Shane Williamson’s Reviews > Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept > Status Update

"...metaphorical patterns offer conceptual windows through which we might gain a better understanding of the concept of sin as it is mediated by the symbolic thought-world of ancient Israel. In the chapters that follow, we will give attention not only to the cultural basis of each of the metaphors but also to how they are employed by the biblical writers to achieve their rhetorical goals." (15)

"...metaphor is a way of imposing order on the world around us, or of grasping the world by means of the ideas available to us. So careful attention to the metaphors by which a concept is expressed can give us genuine insight into the cultural assumptions pertaining to that concept." (4)