My goal in this chapter is to uncover Ephrem’s Bible—not the physical text upon which he drew, but the text as he imagined it and wove it into his literary body. I argue that Ephrem represented the Bible as a symbolic document always constructed through its use by a particular community and set of reading practices. In the first section, I look at the names that Ephrem gave to the Bible and how his imaginative portrayal of it functioned in its fourth-century context. I then look at how he developed a polemic against the reading practices of his opponents and a theory of signs that destabilized the Bible’s apparent meaning, and how he represented the Bible as modeling his own compositional process.
Ephrem constructed his Bible in a fundamental way through the names he gave it. Within the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem most frequently refers to the Bible as ktābê (“books”), a term that denotes not individual parts but the work as a whole. While he never defines this whole, he predicates quotations from the Old and New Testaments upon this single term. “The books” perform the role of active subject. They “depict the Son” (MF 33:6), “lift the understanding” (MF 26:5), “show forth” the “nature of the Lord of all” (MF 64:10), “call out” (MF 71:33), “give witness” (MF 61:10), and “seal” the truth (MF 63:4). Ephrem further calls “the books” “true,” “able to be interpreted” (pšîq) (MF 65:2), and “holy” (MF 75:22). Only occasionally does Ephrem refer to the Bible as the singular ktābâ, “the book.” This is especially common when he couples it with references to the natural world.1
While ktābê does not indicate any specific part of the Bible, Ephrem does use a more specific terminology. He refers to the Bible as consisting in “Two Testaments,” which he also calls the “Old” and “New Testament.”2 Analogous to the division between the “Old” and “New Testament,” Ephrem occasionally refers to the Bible simply as “the Prophets and Apostles,” with the former apparently signifying the “Old Testament,” and the latter the “New Testament.”3 Ephrem also refers to the “law” (nāmûsâ) and “Torah” (ʼûrāytâ). With both terms, he clearly intends to indicate the Old Testament generally, but it is difficult to tell if these terms have any more specific significance for him.4 He also uses the term sbartâ, “Gospel,” to refer—though not exclusively—to the physical book.5
Beyond identifying these concrete names, uncovering Ephrem’s conception of the Bible becomes a more complicated task. It is difficult to reconstruct his hermeneutics. He rarely makes general statements about the Bible or speaks straightforwardly about how it should be interpreted. Any such data that he does provide appears in the midst of dense, often polemical passages,6 but Ephrem consistently conceives of the Bible as malleable and multivalent. “The books” can be interpreted differently in different contexts; Ephrem at times encourages a variety of interpretations.7 As he writes in an oft-quoted passage from his Commentary on the Diatessaron, “if the words had [only] one aspect, the first interpreter would find it, and all [his] listeners would have neither the toil of seeking nor the rest [that comes] from finding.”8 Yet so as to incite this pleasurable toil on the reader’s behalf, God, through various authors, has constructed the Bible so that its meanings are many layered, always shifting, ever new.
In Ephrem’s corpus, the reader’s pleasure is only one cause of the Bible’s multivalence. In Ephrem’s overtly polemical works, he rarely interprets disagreements about the Bible’s meaning so positively.9 For example, in his Madrashe Against Heresies, Ephrem developed a polemic directed specifically against Marcionite use of the Bible. Ephrem poetically criticized Marcion for “severing [Christ’s] words like limbs” and praised the Church for having received the complete text of the Bible.10 In the Madrashe on Faith, writing primarily against subordinationist Christians, Ephrem imagined a different Bible. Unlike with the “Marcionites,” Ephrem shared with the various Christian groups that debated the legacy of Nicaea a number of assumptions about the sacred text. As Khaled Anatolios has pointed out, regardless of their specific perspectives on the relationship between Father and Son, these groups all shared a canon, held the books in that canon to be authoritative, and assumed the books’ divine provenance.11 Yet, as Frances Young has also pointed out, the wide-ranging fourth-century disagreements about the Trinity almost always took the form of debates about the meaning of the Bible.12
Ephrem could assume that he and his subordinationist opponents held the same basic textual starting point—their Bible was shared. However, in his presentation of the Bible with respect to these subordinationist opponents, Ephrem was faced with an uncomfortable sameness. He and his opponents shared a Bible, but, from Ephrem’s perspective, drew wildly different conclusions on its basis. In response to their shared literary starting point, Ephrem crafted a symbolic world within which he literarily represented the Bible. He constructed this imagined Bible in two primary ways. First, he poetically built a world within which his opponents’ “misreadings” could be placed. In this world, the Bible’s meaning was obvious yet always missed by Ephrem’s opponents. These opponents, and their relationship to the Bible, were placed as characters in this literary world. Second, Ephrem constructed a world within which he and his community related to the Bible as a cryptic document—its meaning always expanding and slightly hard to determine. In addressing his opponents, Ephrem insisted that the Bible was simple, but they missed its meaning. In addressing his allies, he insisted that the Bible was cryptic, because it truly represented the God who transcended human understanding.
One of the ways Ephrem represented the Bible in the Madrashe on Faith was by creating a dramatic picture of its relationship to his opponents. While he was concerned with some of their misreadings of the text, he spent far more time creating dramatic scenes involving what he took to be his opponents’ misuse of the Bible. These dramatic scenes can be divided into three types: scenes in which he portrays his opponents and allies as abandoning the Bible’s language; scenes in which he portrays his opponents as obfuscating a book that is, in itself, clear; and scenes in which he embeds his opponents within a broader genealogy of misreading.
