Review of Hasselbalch, Meaning and Context in the Thanksgiving Hymns

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Sociolinguistics and the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns) (Michael Johnson).

Meaning and Context in the Thanksgiving Hymns is the revised version of Trine Bjørnung Hasselbalch’s 2011 doctoral dissertation, supervised by Bodil Ejrnæs, which applies elements of the sociolinguistic approach called Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the texts in the poetic collection, 1QHodayota. 1QHa is the largest extant manuscript of the “Thanksgiving Hymns” from Qumran, discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls of Cave 1 in 1947. The psalms are written from a first-person “I” perspective, and they address God by giving thanks or praising God for special knowledge, spiritual strength, and deliverance from distress. The objective of Hasselbalch’s investigation is to use SFL and CDA to recover information about the social context of 1QHa that has been encoded into the lexicon and grammar of the text and into the selection of certain psalms for this collection.

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Earlier essays in AJR's current series on the Dead Sea Scrolls (in honor of the 70th anniversary of their discovery) are noted here and links.