1. Jeffrey T. Wickes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015).
2. Wickes, St. Ephrem, 19–43.
3. One consistent change I have made is that whereas my translation rendered ktābê literally as “books,” I have here used the more readable “Bible.” Throughout this volume, unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
4. See M. Lattke, “Sind Ephraems Madrāšē Hymnen?” Oriens Christianus 73 (1983): 38–43. Given the hymns’ pedagogical focus, Andrew Palmer suggests calling them “teaching songs.” See “The Merchant of Nisibis: Saint Ephrem and His Faithful Quest for Union in Numbers,” in Early Christian Poetry: A Collection of Essays, ed. J. den Boeft and A. Hilhorst (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 167–233.
5. See Wickes, St. Ephrem, xi.
1. André de Halleux (Saint Éphrem le Syrien,” Revue Théologique de Louvain 14 [1983]: 328–55) and Bernard Outtier (“Saint Éphrem d’après ses biographies et ses oeuvres,” Parole de l’Orient 4 [1973]: 11–33) offer the classic modern treatments of Ephrem’s biography. For recent English accounts of the life, see Joseph P. Amar, “Ephrem, Life of,” in GEDSH, 147; Amar and Edward G. Mathews, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works,Fathers of the Church 91 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 25–37); Kathleen E. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 5–28.
2. Syriac, like Arabic, is a Semitic language. It is a dialect of Aramaic, which Jesus spoke in first-century Palestine. On the Syriac language, see Aaron M. Butts, “Syriac Language,” GEDSH, 390–91 and Sebastian Brock, An Introduction to Syriac Studies (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 1–2, 13–24.
3. Ute Possekel presents a compelling portrait of how Ephrem might have been educated (Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO Subsidia 580 [Louvain: Peeters, 1999], 48–54). She suggests that he likely received an initial catechetical education from his bishops in Nisibis. Moreover, given the extensive “Hellenization” of the Near East, there may well have been primary and secondary schools of the Greco-Roman type in Nisibis. Regarding Ephrem’s biblical text, he appears to have used the Peshitta version of the Old Testament and the Diatessaron version of the New Testament, though he knew the separate Gospels as well. The scholarship on both of these bodies of literature is extensive, but see, on the Old Testament Peshitta, R. B. ter Haar Romeny and C. . Morrison, “Peshitta,” GEDSH, 327–31; Michael Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Romeny, “Hypotheses on the Development of Judaism and Christianity in Syria in the Period after 70 C.E.,” in Matthew and the Didache: Two Documents from the Same Jewish-Christian Milieu?, ed. H. van de Sandt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 13–33. On the Diatessaron, see Sebastian Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006), 31–37; Christian Lange, “Ephrem, His School, and the Yawnaya: Some Remarks on the Early Syriac Versions of the New Testament,” in The Peshitta: Its Use in Literature and Liturgy: Papers Read at the Third Peshitta Symposium, ed. R. B. ter Haar Romeny (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 159–75. See also the (albeit outdated) F. C . Burkitt, Ephraim’s Quotations from the Gospel (Cambridge: The University Press, 1901). On Ephrem’s awareness of the separate Gospels, see Matthew Crawford, “The Fourfold Gospel in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 18, no. 1 (2015): 44–45. On the difficulties in using Ephrem’s works to arrive at the biblical text that stands behind them, see Jerome A. Lund, “Observations on Some Biblical Citations in Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis,” Aramaic Studies 4, no. 2 (2006): 207–20 and Lukas Van Rompay, “Between the School and the Monk’s Cell: The Syriac Old Testament Commentary Tradition,” in Peshitta, ed. Romeny, 27–51.
4. To some extent, of course, this depends upon accidents of transmission. Theoretically, a Syriac author of Ephrem’s caliber could have preceded him. Indeed, Sebastian Brock suggests as much: “[T]he great variety of poetic forms that he employs with such facility suggests that behind him lies a long tradition of Syriac poetry” (“Syriac and Greek Hymnography: Problems of Origins,” Studia Patristica 16 [1985]: 77–81). Ephrem himself tells us that Bardaisan and Mani wrote madrashe before him. But among what remains, there is nothing that compares with the size and sophistication of Ephrem’s corpus. Likewise, Laura Lieber argues that especially the Madrashe on Faith “constitute a genre that is unattested in Jewish or Samaritan poetry from the same period” (“Scripture Personified: Torah as Character in the Hymns of Marqah,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24 [2017]: 214). She suggests, however, that the Madrashe on Nativity “reflect a more narrative. . .theology,” which is “more overtly akin to [Samaritan and Jewish] liturgical poems” (p. 214). For a survey of Aramaic poetry that provides context for the poetic culture that did precede Ephrem, see A. S. Rodrigues Pereira, Studies in Aramaic Poetry (c. 100 B.C.E.–600 C.E.): Selected Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan Poems (Assen: Van Gorcum and Comp., 1997). On the origins of the genre, especially in connection with Bardaisan and Mani, see Kathleen E. McVey, “Were the Earliest Madrāšē Songs or Recitations?” in After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour of Professor Han J. W. Drijvers, ed. G. J. Reinink and A. C. Klugkist, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 89 (Louvain: Peeters, 1999), 185–99. On early Syriac literary generally, see Brock, “The Earliest Syriac Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. F. Young, L. Ayres, and A. Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 161–71 and David Taylor, “The Syriac Tradition,” in The First Christian Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Church, ed. G. R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 201–24. On Syriac poetry more broadly, see Brock, “Poetry,” in GEDSH, 334–36 and Brock, “Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S. A. Harvey and D. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 657–71.
