The affinity of ‘ROAD’ images in biblical Hebrew and contemporary Polish
The sources of the main currents of the European culture have been spotted in Jerusalem and in Athens. Some amount of ‘ground water’, mostly containing pre-Christian beliefs to be detected in neo-pagan religious movements can also be noticed. However, it is the Bible which is the most commonly accessed treasury of various modi cogitandi, observed in different scenarios of human activity, stereotypes, collocations etc. The authors, in the course of analysis of classic Hebrew expressions: ישד הלךְ ררךְ and חטא טצה תצה שננ, being the basic notions connected with the notion of path, arrive at the description of various issues unmistakably connected with the dignity of life, appropriate behavior, choice of appropriate moral solutions, but also the conceptualization of sin, vice, drifting astray. The arguments presented in the paper let the authors come to the conclusions that the expressions denoting such issues are usually recognized as sacral in various forms of religious discourse but lose the content in the secularized layers of language.