Rediscovering Righteousness in Romans: Personified dikaiosyne within Metaphoric and Narratorial Settings

This book is a sustained investigation of the interpretation of righteousness (

) in Romans as it undergoes personification within a metaphoric and narratorial setting. The argument has, as its starting point, the assertion that previous treatments of righteousness in Romans, and particularly within the New Perspective, have failed adequately to take account of the poetic, connotative, and metaphoric nature of Paul’s language. As a way forward, David J. Southall assesses recent literary theorists and endorses their conclusions that metaphor, narrative and personification are tropes of semantic innovation which are productive of new information. In nuce, the thesis of the entire project is that when personified Dikaiosu/nh occurs within pericopes which display clear components of metaphor and narrative, then the character-invention Righteousness acts out the role which in less metaphoric and narratorially construed passages would be played by Christ himself. The author mainly seeks to demonstrate this via exegetical treatments of Romans 6:15-23 and 9:30-10:21 (texts in which biblical scholarship has recognised the personification of righteousness) showing that both of these pericopes contain strong metaphoric and narratorial elements, and concluding that personified

operates within these matrices and is functionally equivalent to Christ himself. The investigation concludes with an examination of righteousness elsewhere in the Pauline corpus.