Journal for Semitics

Akhenaten used a centralised cult and monolatrism to achieve political stability in Egypt. Hammurabi used Marduk as chief deity in Babylonia to centralise power and create political and religious stability in his kingdom. It is within this ancient Near Eastern tradition of using religion and one specific deity to achieve political stability that Psalm 104 finds its origins. The early Israelite monarchy found itself amidst uncertain political circumstances. The early kings used a centralised monarchy and monolatrism to achieve economic and political stability. The early Israelite government also used other Egyptian influences including governing methods, policies and the use of Egyptian scribes. The monarchy used cultic staff to communicate theologically sanctioned politics. Contact between Egyptian scribes and this cultic staff influenced by Canaanite heritage probably led to the production of a culturally diverse Psalm 104.

Unlike modern narrative, which often goes into great detail in order to develop characters and themes, the narrator in the Old Testament is reticent, and the narrative is typically terse. There are many ambiguous passages involving actions of dubious propriety, resulting in readers being uncertain how to assess characters and draw ideological conclusions from their actions. It is too easy for modern readers to filter interpretive decisions through their presuppositions and values. Appraisal theory, an area of systemic functional linguistics, acts not to eliminate but to constrain the subjectivity of the interpreter and increase the transparency of the process by looking for specific linguistic signals in the text that can be presented as evidence. These instantiations are drawn mainly from the interpersonal metafunction, but also involve the textual and ideational metafunctions. J.R. Martin and P.R.R. White developed a system network through which text is processed in order to identify evaluative language; however, their work is based primarily on contemporary English texts of a rhetorical nature, such as political speeches and reviews. This article presents a modified system network, the “Narrative Appraisal Method,” adapted for Hebrew narrative texts. It operates not only at the level of the clause but also at higher levels of discourse. It takes into consideration the characteristics of narrative and the point of view of the evaluator. The article provides specific examples of the results the methodology yields from the book of Judges, focusing on situations in which pronominal forms play a relevant role.

Using ecological systems theory to understand the systemic interactions in the context of Islam is not an extensively researched topic. In view of this, ecological systems theory is used in this article to argue that the social interaction of an individual Muslim female deliberately donning the ḥijāb should be interpreted and evaluated in the context of Islam as an ecological system. Islam is analysed as an ecological system in which each part of the system is influenced by all other parts, but in turn also influences all other parts. There are borders between the various parts of the system, but these borders are permeable from the inside and from the outside. These principles are applied to every Muslim female who chooses to don the ḥijāb. She becomes an integral and indispensable part of Islam as a system. She is influenced by every part of the system, and in turn influences every part by her conscious choice to give visual expression to her religious identity. Awareness of the mutual interactions between an individual Muslim female and all other constituent parts of her religion allows for a contextual and holistic analysis of the ḥijāb as religious and cultural phenomenon. The ḥijāb functions as a border of cloth demarcating the Muslim female body as sacred space in space as she interacts with and within her micro-, meso-, exo-, macro-, and chronosystems.