“Thy Law Is within My Heart” (Ps 40:7). Sacred Tradition in the Hebrew Psalter and in African Indigenous Texts
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Date
2023
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Religions
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 un‑
changed 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.
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Research Article
Keywords
sacred texts, African Biblical Hermeneutics, decoloniality, Psalm 40, Adinkra
Citation
Citation: Mensah, Michael Kodzo. 2023. “Thy Law Is within My Heart” (Ps 40:7). Sacred Tradition in the Hebrew Psalter and in African Indigenous Texts. Religions 14: 1227. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14101227