Meaning and Context in the Thanksgiving Hymns

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 the speaker in some of the so-called leader hymns as well as in compositions not normally designated leader hymns appears to have the role of a mediator in the agency of God-a feature that distinguishes the hodayot from biblical psalms. This characteristic can be seen as a common denominator that unifies the collection.