5. The text of the Memre on Faith was critically edited by Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones de Fide,CSCO 212 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CSCO, 1961), with an accompanying German translation (CSCO 213). Beck also made it the subject of a very brief book, Ephraems Reden über den Glauben: Ihr Theologischer Lehrgehalt und ihr Geschichtlicher Rahmen (Rome: Herder), 1953. The Memre on Nicomedia survive only in Armenian but are thought to be authentic (see David Bundy, “Bishop Vologese and the Persian Siege of Nisbis in 359 C.E.: A Study in Ephrem’s Mēmrē on Nicomedia,” Encounter 63 [2000]: 53–65 and Bundy, “Vision for the City: Nisibis in Ephrem’s Hymns on Nicomedia,” in Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 189–206). They were edited, with an accompanying French translation, by Charles Renoux, Éphrem de Nisibe, Mēmrē sur Nicomédie,Patrologia Orientalis 37 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975). The three Memre on Reproof have been critically edited (Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones I, CSCO 305/306 [Louvain: Secrétariat du CSCO, 1970]), but not well studied. Ephrem’s Commentaries on Genesis and Exodus were edited by R. M. Tounneau, Sancti Ephraem Syri in Genesim et in Exodum Comentarii, CSCO 152/153 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1955). The Commentary on Genesis, in particular, has been the subject of extensive scholarly study. See most recently Thomas Kremer, Mundus Primus: Die Geschichte der Welt und des Menschen von Adam bis Noach im Genesiskommentar Ephräms des Syrers, CSCO Subsidia 128 (Louvain: Peeters, 2012). The Commenary on the Diatessaron survives in fragmentary form in Armenian and Syriac, and has been critically edited by Louis Leloir in three volumes: Saint Ephrem: Commentaire de l’évangile concordant; Version arménienne, CSCO 137 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1953); Saint Ephrem: Commentaire de l’évangile concordant; Texte syriaque (Manuscript Chester Beatty 709), Chester Beatty Monographs 8 (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1963); and Saint Ephrem: Commentaire de l’évangile concordant; Texte syriaque (Manuscript Chester Beatty 709), Folios additionels, Chester Beatty Monographs 8a (Louvain: Peeters, 1990). The Commentary on the Diatessaron has been recently studied in detail by Christian Lange, The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, CSCO Subsidia 616 (Louvain: Peeters, 2005). Lange concludes that the Commentary on the Diatessaron is a composite work, compiled from “ ‘authentic’ Ephraemic pieces and ‘non-authentic’ pieces from hands later than that of Ephraem himself” (Portrayal of Christ, 66).
6. On the religious world of late antique Mesopotamia, see the classic essays of Hans J. W. Drijvers, East of Antioch: Studies in Early Syriac Christianity (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984) and Drijvers, History and Religion in Late Antique Syria (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994). See, more recently, Lukas Van Rompay, “The East (3): Syria and Mesopotamia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S. A. Harvey and D. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 362–86.