In his polemics against subordinationist Christologies, Ephrem occasionally does focus upon what he identifies as specific misreadings of particular biblical verses. For example, in MF 53 he alludes to subordinationist readings of Proverbs 8:22. According to Athanasius, this verse had become a veritable subordinationist proof text, and Athanasius himself constructed what would become the standard pro-Nicene rebuttal, namely, that the verse referred to Christ as “creature” with respect to his human begetting not his divine begetting (as Arius purportedly took it).13 Ephrem obviously knew this exegetical tradition and alluded to it in MF 53:11.14
Yet this approach to biblical disagreements features minimally in Ephrem’s broader polemic against his opponents’ use of the Bible. Rather than focusing on specific misinterpretations, Ephrem broadly critiqued his opponents and his allies for using in their theological discourse language not taken from the Bible. In voicing this broad accusation, Ephrem almost certainly had in mind two terms, homoousios (“consubstantial,” Syr., bar kyāneh), and agennêtos (“unbegotten,” Syr., d-lâ yaldâ). The term homoousios elicited criticism during the fourth century because it never appeared in the Bible as a term to describe the divinity of Christ. This criticism appeared in authors who otherwise supported the Nicene cause, among whom was Ephrem.15 The term agennêtos derived from the works of Aetius and Eunomius. Basil had criticized Eunomius for building a theological system on a divine name (agennêtos) that appeared nowhere in the Bible.16 As the polemics of the Madrashe on Faith make clear, Ephrem was aware of both of these movements and against both of them he leveled the same claim.17
The content of Ephrem’s polemic rested on the conviction that Trinitarian discourse should derive its key phrases from the Bible. But he articulated this position by crafting short poetic scenes, full of pregnant language, in which both he and his opponents featured as characters. In MF 64:11, Ephrem depicted himself encountering such misuses of the Bible:
I have never wandered after humans
Saying like them, “I have seen that they call
Our Savior other names that are unwritten.”
I have left what is unwritten and proceeded through what is written,
Lest on account of those unwritten things,
I should destroy the written things.18
Ephrem’s accusation is clear: insofar as someone names Christ using terms from outside the Bible, that person risks destroying the Bible’s way of speaking about Christ. Ephrem implies a stark contrast between the Bible’s God-given names for Christ and the humanly constructed language of his opponents. He articulates this accusation in two ways. First, he constructs a terse image in which he presents himself as faithful and unnamed “humans” as unfaithful (whether willfully or otherwise). Second, he builds this image through language that subtly depicts his opponents as unthinking victims of theological whimsy. As a whole, the stanza juxtaposes the firmness of biblical language with the negative fluidity of human language.
The verb here translated as “to wander” (ṭāp) has a basic meaning of “to float,” from which the noun “flood” (ṭûpānâ) is derived. The key concept connecting these meanings, which leads to the sense of “wandering,” is the idea of an object being unable to withstand the forces acting upon it. Ephrem’s phrase “I have never wandered after people” bears this sense of lazily floating along without active thought. Ephrem’s language depicts one who is not simply lost but is thoughtlessly wandering at the behest of external forces. By using ṭāp to describe a fairly basic theological idea—the idea that nonbiblical language can be used to adequately arrive at ideas of God—Ephrem sketches an image of his opponents being moved erratically toward something not of their own choosing. The overtones of flooding, moreover, communicate the seriousness of the state that Ephrem depicts. Much more than simply stating his disapproval of divine names deriving from outside the Bible, Ephrem’s language builds an unflattering and dramatic portrait of those who would utilize such names. Thinking of this scene in terms of his overall construction of the Bible, Ephrem here portrays his opponents as thoughtlessly drifting away from it, yet with language that subtly suggests approaching danger.
A crucial part of this portrait, of course, is that Ephrem presents himself as standing in an ideal relationship to the Bible. Ephrem counters the passive movement of his opponents with his own course toward “what is written.” While the verbs “to leave” (šbaq) and “to go forth” (npaq) are common, they nevertheless express a clearly active movement, especially when juxtaposed with ṭāp (“to wander”). Rather than merely stating his position on biblical language, Ephrem depicts an imaginative scene in which he and his opponents stand in relationship to the Bible. Within this scene, he draws clear lines between those who actively latch onto the Bible (with himself as exemplar) and those who passively abandon it. The Bible’s purpose in this represented world is obvious. As Ephrem writes in the following stanza, “the Bible (ktābê) has uncovered” the “Lord of all.”19 Ephrem actively latches onto the Bible in this capacity, while his opponents drift dangerously away.
The Bible stands at the center of MF 64:11 as a document that reveals God by providing a lexicon with which humans can speak about God. Ephrem positions himself and his opponents in relationship to this book. In the stanza that follows, Ephrem expands this picture, so that the Bible becomes more than just a lexicon for theological discourse. Rather, by linking the Bible with the natural world, Ephrem renders it a concrete entity that provides spiritual life in the same way that the natural world provides physical life:
The waters he created and gave to the fish for their use.
The Bible he inscribed and gave to humans as an aid.
The two testify to one another: if the fish pass beyond
The boundary of their path, their jerking is painful.
And if humans pass beyond the boundary of the Bible,
Their dispute becomes deadly.20
In this passage Ephrem takes an ambiguous, abstract entity—the Bible and its meaning—and represents it as something concrete and obvious. In reality, Ephrem’s opponents—those who constructed theological systems that depended in various ways on using language that did not appear in the Bible—had arguably not abandoned it. Eunomius’s short treatises are replete with biblical allusions, and Athanasius—champion of the Nicene homoousios—would offer a rigorous defense of how the nonbiblical homoousios ensured the integrity of the Bible.21 In representing the Bible through the analogy of the fish’s relationship to water, Ephrem constructed this ambiguous situation through imagery that rendered it clear and concrete.
In these two stanzas, Ephrem uses metaphoric language to represent himself, his opponents, and the natural world in relationship to the Bible. MF 65 expands this metaphoric representation. As in poem 64, Ephrem draws on spatial, physical metaphors to represent the Bible as a concrete, unambiguous entity:
Who has ever been crazy enough to look around without light,
Investigate without shining, or explore without brightness?
Yet the foolish scribes have gone out from the Bible
To wander around in a wasteland. They have neglected the Testament—
The way of the kingdom. Its mile markers are the prophets,
Its abodes the apostles.22
In this stanza Ephrem articulates three metaphors to build a complex portrait of his opponents’ use of the Bible. The first is that of someone who tries to explore the darkness without light. This metaphor gives way to the related notion of wandering around in a wasteland. Finally, Ephrem settles on a picture of someone who has wandered off a clearly demarcated path. The “scribes”—a biblically derived poetic term for his opponents—wander through this metaphoric landscape. Ephrem depicts their movement out from the Bible with the same language that he used in MF 64:11 to depict his own adherence to it. Whereas there he presented himself as will-fully clinging to its words, here the “foolish scribes” evidence the same active and intentional movement away from the Bible.23 Moreover, whereas his opponents in poem 64 found themselves passive participants in an unintentional drift away from the Bible’s harbor, here “the scribes” intentionally chart a course away from its safety. The latter is represented as cultivated land in which one can dwell in peace.
