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Abstract
In the form of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah, the literary image of God as a suckling mother constructs a metaphysical social relationship between God and humanity that is unprecedented in Jewish theological literature. This striking image arises from a stream of Jewish thought that uses the metaphor of a child suckling milk from its mother to understand the process of spiritual transmission. In Jewish literature spanning a period from the fifth through the twelfth centuries, this metaphor is confined to humanity, with spiritual transmission passing from mother to child, or from the Torah to the scholar. Kabbalistic texts of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries apply this metaphor to divinity, depicting God suckling the people of Israel with a spiritually nurturing transmission of divine overflow. They also apply the image to internal divine dynamics, explaining the intimate relationships among the kabbalistic gradations of divinity with the suckling metaphor. However, it is in the late thirteenth century text Sefer Ha-Zohar that the metaphor of God as a suckling mother achieves its fullest expression. In the Zohar, the metaphor is deeply embedded in feminine and affective connotative imagery, grounding the concept of suckling as spiritual transmission in a cognitive, experiential understanding that restructures kabbalistic concepts of God and self.
This project applies metaphor theory to the study of Kabbalah, a form of mysticism known for its use of vivid and unusual imagery. In doing so, it demonstrates some of the processes by which theological images mediate tradition and innovation to effect religious transformation. Additionally, the project contributes to an understanding of Kabbalah's feminine divine imagery, one of this theology's most distinctive and mysterious features. By examining the inner-cultural history of a discrete feminine image, its surrounding Christian cultural milieu, and the use of feminine imagery by exclusively male authors, the project explains the conceptual impact of one such feminine image in Kabbalah.