7. While Ephrem’s polemics recur throughout his various works, he primarily articulates his polemics against “Manichees,” “Marcionites,” and “Daysanites” in the Madrashe Against Heresies, ed. Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen Contra Haereses, CSCO 169/70 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1957), and in the Prose Refutations, ed. Charles W. Mitchell, St. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, vol. 1: The Discourses Addressed to Hypatius, Text and Translation Society 7a (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912) and Mitchell, St. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, of which the Greater Part has been Transcribed from the Palimpsest B. . add. 14.623, vol. 1: The Discourse called “Of Domnus” and Six Other Writings, comp. A. A. Bevan and F. C. Burkitt, Text and Translation Society 7b (London: Williams and Norgate, 1921). The Prose Refutations have not been the subject of extensive scholarly study, though on Ephrem’s polemics against Mani and Bardaisan, see recently Robert Morehouse, “Bar Dayṣān and Mani in Ephraem the Syrian’s Heresiography” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2013), and, on Manichaeism, Flavia Ruani, “Les controverses avec les manichéens et le development de l’hérésiologie syrique,” in Les controverses religieuses en syriaque, ed. Flavia Ruani, Études Syriaques 13 (Paris: Geuthner, 2016), 68–76. On Ephrem’s Madrashe Against Heresies, see Sidney Griffith, “The Thorn Among the Tares: Mani and Manichaeism in the Works of St. Ephraem the Syrian,” Studia Patristica 35 (2001): 395–427; Griffith, “Setting Right the Church of Syria: Saint Ephraem’s Hymns against Heresies,” in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. . Markus, ed. W. E.Klingshirn and M. Vessey (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 97–114. Ephrem’s most focused polemics against the “Jews” appear in his Madrashe on Unleavened Bread, also edited by Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Paschahymnen CSCO 248/249 (Louvain: Secrétariat de CorpusSCO, 1964). Ephrem’s Jewish polemics have been extensively studied by Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press), 2008. On anti-Jewish polemic as a backdrop to the Madrashe on Nativity, see Kathleen E. McVey, “The Anti-Judaic Polemic of Ephrem Syrus’ Hymns on the Nativity,” in Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins, ed. H . W. Attridge, J. J. Collins, and T. H. Tobin (New York: University Press of America, 1990), 129–40.
8. For an account of the Trinitarian controversies, see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15–20; John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2: The Nicene Faith, part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), esp. 21–122; R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 3–178; and Manlio Simonetti, La Crisi Ariana nel IV secolo, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 36 (Rome: Augustinianum, 1975).
9. Jacob of Nisibis is listed among the attendees of the council. See Ernest Honigmann, “La liste originale des Pères de Nicée,” Byzantion 14 (1939): 17–76 and Hubert Kaufhold, “Griechisch-Syrische Väterlisten der frühen Griechischen Synoden,” Oriens Christianus 77 (1993): 1–96. Emanuel Fiano has recently offered a thorough examination of the evidence for the Trinitarian controversies in fourth-century Edessa (“The Trinitarian Controversies in Fourth-Century Edessa,” Le Muséon 128 [2015]: 85–125). While Fiano admits that the evidence is piecemeal and difficult to interpret, he nevertheless concludes that, at the very least, it suggests Edessa’s full integration into the “wider theologico-ecclesial net of Syria and the East” (p. 90).
10. On Ephrem’s theology in relationship to the Trinitarian controversies, see Peter Bruns, “Arius—hellenizans?—Ephräm der Syrer und die neoarianischen Kontroversen seiner Zeit,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 101 (1990): 21–57; Fiano, “Trinitarian Controversies,” 96–99; Lange, Portrayal of Christ, 114–50; Ute Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God,” in God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G. Patterson, ed. Andrew B. McGowan, B. E. Daley, and T. J . Gaden (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 195–237; Paul S. Russell, St. Ephraem the Syrian and St. Gregory the Theologian Confront the Arians (Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Center, 1994), 146–84; and Jeffrey Wickes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 19–43.
11. In this sense, we could say that the “Trinitarian controversies” merely provide a Sitz im Leben for this material. My interest is not, per se, in the history of the doctrines that emerged in the wake of this council.
12. Frances Young has written that “[t]he writings of Athanasius make it absolutely clear that the Arian controversy was about exegesis” and that “the scriptures seem to have had a key role in the debate from the beginning” (Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 30 [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1997], 30). See also Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 31–40.
13. In only four places in the Madrashe on Faith does Ephrem explicitly address biblical passages that were commonly associated with the Trinitarian controversies: MF 53, which treats Proverbs 8:22, and MF 77–79, which treat Matthew 24:36. On these, see Lange, Portrayal of Christ, 77, 119–20; Paul S. Russell, “Ephrem and Athanasius on the Knowledge of Christ,” Gregorianum 85, no. 3 (2004): 445–74; and Wickes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 29–36.
14. DJBA, 353–54.
15. DJBA, 353–54.
16. On the genre of midrash, see Hermann L. Strack and Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 233–46.
17. See the Wisdom of Solomon 11:2, “They walked through an uninhabited wilderness, and pitched their tents where it had not been cleared” (d-lâ drîš). For lexical meanings in Syriac, see LS, 325. As Kathleen E. McVey notes, the Syriac verb draš also does not have any obvious musical ramifications (“Were the Earliest Madrāšê Songs?,” 186).
