Professor Dr. Ellen van Wolde
Professor Emeritus, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Professor Van Wolde has held positions at the Universities of Nijmegen (1984-1992) and Tilburg (1992-2008). She was appointed at Radboud University in Nijmegen in 2009 and retired in 2020. In her research, she investigates the linguistic, literary and cultural contents of texts in the Hebrew Bible in close connection with the culture and cognition (the mental processes) of people in the Ancient Near East. In her syntactic and semantic studies, she uses linguistics and especially cognitive linguistics as the instrument of analysis. In doing so, she strives to uncover the concepts and language use of people in the time, place, and culture in which the texts originated, such as the concepts on the beginning, on purity and impurity, and on emotions. Her insights are captured in her monograph Reframing Biblical Studies. When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context and in the articles she has published, among others on the first verses of the Bible (the verb ‘bara’), on ‘the rainbow’ after the flood, on ‘the Jacob’s Ladder’, and on metaphors.
Email: ellen.vanwolde@ru.nl
Website: radboud.academia.edu/ellen van wolde
Select Publications
Wolde van, Ellen Reframing Biblical Studies. When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context (Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009).
Wolde van, Ellen, ‘One Bow or Another? A Study of the Bow in Genesis 9:8-17’, Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 124-149.
Wolde van, Ellen, ‘Separation and Creation in Genesis 1 and Psalm 104. A Continuation of the Discussion of the Verb bara’, Vetus Testamentum 67 (2017): 611-647.
Wolde van, Ellen, ‘The Niphal as Middle Voice and its Consequence for Meaning’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43 (2019): 453-478.
Wolde van, Ellen, ‘A Stairway to Heaven? Jacob’s Dream in Genesis 28.10-22’, Vetus Testamentum 69 (2019): 722-735.
Wolde van, Ellen, ‘A network of conventional and deliberate metaphors in Psalm 22’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44.4 (2020): 642-666.