Faith as a construction of meaning in the Book of Psalms: a lexicographical analysis of the words Emunah and Bitachon

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the words Emunah and Bitachon in Psalms 119, 71 and 37, in the Hebrew language, in order to understand their effects of meaning, which are also highlighted in the Portuguese text. The aim is also to trace the relations of meaning generated by these words within the Hebrew text and, for this purpose, the above psalms were selected, since these texts contain the two words in their corpus. In order to achieve this objective, the article is based on an understanding of the word in its magical dimension, since it is constituted as "magical, cabalistic, sacred, [...] endowed with power" (BIDERMAN, 1998, p. 81). As a result, it became possible to understand the word Emunah as faith based on trust that everything is for the good, and to understand the word Bitachon as faith built on absolute certainty. It was also possible to understand the acrostics of the word Amen within Jewish thought, in order to understand their relationship with the word Emunah and their presence within the text. It was also possible to see that these words permeate each other in their meanings, building a web of meanings generated by the biblical text.