Redeeming and Redemption in Biblical and Qumran Psalms and Prayers

Psalms and prayers in the Hebrew Bible and the Qumran literature frequently refer to God’s intervention on behalf of the individual or the nation as “redeeming”. The vocabulary employed, from פדה and גאל, has its literal setting in a sacrificial or legal context, but is employed in an expanded sense when it occurs in prayer material and psalms. The paper approaches this feature of prayer language from the point of view of cognitive metaphor theory in order to clarify how such prayers conceptualize divine intervention.