© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Biblical Interpretation 11, 3/4 Also available online – www.brill.nl IN WORDS AND PICTURES: THE SUN IN 2 SAMUEL 12:7-12 ELLEN VAN WOLDE University of Tilburg A biblical narrative offers words and images, thus setting the scene for a world different from ours. In reading, we create a mental representation of a story world, using textual complexes of meaning and letting them interact with our knowledge and experience of the real world. Neither the biblical presentation nor the reader’s representation, however, are directly related to the extra-textual worlds, only indirectly, bound as they are to cultural ideas and categorisations, linguistic prototypes and time- and space-bound mental arrangements. Until recently, these cognitive categories were reduced to rational categories, to grammar and meaning, to literary style and structure, to history and ideology. However, emotional categories are also present in and evoked by a text, such as anger and fear, happiness and joy, sorrow and sadness. It is difficult for us, in the twenty-first century, to gain insight into the emotions and views as presented in the biblical texts. Nevertheless, we can feed our imagination not only by re- flecting on words as the single entrance to biblical thoughts and texts but also by taking into consideration the pictures on seals, in archives or in stone, because they offer as good an access to the cognitive world of the ancient Near East as words. I will concentrate here on one single aspect to illustrate this, namely, on the role of the sun in 2 Sam. 12:7-12. In Yhwh’s dis- courses, embedded in Nathan’s speech to David, the sun is men- tioned twice: “He will sleep with your wives before the eyes of this sun” (v. 11) and “because you did this secretly, I will do this thing in the sight of all Israel and in the sight of the sun” (v. 12). Many exegetes are of the opinion that the term “sun” does not signify anything special or that it is just a nice image (cf. Fokkelman 1981: 83; McCarter 1984: 306; Polzin 1993: 126-27). My question is: can we achieve a better understanding of the meaning of the image of the sun in 2 Sam. 12:11-12 and of the text’s cognitive and emo- tional values when we take into account textual, linguistic, and iconographic information?