As with the metaphor of fish and water (MF 64:12), Ephrem’s language in this passage casts the Bible as an obvious, life-giving entity, with clearly demarcated limits. Ephrem articulates a position according to which biblical language amounts to something as simple as using light in the darkness or walking along a path with clearly defined road signs. The opposite—theological discourse without biblical language—is not only chaotic and aimless (like wandering in a desert) but is portrayed as actually difficult to choose—a choice not to carry a light, not to stick to a clearly marked path through a harsh landscape. Again, in a context in which his communities’ relationship to the Bible was anything but clear, Ephrem uses language that attributes to his position an apparently undeniable clarity and simplicity.
Ephrem’s articulation of the relationship between Bible and theological language is relatively simple, and it is easy enough to ground historically. Responding to the use of a couple of key nonbiblical terms on opposite sides of the controversy—the Nicene homoousios and the Eunomian agennêtos—Ephrem insists that theological discourse must root itself in biblical language. In order to voice this basic theological position, Ephrem constructs an imaginative world in which he and his opponents relate to the Bible in dramatic terms. In these passages, he represents the Bible as life-giving, simple, and clearly defined. He represents his opponents as a group that has either drifted away from the text unwillingly or abandoned it willingly.
In MF 64, Ephrem argued against theological discourse that was insufficiently rooted in the Bible. In MF 35, the poem under investigation in this section, he makes a subtler critique, but one which is rich in its poetic presentation. Again he presents the Bible as existing in parallel to the natural world and uses this natural language to represent the book as a concrete and life-giving entity. Ephrem takes aim in MF 35 against the religious leaders of his own day. This polemic recurs throughout the Madrashe on Faith but is voiced most blatantly in a different poem—MF 87:21. There, apparently in reference to imperial interventions in ecclesiastical affairs, Ephrem writes:
The crown is absolved,
For priests have placed stumbling blocks before kings.24
The precise historical background to this passage is debatable. Sidney Griffith and Andrew Palmer took it in reference to Valens’s mistreatment of pro-Nicene Christians in Edessa, while Edmund Beck saw it as representing Ephrem’s more general stance toward ecclesiastical politics following Nicaea.25 While I tend towards Beck’s reading, the two positions are not mutually exclusive. What is interesting to me, instead, is the way in which Ephrem uses the Bible to address these controversies in a cryptic way. In so doing, he presents them as deeply connected to his community’s use of the Bible.
MF 35 is a complex poem. Ephrem roots his critique of the religious leaders of his own day in a reading of Ezekiel 34, which likewise criticizes the religious leaders of its time. Yet Ephrem rewrites this passage from Ezekiel by connecting it to language about the natural world and about the community’s ritual life. By connecting Ezekiel, the natural world, and the sacraments of Eucharist and baptism, Ephrem builds a subtle and scathing critique of his opponents:
From the words written
About the humbling of the Creator’s Son,
Debaters have come to believe that he is a creature,
And have stirred up the spring.
Upon stirring up investigation through their controversies,
They have turned and given to drink from the waters their feet stirred up.
And though the teaching is clear,
They have drunk the dregs of its clarity.
Ephrem depicts the Bible as a clear “spring” that his opponents have sullied through misinterpretation and then forced others to “drink” by further promulgating these misinterpretations. This first stanza marks the beginning of an allusion to Ezekiel 34:18–19 that echoes through the next six stanzas of this poem, before Ephrem refers to it explicitly in MF 35:9.26 The allusion in this stanza is to Ezekiel 34:18 (shared vocabulary is italicized in the translation):
MF 35:3:4–5
… And they have stirred up (dalḥûh) the spring.
Upon stirring up (w-kad dalḥûh) investigation
through their controversies,
They have turned and given to drink from the
waters their feet stirred up (w-ʼaštî[w] mayyâ
da-dlaḥ reglayhôn).
Ezekiel 34:18
And the rest of your pasture you trample with your
feet (reglaykôn). You drink the water (mayyâ
šātîn ʼa[n]tôn), and stir up (dālḥîn ʼa[n]tôn)
what is left over with your feet (reglaykôn).
Ezekiel 34 accuses the “shepherds of Israel” of taking care of themselves and ignoring their sheep. By subtly echoing Ezekiel’s condemnation, Ephrem can level these words against the pastors of his own day without stating the criticism outright. In Ephrem’s case, the abuse of power is explicitly exegetical: these “debaters” corrupt the text of the Bible through misinterpretation and render it to their congregation in such an impure state.
The passage from Ezekiel enables Ephrem to cast the Bible as a source of life and to criticize those whose job is to dispense this source of life. In the poem’s fourth stanza, Ephrem expands the metaphor by connecting the language of “spring” to language of the Eucharist, so that reading is represented, by comparison, as a sacramental practice:
[35:4] O font of wonder,
Clear and yet stirred up on both sides!
It is entirely clear to those who are clear,
Who, by its clear drink, are purified.
Yet to those who are stirred up, it is stirred up, because they are stirred up,
Like something sweet, which is [nevertheless] bitter to those who are sick.
Truth is stirred up among the contentious,
Like something sweet [given] among the sick.
O Lord, heal our sickness,
So that with health we may hear what concerns you!
This term “font” (mabbû‘â) occurs elsewhere in the Madrashe on Faith in a clearly eucharistic setting.27 Within Ephrem’s lexicon, “font” can function as a general Christological title, but it can also refer to any source from which teachings come.28 This particular passage extends the semantic range of the term to the Bible, while at the same time maintaining the eucharistic echo.
