María Enid Rodríguez

Humans desire communication with the divine through prophecy. Prophecy, in turn, provides a salient focus for the cross-cultural nature of humanity’s need for divine communication. Of special interest to this project is the phrase word of God that occurs in prophetic corpora across various cultures, especially since the phrase has also been reused with theological meanings that developed from its appearance within prophetic texts. This project uses cognitive science of religion as a framework to analyze the linguistic function of the phrase word of God in Assyrian, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic sacred prophetic writings in order to distinguish the convergences and divergences among the use of the phrase in each linguistic context.