The eschatological meals imagined in the context of the apocalyptic tradition have so far only been treated sporadically. This research desideratum is the starting point of the present study. It ties in with the social science discourse on rituals and adapts it to biblical and extra-biblical texts.
Crises and catastrophes of all kinds have always confronted humans with great challenges. The present study examines the question of how literary texts process and deal with these challenges through the imaginary world of metaphors. It concentrates on the metaphor of childbirth, which compares people racked with crisis to women in labour (and sometimes vice versa). The texts examined are taken from the Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, together with a text exemplar from the Qumran corpus, which takes up the metaphor of childbirth and develops it further.