Soliloquies Divine: God's Self-Addressed Rhetoric in the Old Testament
Abstract
Very little has been written about the quite noticeable tendency of God to address himself in the Old Testament, starting with the opening chapters in Genesis and continuing, intermittently, until 2 Kings. These speeches may very well be the oldest examples we have of what James Hirsh calls “self-addressed soliloquies,” but they cannot be analyzed based on some of the theoretical ideas of Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Augustine (who invented the term), or Harold Bloom. As my analysis of these speeches shows, God's rhetoric in these speeches, his ethos, is highly elliptical, ironic, and contradicts most of what readers expect from a soliloquy.
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2016-08-01
- DOI
- 10.1525/rh.2016.34.3.223
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