Hymn XXII is one of the rare hymns of homage to the Atharva-veda itself, listing portions of the text by their internal book-divisions and offering reverence to each. This is the kind of self-canonizing move that mature traditions make when they have become aware of their own scriptural status. The Hebrew Bible has the related move in passages of Psalm 119 that praise the Torah as such. The Atharvan tradition’s self-reference here is partly canonization-politics — by the time of this hymn, the Atharvaveda is asserting its parity with the older three Vedas, and a hymn that addresses the Veda as itself a sacred power is one way to consolidate that status.