories. Prompted by the exegetical studies by Wolff (1937) and Overholt (1979), the thesis utilizes Sternberg’s publications on quotation theory in order to confront these two central domains of authenticity and categorization. Quoted speech is deUined as a dualistic structure in which the inset (quoted utterance) is subsumed under the frame (quoting context) in order to serve its perspective and rhetorical goals. The dynamics of the frame-­‐inset relationship renders appeals to authenticity and direct access misguided: every quotation is subject to the forces of contextual mediation, inUluence, and shaping. The inseparable bond between frame and inset also challenges the approach of extraction and categorization. As a corrective to previous approaches, the thesis thus constructs the argument that prophetic speech quotations must always be interpreted within their literary context. To demonstrate the accuracy and implications of this methodological discussion and argument, the remainder of the thesis analyzes the twelve quotations in Jeremiah 2.1-­‐3.5. Special attention is devoted to the contextual integration of the quoted words and to the ways in which they are utilized to serve their frames. In close interaction with previous studies on this passage, this exegesis demonstrates the beneUits of a reading that takes into account the contextually conditioned nature of prophetic speech quotations. At the end of the thesis, the results of this analysis are summarized and related to other quotations in the Book of Jeremiah and other prophetic texts. The contribution of the thesis relates to the exegesis and understanding of the speech quotations and text of Jeremiah 2.1.