“Thy Law Is within My Heart” (Ps 40:7). Sacred Tradition in the Hebrew Psalter and in African Indigenous Texts
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Every society possesses systems for accessing, preserving, and transmitting its traditions. These are meant to ensure that privileged knowledge entrusted to reliable custodians is passed on unchanged between generations for the preservation of society. In Africa, scholars have advocated new hermeneutical approaches to the study of the Bible, arguing that the adoption of traditional methods of exegesis served as another instrument in the colonialists’ toolkit to undermine the reception and preservation of Africa’s sacred traditions. Using African Biblical Hermeneutics, this paper studies the processes for preserving Sacred Tradition in Psalm 40. Similar processes are found in African Indigenous Sacred Texts such as the mate masie of the Adinkra textual system. I argue, therefore, that a complementary reading of the texts of the two traditions could serve to de-link from the monocular vision of traditional exegesis and offer a much more fruitful approach to interpreting these texts and making them relevant to the contemporary African reader.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel14101227
Author: Michael Kodzo Mensah
Institutions: University of Ghana, University of South Africa
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,557
OpenAlex ID: W4387024905