18. See the Peshitta of Acts 9:29, “He disputed with the Jews” (draš-[h]wâ ‘am yāhûdāyê).
19. The earliest Syriac account of the life of Ephrem, Jacob of Sarug’s Memra on Mar Ephrem, says that Ephrem composed his madrashe for women, so that they could give glory for the resurrection (lines 52–114) and dispute heretical ideas (lines 152–184) (A Metrical Homily on Holy Mar Ephrem by Mar Jacob of Sarug, ed. Joseph P. Amar, Patrologia Orientalis 47, no. 209 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1995], 36–52 and 64–70). As I have argued elsewhere, Ephrem’s prose biographical tradition intentionally separated Ephrem’s exegetical work from his polemical work. It relegated the former to the genre of the commentary and the latter to the madrasha. On this, see Jeffrey Wickes, “Between Liturgy and School: Reassessing the Performative Context of Ephrem’s Madrāšê,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (2018): 25–51.
20. See Edmund Beck, “Ephräms des Syrers Hymnik,” in Liturgie und Dichtung: Ein interdisziplinäres Kompendium; Gualtero Duerig annum vitae septuagesimum feliciter complenti, vol. 1, ed. H. Becker and R. Kaczynski (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1983), 345–79. The earliest scholarly treatments were particularly interested in the influence of the Syriac madrasha on Greek hymnography. See Wilhem Meyer, “Anfang und Ursprung der lateinischen und greichischen rythmischen Dichtung,” in Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur mittelateinische Rythmik (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1905), 103–201. Kathleen E. McVey argues that before Bardaisan the madrasha was a literary genre, which Bardaisan himself “transformed…into song” (“Were the Earliest Madrāšê Songs?,” 186).
21. For a brief listing of Ephrem’s madrashe, see Joseph Amar, “Ephrem, Life of,” in GEDSH, 145. More extensively, see Sebastian Brock, “A Brief Guide to the Main Editions and Translations of the Works of Saint Ephrem,” in Saint Éphrem: Un poète pour notre temps (Antélias: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Orientales, 2007), 281–338 and Kees den Biesen, Bibliography of Ephrem the Syrian (Umbria: self-pub., 2002).
22. Sidney Griffith, “Ephraem the Syrian’s Hymns ‘Against Julian’: Meditations on History and Imperial Power,” Vigiliae Christianae 41, no. 3 (September 1987): 245–46.
23. The literature on Ephrem and early Christian typology is extensive. I will deal with some aspects of this literature in chapter three. Note here the long tradition of situating Ephrem in terms of “Alexandrian” and “Antiochian” styles of exegesis: Bertrand de Margerie, “La poésie biblique de Saint Ephrem exégète syrien (306–373),” in Introduction à l’histoire de l’exégèse, vol. 1: Les pères grecs et orientaux (Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 1980), 165–187; Nabil el-Khoury, “Hermeneutics in the Works of Ephraim the Syrian,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 229 (1984): 93–99; and Shinichi Muto, “Interpretation in the Greek Antiochenes and the Syriac Fathers,” in The Peshitta: Its Use in Literature and Liturgy; Papers Read At the Third Peshitta Symposium, ed. R. Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 207–22. While standing within this general tradition, Carmen Maier has recently taken a more nuanced approach to the Antiochian-Alexandrian debates and resituated Ephrem within that scholarly discussion (“Poetry as Exegesis: Ephrem the Syrian’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation Especially as Seen in His Hymns on Paradise and Hymns on Unleavened Bread” [PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2012]). Maier argues that there is a “reciprocal hermeneutic” in Ephrem’s writings, in which he interprets both the Bible and his audience in light of one another. She uncovers this at work in the Madrashe on Paradise and Madrashe on Unleavened Bread. There has also been the related effort to situate Ephrem’s exegesis with respect to his understanding of symbols (though not necessarily with respect to broader Greco-Roman reading trends): Louis Leloir, “Symbolisme et parallélisme chez Saint Ephrem,” in A la recontre de Dieu: Mémorial Albert Gelin (Lyon: Editions Xavier Mappus, 1961): 363–74; Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition, rev. ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2004); Murray, “The Theory of Symbolism in St. Ephrem’s Theology,” Parole de l’Orient 6/7 (1975): 1–20; and Muto, “Early Syriac Hermeneutics,” The Harp 11–12 (1998): 45–65. T. Bou Mansour (La pensée symbolique de Saint Ephrem le Syrien [Kaslik, Liban: Université Saint-Esprit, 1988]) interpreted Ephrem using language taken from Gadamer.