Applied to both the Eucharist and the Bible, the metaphor of the font evokes different modes of divine embodiment simultaneously, albeit with different referents taking prominence at different times.29 The body of the Bible is still the primary referent, but “font” enables Ephrem to connect the audience’s sense of reading to their sense of euchariastic reception. As the poem proceeds, the “font” metaphor shifts to refer not only to the Bible and the Eucharist, but also to nature. At 35:5, Ephrem states, “Those outside [i.e., the Church] look upon nature, / which is all stirred up (dlîḥ) on account of Adam.” Yet, whereas it is Adam’s sin that has lent to nature a disordered façade, it is theological controversy that “has troubled the book” (35:8).30 Ephrem draws this out in 35:9, and now quotes Ezekiel 34:19 outright:
Ezekiel foresaw
This all-disturbing debate
And this all-troubling controversy
When he rebuked the shepherds:
“My sheep have grazed the pasture your heels have trampled.
They have turned and drunk the waters your feet have troubled!”31
Look at the words [of Ezekiel] and look at [these] acts!
The proud have troubled creation!
Having hinted at the passage from Ezekiel for forty-eight lines, Ephrem here finally lands firmly in his source. While his primary focus has been on the Bible and its misreading, Ezekiel’s language enables him to weave a broader tapestry and situate misreading within it. The subordinationist readings of the Bible, which he accuses his opponents of promoting, become akin to interpretations of nature that both he and his audience deem heretical. At the same time that he levels this critique against his opponents, he uses ritual language to recast reading as a sacramental act for his audience.
Ephrem situates himself in the midst of this poetic discourse. Still incorporating Ezekiel’s language, he concludes the poem with another subtle critique of his own hierarchy: “Through a clear shepherd, give me to drink / from the clear stream of books!” In identifying the Bible as a source from which a clear stream flows, Ephrem continues the connection between reading and ritual ceremony, and again draws on metaphors that present the Bible as a simple, concrete reality, which has nevertheless been rendered unclean through debate.
Ephrem accuses his opponents of promulgating theological discourse shorn of biblical language and of misinterpreting the biblical terms they do use. He clothes both of these accusations in poetic language, using metaphors that present the Bible as a concrete and unambiguous book. In addition to these specific accusations, he also constructs a genealogy of misreading, carried out by biblical villains, within which he places his opponents’ present misreadings.32 Ephrem uses these biblical antagonists to present his opponents as approaching the Bible with doubt and mistrust—looking upon the pages that give life and finding only errors.
In MF 56:7 and 8, Ephrem writes:
[56:7] From that Old Testament, let us learn
How the children of truth listened to him with a love of discernment.
They believed [truth’s] giver and affirmed its writer,
While the children of error listened to every aid
With an ear for controversy and mouths for derision.
[Yet] they who mocked him have been rejected.
[56:8] Therefore, the two Testaments instruct us
That the faithful have never debated or discussed (lâ draš[w] w-lâ ‘qab[w]),
For they have believed in God. But the scribes and the crooked
Debaters (dārûšê) never keep silent. The Books are full of peace,
But they are full of rage. Their debating (drāšhôn) has aged them
And their rust consumes them.
In the last three lines of this stanza, Ephrem repeats his accusation that though “the Books” are “full of peace,” the “scribes and debaters” have approached these peaceful texts with anger and mistrust. Ephrem’s precise accusation against these debaters is less clear than in the passages we have already examined. He does not accuse them of nonbiblical discourse or obvious misinterpretation. Rather, his accusation here is of a more ideological nature. As Christine Shepardson has shown in connection to his anti-Jewish rhetoric, Ephrem aimed first to demonize Jewish behavior (taking New Testament scribes and Pharisees as typical), and then to conflate rhetorically his opponents with these literarily constructed Jewish villains.33 In making these accusations, Ephrem is not focused on the meanings these readers draw from the text. Rather, his goal is to present their approach to the text in a particularly negative light. By coupling New Testament scribes and “debaters” (the symbolic name he applies to his contemporaries), Ephrem casts his opponents as parallel to those who challenged Christ in his own lifetime. Ephrem has merged the symbolic world of the Bible with his own contemporary world. In his madrashe, New Testament scribes and “debaters” engage in a timeless task of hermeneutic mistrust.
The scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament function as a recurring metaphor through which Ephrem presents this type of hermeneutic mistrust.34 More generally, he likens his opponent to a lawyer or a prosecutor (b‘el dînâ) when faced with the biblical text. In MF 54, he echoes New Testament language to depict his opponent as a type of legal prosecutor:
For whenever his own hearers of truth
Are surrounded by him in love, they do not take his words to court.
But those who are craftily divided lie in wait for his utterances—
Their hateful controversy is like a prosecutor.
While lacking any specific borrowing of terminology, this characterization echoes several New Testament presentations of scribes and Pharisees.35 According to Ephrem, his opponents’ hermeneutic mirrors the prosecutorial manner evidenced by Christ’s opponents in his own earthly lifetime. In the following stanza, Ephrem identifies the Pharisees and scribes more obviously:
Our Lord spoke, the luminous rejoiced,
The gloomy grew afraid, the innocent heard and believed,
And the cunning heard and debated: “How can this one
Give his body to us?” Their debating has cheated them
From the medicine of life. Let it not cheat us also—
Our debating—so that we do not believe!
Here Ephrem embeds a quotation from John 6:52.36 Yet whereas the Johannine text presumes a eucharistic context, Ephrem, as in MF 35, applies this eucharistic language to the process of reading. Rather than debating Christ in the flesh, as did “the cunning” in Christ’s lifetime, Ephrem’s opponents debate with the text. As a result of this debating, they are robbed of its healing properties.
Ephrem’s argument here is not against a concrete misuse of the Bible. Rather, by tracing a parallel between his opponents’ reading of the Bible and these biblical villains’ response to Christ, Ephrem creates an ambience around their use of the Bible. The concrete nature of these readings is almost irrelevant. Rather, what matters is the way that, in Ephrem’s presentation of them, they pursue such readings. In a context of debate about the Bible and its Trinitarian ramifications, Ephrem’s argument would have been powerful precisely because of this ambiguity. As he presents it, any discursive activity could be presented as “debating” and thus uncharitable and argumentative. Moreover, by making these claims within his Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem makes an implicit claim about his own use of the Bible. His is an ideal use, even if only because it is not characterized by those failings of which he accuses his opponents.
