The King of Terrors: Death and its Meaning in the Israelite/Early Jewish Culture

The proposed study will be the first to comprehensively examine the semantics of a spectre of metaphors, ideas, rituals, symbols and symbolic associations and interactions employed in the early Jewish culture to appropriate mortality. Through an interdisciplinary approach and contextual, comparative and structural analysis of different types of sources (written and artifactual), the project aims to reveal the complexities of the Israelite/early Jewish understanding of death, its conceptualisation, rationalisation and ritualisation and the symbolic expressions of social and religious issues reflected through those complexities.