To What Extent Do Christians Understand the Hymns They Sing? A Linguistic and Theological Analysis of Four Maronite Hymns

Abstract

This paper stands at the interface between linguistics, theology, and culture, and its aim is twofold. First, it investigates the challenges that Arabic-speaking Christians in the town of Jish, Israel, might face while singing the four hymns performed during the Wednesday service of the Season of the Glorious Cross in the Maronite liturgy. Second, it studies these hymns, unpacking their meaning. One of these hymns is in Syriac, while the rest are in Modern Standard Arabic, a language not spoken natively but used in formal settings in the Arab world. To achieve the first aim, an anonymous online questionnaire was distributed via two WhatsApp groups belonging to the parish, and it was answered by 37 respondents. The results show that many of the respondents did not understand different parts of these four hymns. This, in turn, demonstrates the necessity of explaining these hymns to Arabic-speaking Maronites. To achieve the second aim, the hymns were transliterated using Roman script and translated into English. For each morpheme (smallest meaningful element in the language), an interlinear gloss has been provided, along with a linguistic and theological commentary on the stanzas of each hymn. It is hoped that such deep linguistic and theological analysis provides linguistic, religious, and cultural insiders (i.e., Arabic-speaking Maronites), as well as outsiders (i.e., non-Maronites and non-Arabs), with a deeper understanding of each hymn and gives them access to part of the Maronite liturgical world.