This contribution uses the analysis of spatial metaphors in a well-known Hebrew literary text, the Book of Job, to evaluate whether the debate about deliberateness focuses on the right ‘kind’ of deliberateness. Drawing on a variety of both deliberate and non-deliberate spatial metaphors, I argue that investigating the deliberateness of any individual metaphor is a) harder to corroborate from a theoretical perspective, b) harder to practically implement, and c) less representative of the communicative dimension of metaphor than studying metaphors as they relate to the overall intention of the author, a level of deliberateness that has widely been studied and has recently known a resurgence in popularity (Stockwell 2013). Indeed, the question is not whether the author intentionally uses a specific metaphor, but to what extent a metaphor is relevant to the author’s message. To put authorial intent at the core of the selection and use of a text’s metaphors allows us to go beyond the question ‘is the reader’s attention diverted to the source domain?’ thus leading us into one of the core questions of stylistics and exegesis, viz. the relevance of a textual feature for an author’s message.