Reassessing the Genres of the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran)

Abstract

The psalms of the Hodayot tradition (the Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran) have been customarily divided into two categories: the “Teacher Hymns” written by a leader of the sect at Qumran, and the “Community Hymns” associated with the ordinary members of the sect. These categories are considered problematic because of well-recognized problems pertaining to authorship and to the poor fit of many of the psalms in the categories. I propose a new set of categories for the Hodayot that classify the psalms on the basis of genre. It is my contention that genre offers a better frame of reference because it defines the psalms against the backdrop of the genres of early Jewish psalms and not solely in terms of the sectarian community.

To propose new generic categories, I employ John Swales’s rhetorical moves analysis to classify the psalms on the basis of how their formal structures (what he calls “rhetorical moves”) work together to achieve common rhetorical objectives. Swales defines a composition’s genre primarily by its rhetorical objectives rather than a definitional checklist of features. I use rhetorical moves analysis to describe where the Hodayot psalms fall along the spectrum of descriptive and declarative praise in Claus Westermann’s schema for the genres of the biblical psalms. I conclude that there are two interlocking generic categories in the Hodayot: eschatological psalms of thanksgiving and psalms of hymnic confession. These generic categories have overlapping rhetorical strategies consisting of rhetorical moves that work closely together to achieve the primary communicative purpose of praising God descriptively and declaratively. In this respect, they serve the Maskil’s secondary rhetorical objective of instructing the audience in the sectarian discourses of praise and supplication, making the Hodayot tradition a part of the Maskil’s programme of instructing sectarians and evaluating their insight into the divine plan.