This is how such language was used across many centuries in the Israelite and Jewish culture, which had always believed in the close link of “heaven” and “earth” and found it natural to use the language of “natural disasters” to bring out the significance of what we might call major sociopolitical upheavals. Actually, we do the very same thing, speaking of a political “earthquake” or of an election producing a “landslide.” Our own metaphors seem so natural that we forget they are metaphors. Other people’s metaphors, alien to our way of speaking, are often misinterpreted as though they are not
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