Ephrem develops a series of metaphoric ways of portraying his opponents’ use of the Bible: they promote a theological discourse stricken of biblical language, they confuse otherwise clear books through misreading, and they stand within a genealogy of willful mistrust of the Bible. Taken together, these portraits work together to produce a conglomerate picture of a culture of misreading. Through these portraits, Ephrem does not counter the concrete misreadings that his opponents are promulgating. Rather, he builds a series of dramatic scenes that aim to construct a particular narrative of the Bible and its readers. While Ephrem never explicitly trumpets his own reading as in any way ideal, his presentation of this narrative of his opponents’ misreading inevitably has an effect on the perception of the readings presented in his own madrashe. By comparison, these negative portraits imply that his discourse is steeped in the Bible’s language, states its meaning clearly, and stands within a decidedly different genealogy of reading.
In the scenes we have examined, Ephrem has focused on the Bible’s misunderstanding and misuse rather than on its accurate interpretation. However, in other places in the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem does articulate a system for finding meaning in it. In representing a correct understanding of the Bible, Ephrem constructs it as a transcendent document, full of mysterious signs that stretch human comprehension. In this section, I argue that Ephrem’s view of biblical language undergirds his actual use of the Bible, and that this performatively acts out his theology of it. He presents the Bible as a collection of signs that God and, by extension, biblical authors, have arranged to convey particular meanings to particular audiences. In turn, Ephrem presents himself as imitative of this act of divine authorship, further arranging the Bible’s signs to convey new meanings to his particular audience.
Similar to Ephrem’s anti-investigative stance, Ephrem’s notion of divine names developed in response to the Trinitarian controversies.37 But this theological development, which led Ephrem to emphasize God’s transcendence and unknowability absolutely, shaped the way he saw and used the Bible. In response to the Eunomian idea that language could reveal the divine absolutely and exhaustively, Ephrem came to view the Bible’s language as deeply metaphorical. This meant, on the one hand, that its meaning always had to be held with a sort of reverent uncertainty. On the other hand, it meant that Ephrem could play with the Bible—he could shape its words and meanings within his poetry. As Shinichi Muto has articulated it, Ephrem presented himself as engaging in a gathering of symbols that began initially with Christ’s own semiotic act.38
Ephrem’s builds his sense of the Bible’s meaning by focusing on the divine names within it. Over the last decade, scholars have argued that Ephrem’s theory of names sits at the center of his theology writ large. Much of this literature has offered a first-level organization, cataloguing, and analysis of the passages in which he addresses divine names.39 If there is one way in which my approach differs from these studies, it is that I take Ephrem’s theology of names to have been rhetorically articulated. That is, I would argue that our understanding of his theology of names must always be connected to the way he uses language and to the way he thinks through and presents his own poetic reuse of the Bible.40 My sense of the rhetorical force of Ephrem’s view of language builds upon three ideas: first, scholars have pointed to Ephrem’s articulation of a basic “chasm” between the Creator and the creation as an essential component of his view of language; second, scholars have emphasized Ephrem’s linking of the Bible and the natural world; third, scholars have interpreted Ephrem’s view of biblical language in terms of sacrament. I first outline these ideas and then address Ephrem’s view of language in connection to his biblical poetics.
At a most basic level, Ephrem’s understanding of language in relationship to God is wrapped up with his idea of a radical “chasm” (petḥâ) that separates God and creation.41 As Ephrem sees it, language operates within the realm of what is created, yet the object of theological discourse—God—lies outside the created realm. The very possibility for humans to speak about God always depends upon the fact that God has transgressed this “ontological gap” in order to manifest God’s self to humans. For our purposes, the particularly linguistic aspect of Ephrem’s view of the ontological gap has two important consequences. First, this gap between divinity and humanity leads Ephrem to emphasize the instability of language. Second, because the Bible provides the primary paradigms for human speech to and about God, it demands that Ephrem situate his own poetic God talk in a very clear relationship to the Bible.
Yet, as Ephrem understands it, the Bible is already connected to the natural world in crucial ways. Robert Murray and Kathleen McVey have articulated the way Ephrem sees the world of the Bible and the world of nature as together bespeaking shared semantic content.42 As Ephrem presents the idea in the Madrashe on Virginity 20:12, God, upon creating the world, “adorned it with his images,” so that it would organically bear witness to divine life.43 When Moses authored the Torah, he was not given a new set of signs whole cloth but took nature’s already divinely infused images and rearranged them to bespeak further God’s presence in the world.44 Ephrem’s idea here, as pointed out by both McVey and Murray, is that a divine order underlies both the world of nature and the world of the Bible.45 This means that in addition to interpreting natural objects (for example, the olive) in a theological way, Ephrem can contemplate historical phenomena, such as the rise of Julian “the Apostate,” as a manifestation of divine providence.46
With respect to biblical signs, Ephrem’s position also implies that the Bible as a whole functions within the realm of created objects—that it is composed of natural, created signs that have simply been rearranged in a particular way by particular, divinely inspired, authors. In this respect, Murray insists that, for Ephrem, the Bible operates within the world of created things yet functions as a “special interpreter” of that world and its history.47 Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis offers a quasi-historical explanation for how this has developed.48 He explains that when God initially created the world, humans had an innate grasp of basic monotheistic principles. Over time, however, humans lost their grasp of the one God and began to construct their own multiple gods.49 It is within this context of God forgotten that Moses emerged on the literary scene. In constructing the Torah, he was reconstructing the world so that it would once again bespeak the truth of its Creator. He was, quite literally, representing the world in a book.
