This book represents a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. As I wrote that dissertation, I also prepared my own translation of the Hymns on Faith (madrashe d-‘al haymānûtâ), a translation that I published before revising this book.1 Aside from the translation, my goal in that volume was to clarify the hymns in a general way and to situate them in a specific Trinitarian context. My goal here is to make an argument about how the Bible functioned in Ephrem’s hymns. I thus do not conceive of this volume as a companion to that one, but I do take for granted, as well as expand, some of the arguments that I made there. For example, in this book I neither rehearse Ephrem’s life in detail nor attempt to prove the Trinitarian background to the Hymns on Faith, for that information is available in the translation volume.2 But I do reflect on how the Trinitarian context shaped these hymns and how these hymns operated in the life of Ephrem’s community. I have also occasionally altered the translations I offered in that volume when doing so helps to clarify a particular reading I offer here or corrects a misreading I made there.3 I note these changes when I make them.
Finally, a note on terminology and transliteration. The Syriac term that I translate as “hymn” is madrasha (pl., madrashe). The madrasha is a Syriac genre that consists in sung metered stanzas that are accompanied by musical refrains. In modern scholarship, madrasha usually gets translated as “hymn,” because the madrashe were songs used in religious settings. Yet, as scholars have noted, “hymn,” especially in a classical context, can suggest a work that is narrowly focused on doxology. However, the madrashe—especially Ephrem’s madrashe—tend to be more pedagogically focused than classical Greek hymns.4 Moreover, there is a value in retaining the Syriac term madrasha so that we can avoid too easily reading our own literary categories into a Syriac literary context. For these reasons, and in spite of the book’s title, my default throughout this book is to use the Syriac term madrasha, both for the Madrashe on Faith, as well as for Ephrem’s other madrashe collections. I do also use “hymn,” “poem,” and “song,” terms that accurately represent certain crucial aspects of the madrashe (namely, that they were sung, metered, and used in settings of religious devotion).
As regards transliteration, I consistently use madrashe and memre without diacritics. For all other words I use diacritics, following the same basic system I indicated in my translation volume.5