Growing the green city: A cognitive ecostylistic analysis of Third Isaiah’s Jerusalem (Isaiah 55–66)

Abstract

In the ancient world, cities served as physical and conceptual containers to separate a controlled, orderly area from the chaos outside. The depictions of cities in the Hebrew Bible largely underwrite this paradigm. Third Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem, however, imagines a space that challenges these engrained ideas of the urban. Conducting a cognitive ecostylistic analysis and drawing on insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Text World Theory, this article examines the green city as imagined by Third Isaiah (Isaiah 56–66). Throughout the vision, the prophet creates a new (text-) world defined by urban and natural world-builders, a blend that unites seemingly paradoxical elements. The utopian character of future Jerusalem is downplayed by its grounding in the real world (both the discourse-world and its near-equivalent, the empty text-world in which the prophecy is uttered). Third Isaiah calls for a view of city space that draws on the known, dissolving existing dichotomies and categories. As such, it invites modern readers to rethink not only the biblical Jerusalem but also urban space and its relationship to nature more generally.