Early Personal Hymns of Thanksgiving

Hymns are heightened poetic expressions of praise and thanksgiving. They frequently use the rhetorical technique of parallelism, in which the same idea is expressed with different details in each half of a poetic line. God is praised for specific acts, such as creation, revelation, and redemption, or attributes, such as wisdom, compassion, and just rulership. Fictive hymns that are placed in the mouths of characters emphasize the specific divine attributes and actions that have motivated the hymn within the narrative context. Such fictive hymns are common in the Apocrypha, including the books of Ben Sira, Tobit, and Judith, and are placed in the mouths of biblical characters in retellings and expansions of biblical narratives. They also occur in the New Testament, including in the Gospel of Luke, where both Jesus’ mother, Mary, and John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, give thanks to God in hymnic form.