Meaning and Context in the Thanksgiving Hymns: Linguistic and Rhetorical Perspectives on a Collection of Prayers from Qumran

Hasselbalch asserts that current theories about the social background of Thanksgiving Hymns are unable to explain its heterogeneous character. Instead the author suggests a reading strategy that leaves presumptions about the underlying social contexts aside to instead consider the collection's hybridity as a clue to understanding the collection as a whole. Hasselbalch applies Systemic Functional Linguistics to four Hodayot compositions which show signs of hybridity. Analysis reveals that th...