This account suggests a nuanced relationship between the Bible and the world. On the one hand, Ephrem conceives the world as possessing the innate, God-given capacity to convey knowledge of God. On the other hand, because humans have lost sight of this divine content, authors (with Moses operating as the prototype) must rewrite the world, reshaping its images to convey the world’s core content. So, the Bible emerges out of nature but as a representation of nature. In turn, Ephrem himself mimics this process of biblical authorship, as he rearranges and represents the Bible’s signs (themselves already the product of nature’s rearranged signs). Whereas Moses represented the world in a book, Ephrem refracts that biblical world back onto the world he inhabits.50
Though Ephrem viewed the Bible as standing within the realm of created things, he still expressed a very exalted view of biblical language. In fact, he pressed certain biblical signs—especially divine names—to the point that they seemed to transcend the created order from which they arose.51 Frances Young has argued that, in this capacity, Ephrem’s view of biblical language can be termed “sacramental.”52 For Ephrem, the words of the Bible emerged from nature as divinely infused signs and thus offered a “sacramental vehicle of truth, permitting the expression of eternal Being in a temporal narrative which is luminous.”53 Biblical signs, though forming part of the created order and thus ontologically distant from the God Ephrem uses them to speak about, genuinely conveyed the divine Creator to which they pointed, in a close, but not exhaustive way.
The idea that the Bible emerged as a representation of divinely infused signs, and that signs—both natural and biblical—can bear witness to what is uncreated even as they remain within the realm of the created, helps us grapple with the biblical poetics that emerge in the Madrashe on Faith. Within this collection, Ephrem’s focuses his discussion of language primarily on the way Christological titles relate to the divine Christ to whom they refer. Yet, by examining his view of biblical language, we can think more broadly about his understanding of his own poetic use of language.
Throughout the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem identifies biblical names according to two categories. On the one hand, names that apply to God absolutely he terms “true” (šarrîrâ),54 “accurate” (ḥattîtâ),55 “perfect” (gmîrâ),56 or “holy” (qaddîšâ),57 and sometimes simply by the noun “name” (šmâ).58 On the other hand, names that apply to God in a metaphorical and temporary way, he terms “borrowed” (šʼîlâ)59 or “transitory” (‘ābûrâ),60 and sometimes simply by the noun “title” (kûnāyâ).61 At its most basic, this distinction between different types of names enables Ephrem to argue that biblical passages that appear to present Christ as inferior to God be taken as metaphoric, while at the same time attributing some absolute, if not entirely literal, value to biblical names such as “Father,” “Son,” “Begotten,” and “Begetter.”
Ephrem’s understanding of biblical names as “borrowed” stands within a theological tradition that can be called “accommodationist,” according to which biblical language is taken to represent God’s accommodation to human ideas. In this view, God uses terms that are ill-suited to God if taken literally, but which, if understood correctly, function pedagogically.62 Thus, the Bible’s reference to God’s “ears” show that God hears humans; references to his “eyes” show that God sees humans.63 God’s borrowing of human language arises from a desire to communicate God’s self to humanity. As a result of this desire, God diminishes himself to the level of human tongues.64
Within the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem’s discussion of names begins in 5:5–6. Because divine naming involves a crossing of a categorical border—between that which “makes” and “is made”—Ephrem’s begins his treatment of names with a general statement of the necessary distinction between “the Maker” (‘ābûdâ) and “what has been made” (‘bādâ): “The Maker cannot / be compared to what has been made” (MF 5:5).65 Nevertheless, “the Maker” has accepted precisely this impossible comparison and thus the distance between the two has been overcome: “The Lord, in his love, wishes / to confer his names (šmāhaw[hy]) upon that which he had made” (5:6). Humans were thus given names that in reality belong to God alone: “Priests and kings, according to grace, / put on Your titles (kûnāyāk), / and Moses and Joshua, your names (šmāhayk).”66 Such a gift inevitably invites the “comparison” that Ephrem has already deemed impossible. Ephrem articulates this fully in MF 5:7:
Merciful is the Lord,
Who has put on our names
Even to the point of humbling himself
And being depicted as a mustard seed.67
He has given to us his names;
He has taken from us our names.
His names have made us great;
Our names have made him small.
An exchange thus follows God’s linguistic act. God allows humans the ability to use his names, and, through their use, these names “make [humans] great.” Alongside human magnification, God accepts linguistic diminishment, taking up names that “make him small,” yet which render God palpable to humanity.
The Bible appears in these passages as comprising a series of metaphors through which God has humbled himself. Rather than exhausting the God whom it reveals, the Bible’s linguistic signs metaphorically represent a God who always means more than any reader could comprehend.68 Insofar as its words cannot fully convey the reality to which they refer, the Bible emerges in Ephrem’s presentation of it as a deeply metaphoric book, as always trying to convey more than it can. It contains names that, though opaque to God’s true being, God has taken on so as to be comprehensible. At the same time, the Bible’s words are dynamic, in that they “raise the understanding” (MF 26:5) beyond itself. For Ephrem, the words of the Bible provide a place in which God can dwell and through which human understanding can ascend to God.
This has important consequences for how we understand Ephrem’s notion of the Bible, especially in its relationship to the poetry he writes. As Ephrem presents it in these passages, the Bible is not a stable entity whose meaning can be isolated and articulated with any finality. Its words and images, rather, represent limited containers of a meaning that transcends them. Semantically, the Bible’s deepest meaning lies beyond human capacity to grasp. Though there is a correlation between the Bible’s words and the God who uses these words in a revelatory way, these words are also rhetorical—they are meant to reveal God partially but also to move an audience toward particular convictions and away from certain sorts of discourse. In this sense, the Bible can be conceptualized as offering a series of words that the biblical authors, under divine inspiration, have assembled and dictated to convey particular meanings to particular audiences. This idea of the Bible’s own make up is reflected in Ephrem’s use of it: mimicking the divine arrangement present in the Bible, his task is to reassemble these words to convey further meanings while remaining cognizant of the impossibility of exhaustively conveying the God about whom the poet speaks.
Even as Ephrem argues for the Bible’s semantic instability, he continues to articulate this idea through decidedly concrete, bodily metaphors. This language suggests the “two incarnations” that Sebastian Brock has identified as characteristic of Ephrem’s thought.69 For example, in 31:1, Ephrem writes:
Let us give thanks to him who has put on the names of body parts:
He has named for himself ears, to teach that he hears us.
He has designated for himself eyes, to show that he sees us.
He has only put on the names of things.
Though in his essence he has neither anger nor regret,
He has put on their names for our weakness.
