"The poles of your yoke” (Lev 26:13): mudbrick bearing and the career of a biblical metaphor

The yoke as a metaphor for political suppression is well-attested in the writings of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. Puzzling, however, are instances where the metaphor is expressed as “the poles of the yoke” (Lev 26:13; Ezek 34:27) or, simply, “the poles” as the yoke of a draft animal is comprised of a single pole. This study interprets the appearance of this phrase, in Lev 26:13, in light of representations of mudbrick transport found in the Eighteenth Dynasty funerary chapel of the vizier Rekhmire. The study investigates Ezekiel's invocations of this trope of a yoke of many poles and explores the dynamics that governed how later writers reuse metaphors and adapt them within a new context.