Honor and Shame in the Deuteronomic Covenant and the Deutero...

The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the semantics of honor and shame in the Hebrew Bible and to demonstrate how these social values intersect with Israel's fundamental social organizing principle, covenant. Though many scholars have claimed that honor and shame are pivotal values for biblical Israel and that covenant is fundamental to her conception of the divine-human relationship, no work attempting to explore the juncture of these two important social phenomena has appeared. Thus, our study has two major goals: (1) establish the semantics of honor and shame in the Hebrew Bible; and (2) demonstrate that honor and shame, however conceived in context, are pivotal to biblical Israel's understanding of her covenantal relationship with YHWH in Deuteronomy 28 and 2 Samuel 7.