On the Conceptual Motivation Behind Animal Imagery in the Biblical "Book of Proverbs"

This paper investigates the conceptual motivation underlying selected proverbs from the biblical Book of Proverbs that contain animal names. The analysis examines references to a range of animals, including birds, reptiles, and both wild and domesticated mammals, and highlights their culture-specific symbolic significance for the interpretation of the proverbs. Employing methodological tools from Cognitive Linguistics – specifically conceptual metaphor, metonymy, and metaphtonymy (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Goossens, 1990; Kövecses, 2010; Ruiz de Mendoza, 2011) – the study demonstrates that animal imagery in Proverbs functions as a vehicle for moral and practical instruction. The corpus for this analysis is the English Standard Version of the Bible, available at https://biblehub.com/.