Acknowledgments
The present contribution is part of the project “Depicting Suffering, Imagining God. The Use of Metaphor in the Conceptualisation of Suffering and of the Divine in the Book of Job” which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Dr. Pierre Van Hecke and funded by the Research Fund of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. I want to express my most sincere gratitude to Prof. Van Hecke who has shaped my ideas and whose kind, honest criticism has proven invaluable both professionally and personally. This book would not have existed had he not guided and encouraged me. The mistakes in this work are mine, not his. I also thank Prof. Dr. Eibert Tigchelaar and Prof. Dr. Dr. Pierre Van Hecke for providing the time and finances for the transformation of my dissertation into a book. I thank the professors, researchers, and students of the research unit of Biblical Studies at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the Catholic University of Louvain for their feedback, encouragement, and criticism. Special thanks are due to my colleague Hanneke van Loon who generously shared her insights on metaphor in the book of Job.
I thank the editors of Supplements to Vetus Testamentum for their valuable feedback and for accepting this manuscript as part of their series. I also thank the members, present and past, of the steering committees of the sessions on Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation and Metaphor Theory and the Hebrew Bible of the SBL annual meeting. I thank Dianne Wood, my former teacher at Continental Theological Seminary, and Michael Williams, my former pastor, for their irreplaceable help with the language review. Dr. Dr. Wilhelm Mistiaen has provided valuable feedback on the argumentation of this study.
My parents and siblings are my wisdom teachers. They have brought so much joy to my life. I am forever grateful for their care, instruction, love, and never-failing generosity. I thank them for their never-failing encouragement, prayer, and love. My parents-in-law have been supportive and the same holds for the churches I was part of.
I thank my wife, Isabelle, and our children, Emma-Grace, Elya, and Ezra. It is so easy to love you and it is such a great pleasure to do so. Thank you for the countless times you have cared for me. You have encouraged me to take small steps and you believed in me and in this book.
I thank God for not silencing the dissonant voice. It will take a lifetime to answer certain questions the book of Job raises, yet just as the protagonist of the book, I will press on to search for answers and for Him.
I dedicate this book to my mother. My father passed away less than a year after the completion of my first manuscript. He suffered from an aggressive brain tumor. May his kindness and love live on in his children and grandchildren. May my mother be comforted in ways unknown for the loss of the man she so deeply loved and loves.