In Ephrem’s MAH 32:9, he states that Christ “clothed himself with real limbs,” and, in MF 4:2, simply that he “put on a body [from Mary] and went forth.”70 That expression parallels the way Ephrem speaks of the Bible here, suggesting that he thinks of God’s revelation in the Bible and God’s revelation in Christ’s body as existing on a continuum. Both represent points at which the immaterial God has focused human attention on material objects. In MF 31, Ephrem refers only to God’s biblical body, identifying the Bible’s bodily images of the divine as “names.”71 Here, too, God uses these names pedagogically. Rather than revealing divine life, the names reflect aspects of that life in a way that is palpable to humanity in its limited state.
Ephrem depicts God as one who has taken on human limitation so that humans can be ushered into divine life. Because of this, the physical letters of the Bible become quasi-containers of divinity—examples of divine embodiment. This view of the Bible, in which it communicates a God who is ultimately incommunicable, shapes the way Ephrem uses the Bible in his poems. The poet’s goal is not simply to exegete the Bible, to draw out its meaning. Rather, Ephrem continues the process of rearrangement, bringing forth ever new meanings, ever new reflections of God. Because all the Bible’s images refer to a single divine entity, seemingly unrelated texts can be placed alongside one another, enabling the reader a glimpse, however dim, of the God whose “body parts” they represent. Ephrem articulates this in MF 31:11:
He wishes to teach us two things: that he is and that he is not.
In his love, he made faces, so that his works could gaze upon him.
But lest we be damaged, and think, “That is him,”
He changed from image to image to teach us
That he has no image.
The divine portrait emerges in the conglomeration of these images, appearing in all but exhausted by none. Ephrem’s poetic representation of the Bible consequently becomes an effort to place these images of an ever-shifting God. Reflecting this view of the Bible’s make up, Ephrem uses biblical texts in a way that levels their literal chronological and spatial bearings, allowing different points of emphasis to emerge in different literary settings. In his madrashe, Ephrem mimics the Bible’s own compositional process, rewriting and reshaping its words, to convey, yet again, the God whom the Bible depicts.
We can see the consequences of Ephrem’s view of the Bible in a stanza that is embedded in a poem devoted to the life of Christ:
It is written that the good Lord repented and grew weary,
For he clothed himself in our weakness. He also clothed us
In the names of his Greatness. Fools have seen what belongs to us
And have thought that it belonged to Him—that which was from us. (MF 54:8)
Read in isolation, this stanza’s reference to the weariness of the “good Lord” could indicate either Christ’s incarnate body or the biblical body of the Old Testament. The madrasha in which this stanza is found develops as a poetic retelling of the life of Christ, but the initial line of this stanza—that “the good Lord repented and grew weary”—complicates the picture. The text’s editor, Beck, took this a reference to Christ’s human life, finding here an allusion to John 4:6, where it is said that “Jesus was weary from the labor of the journey” and uses the same term for “weary” (l’â) that Ephrem uses here. Yet, in Isaiah 1:14, God speaks and applies this verb to himself: “I am weary of bearing [your new moons and feasts],”72 When we also take into account Ephrem’s reference to the Lord’s repenting (also line 1), the Isaian provenance of this passage seems more likely: the phrase the “Lord repented” (ʼettwî) has no New Testament parallel but is found repeatedly in the Old Testament.73 Given that both of these descriptions have Old Testament parallels, whereas only one (“the Lord…grew weary”) has a New Testament parallel, it makes the most sense to read the first line as a reference to Old Testament anthropomorphisms.
In and of itself, this is nothing remarkable, except for the fact that Ephrem devotes the seven stanzas preceding this one entirely to Christ’s earthly ministry. In the midst of a poetic reflection on the earthly life of Christ, Ephrem shifts without warning to a description of “the Lord” that draws entirely on Old Testament language. At the same time, his reference to the Lord’s weariness uses language that loosely echoes New Testament descriptions of Christ, so that the precise biblical allusion cannot be decisively identified. In reworking the Bible in this way, Ephrem reflects his own perceptions of its inherent structure: in the Bible, God has used human signs and human authors to construct a book that will communicate God to humanity. Ephrem furthers this divine-human act by taking the Bible’s signs—those of both the Old and New Testaments—and leveling them so that both equally convey the one, incarnate God.
Ephrem’s depiction of biblical language as metaphorical emphasizes its multivalence and plasticity. In Ephrem’s use of it, the Bible is constantly destabilized, its words expanding and diminishing to accommodate the poet’s evocation of the disjunction between God and humanity. Yet, alongside Ephrem’s insistence on the variegated and shifting nature of biblical language, he articulates a concomitant view of biblical language as “true.” In contrast to his emphasis on the Bible’s semantic instability, Ephrem posits these true names as providing a place of hermeneutic stability within the Bible.74
While Ephrem hints at the distinction between true and borrowed language throughout the Madrashe on Faith, it is in poem 44 that he first literally articulates their difference. Before introducing the distinction in 44:2, the first stanza offers a summary statement on the meaning of biblical names:
His names teach you how and what you should call him.
One has taught you that He is,75
another that he is Creator.
He has shown you that he is Good, and he has explained to you that he is Just.
He is also named and called Father.
The Bible has become a crucible. Why does the fool quarrel?
Test in his crucibles his names and his forms.76
This metaphor of the “crucible” (kûrâ) occurs frequently in Ephrem’s writings in reference to an event, place, or thing that tests one’s faith.77 By calling the books a “crucible,” Ephrem envisions them as a self-contained place in which the Lord’s true names can be distinguished from those that are borrowed. In this respect, he presents reading as a process of testing and discerning the proper category of a given name. Here Ephrem identifies “He is,” “Creator,” “Just One,” and “Good One” as true names. Elsewhere, in MF 63:8, he will add “King,” “God,” and “Judge” to the list.
Despite offering this litany of diverse true names, Ephrem’s main concern throughout the Madrashe on Faith is with the names “Father,” “Son,” “Begetter,” and “Begotten,” and any borrowed names (such as “creature”) that could take precedence over these. Similarly to other fourth-century polemicists,78 Ephrem suggests that these true names apply metaphorically to creatures and literally to God:
For whenever He has called us by His own name “King”
It is true for Him and a simile (dûmyâ) for us.
And whenever, again, He has called Himself by the name of his works,
It is natural (kyānâ) for us, and a title (kûnāyâ) for Him. (MF 63:10)
This provides us with the background of MF 44:2, in which Ephrem first mentions the distinction between true (here, “perfect and accurate”) and borrowed names:
He has names perfect and accurate (gmîrê wa-ḥtîtê),
And he has names borrowed and transient (šʼîlê wa-‘ābûrê).
He has quickly put them on and quickly taken them off.
He has regretted, forgotten, and remembered.
And as you have affirmed that he is both just and good,
Affirm that he is Begetter and believe that he is Creator.
Ephrem hints at the aniconic shifting which is the rightful character of God’s borrowed names, names that he rapidly adorns and removes. Such movement marks God as the one who “has no image” (MF 31:1). Yet here this iconoclastic reading of biblical names finds balance when juxtaposed with this idea of true names—names such as “Good,” “Just,” “Creator,” and, most importantly, “Begetter.” In his presentation of biblical meaning, Ephrem places these true names at the center. In MF 44:3, he argues that their denial would result in a complete collapse of the reader’s ability to draw any coherent meaning from the bible:
Be mindful of his perfect and holy names (šmāhaw[hy] gmîrê wa-qdîšê).
If you deny one of them, they all fly off and away.
They are bound one to one another, and they bear everything.
Like the pillars of the earth—
Water, fire, and air—if one did not exist,
Creation would fall. (MF 44:3).79
If, following MF 44:1, the books are the crucible in which divine names must be tested, the consequences of misreading are dire, resulting in the collapse of human ability to derive any accurate sense of God. Between his emphasis on true and borrowed names, two paths emerge in the way Ephrem presents his audience’s relationship to the Bible. In referencing borrowed names, Ephrem insists on an instability between the Bible’s words and the Lord whom these words signify. The true names offer a possibility for a stable center within this disjunction. As Ephrem presents it, when God “borrows” names, the Bible’s meaning can be as unstable as necessary so as to draw the listener ever beyond herself. These true names provide some anchor within this constant movement.
This dual focus on true and borrowed names is clear throughout the Madrashe on Faith. On the one hand, God borrows human language, but, from a human perspective, this borrowed language is always shifting under the weight of divinity. On the other hand, in the midst of this semantic shifting, there are “true” names, which transcend their apparent origin in human speech (where, it turns out, they are but metaphors) and become genuine, impermeable signs of divine life.
In distinguishing the Bible’s “true” and “borrowed” speech, Ephrem is clearly making a theological distinction. It is, however, one that has obvious literary consequences. Whether biblical language consists in God’s metaphoric representation of himself in human language or human representation of itself in divine language, the language contained within the Bible is nevertheless essentially metaphoric with respect to what it signifies. As a result, there is a disjunction between biblical language and the reality that stands behind it. God is not really a mustard seed (MF 5:7) but depicts himself as one for the sake of human comprehension. Humans, moreover, are not really “priests” or “kings” (MF 63:10), but are allowed to use those divine terms for their own good. The Bible is thus not a document in which its signs and their referents align in a one-to-one manner. In fact, Ephrem does not say exactly how they align. Rather, its nouns and narratives are metaphoric representations of something that is essentially beyond the reader’s power to grasp—beyond even the language’s ability to communicate.
On one level, Ephrem envisions the “true” names as providing a relative semantic peace in the midst of this linguistic riot. Yet any semantic order that they do preserve is tenuous. Ephrem never articulates the means by which they preserve it or even outlines exactly what they do mean. While the presence of these words in New Testament theophanic scenes and their resonance with Proverbs 8:22 lend them a cumulative rhetorical force, Ephrem does not assign them concrete semantic content. From a literary perspective, and in terms of Ephrem’s understanding of how biblical discourse works, the two types of terms amount to much the same thing. To humans, “true” names are metaphors because the one to whom they truly apply, and the way in which they apply, cannot be comprehended. Rather than revelations of an essential meaning, they are more like nontransient no trespassing signs, demarcating only the point beyond which knowledge and understanding cannot go. “Borrowed” names, likewise, are metaphors, because they are simply garments that God has temporarily put on but which will inevitably be taken off again. Through this ambiguous space the poet walks, pressing meanings in different directions depending upon the needs of the audience. In MF 53:6–7, Ephrem presents the interpreter as an herbalist, wandering through a garden, mixing and matching to construct the appropriate concoction. Through this metaphor, Ephrem’s casts the relationship between poet and Bible as one that demands flexibility and creativity.
The remainder of this book moves from this examination of Ephrem’s presentation of the Bible’s poetics to a study of Ephrem’s own poetic representation of the Bible. In this chapter I have tried to show that the Bible is already wrapped up in Ephrem’s own poetic world. The world of the Bible and the world of his poetry are already intermingled. Ephrem’s use of the Bible is forged within a polemical context, and much of his self-conscious reflection upon it takes the form of accusations against his opponents. He accuses his opponents of abandoning biblical language, of generally misunderstanding the Bible, and constructs a genealogy of debate about divine words, within which he argues they stand. In each of these portraits, Ephrem uses concrete metaphors to depict the Bible as a simple and unambiguous document, from which his opponents have stubbornly departed and to which he and his own audience remain faithful.
In his identification of different types of language within the Bible, Ephrem opens up more explicit connections between his views of the Bible and his own use of it. Because the Bible is thoroughly metaphoric and arranged toward rhetorical ends, Ephrem can rearrange its narratives to further this compositional process, enabling the Bible to speak to his own context. On a purely lexical level, Ephrem never applies the language of “borrowing” to his madrashe, and, in fact, it is rare that the language he uses to describe the Bible overlaps with the language he uses to describe them.80 Yet, if we move from this purely linguistic and intentional level, and simply observe the phenomenon of Ephrem’s reading, what emerges is a biblical poetics that parallels the mechanisms he finds at play in the Bible’s composition. While the Bible’s words and narratives form metaphors that God has arranged for the sake of an audience, the poet reshapes these same metaphors for the sake of yet another audience, rendering them parables whose new morals are manifest in the context of Ephrem’s own community. We turn now to examine the three primary ways in which Ephrem reshapes the Bible in the Madrashe on Faith: to represent himself, his audience, and Christ.