24. For an attempt to systematize this language, see Bou Mansour, Pensée symbolique, 23–71. Shinichi Muto insightfully connects Ephrem’s own exegesis with his understanding of the divine use of symbols: “[I]t is Christ Himself who gathered His own symbols, and it is He, in turn, who lets Ephrem gather them and speak about them” (“Early Syriac Hermeneutics,” 47).
25. On the physical resonances of figura, see Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–78.
26. Similarly, Carmen Maier suggests that Ephrem “creates a reciprocal hermeneutic between the biblical text and his own context” (“Poetry as Exegesis,” 12).
27. When I speak of Ephrem’s Bible as “coming into being,” I am not speaking of the formation of the canon. Rather, I intend to indicate the sense in which any text is always coming into and out of being through a community’s use of it. In the Madrashe on Faith, we see this “coming into and out of being” in response to a particular set of theoretical and practical issues. In suggesting that Ephrem’s Bible is not a stable, objective entity but always an object brought into being through his performance of it, I am drawing upon the theories of language as performative, on which, see below. But these ideas are equally reflected in theories of reader-response criticism. See the classic studies of Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980), esp. ch. 5.
28. Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven: Yale, 2000), 8, emphasis mine.
29. Robert Alter has further traced the relationship between Absalom! Absalom! and the King James Bible in Pen of Iron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 78–113.
30. Alter (Pen of Iron, 11) points to the terms “blessing,” “curse,” “land,” “seed,” “flesh and bone,” and “blood” as examples of the Jacobean language Faulkner brings into his otherwise Greco-Latinate lexicon. In Pen of Iron, he notes just how far Faulkner’s style is from that of the King James Bible. As Alter describes it, Faulkner displays a “fondness for stylistic extravagance and for stretching the lexical limits of the English language,” and a syntax which is “spectacularly hypotactic, spinning out … in complicated coils that allow nothing like the orderly march of independent clauses and parallel statements that characterize biblical writing” (pp. 84–85). Given this distance of Faulkner’s style from that of the Bible, seen in both lexicon and syntax, it makes his dependence upon these terms taken from the King James Bible all the more stark. Alter traces out the above terms at greater length in Pen and Iron, 86–112.
31. Alter, Pen and iron, 10–11.
32. On this, see chapter three.
33. In emphasizing the performative nature of these poems, I am particularly indebted to the work of Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Derek Krueger, and Laura Lieber on the performative dimensions of late antique liturgical poetry. Harvey has looked at this phenomenon primarily as it relates to women’s choirs in the Syriac world. See Harvey, “Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac Tradition,” in Inquiries Into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, ed. Basilius J. Groen and Steven Hawkes Teeples (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 48–64; Harvey, Song and Memory: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010), 39–92; and Harvey, “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” Patrología Orientalis 9, no. 1 (2001): 105–31. Krueger has studied the phenomenon of subjectivity in a range of Greek liturgical genres in Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Lieber has, in a number of articles, traced the performative and exegetical elements of piyyut. See esp. Lieber, “The Rhetoric of Participation: Experiential Elements of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” Journal of Religion 90 (2010): 119–47; Lieber, “Telling a Liturgical Tale: Storytelling in Early Jewish Liturgical Poetry,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 66, nos. 3–4 (2014): 209–32; and Lieber, “Theater of the Holy: Performative Elements of Late Ancient Hymnography,” Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 327–55.
34. The field of performance studies began in the mid-twentieth century among social scientists who began to think of everyday life through the lens of the theater. From there the idea developed of culture as a performance, one in which a society’s views of itself are refracted and reified through certain cultural rituals. See Jon McKenzie, “Performance Studies,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. M. Groden, M. Kreiswirth, and I. Szeman (electronic version). Among ritual theorists, the extent to which cultural performance can be taken to represent a society’s view of itself to itself, and the extent to which it can challenge a society’s view of itself, is a live issue. On this, see Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32–46. More generally, see Philip Auslander, Theory for Performance Studies: A Student’s Guide (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–5; Tracy C. Davis, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–10; and Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–27.
35. On the performativity of language in liturgical studies, see Joseph J. Schaller, “Performative Language Theory: An Exercise in the Analysis of Ritual,” Worship 62 (1988): 415–32. This aspect of “performativity” draws upon the linguistic theories of J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
36. Bell addressed performance theory both in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice and in Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 159–64.
37. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 160. For a clear articulation of these performative elements in the context of Ephrem’s madrashe, see Maier, “Poetry as Exegesis,” 147–48.
38. Unlike the refrains in Romanos’s kontakia, which are built into the syntax of the poems, Ephrem’s refrains stand syntactically independent of the stanzas. Moreover, the different madrashe manuscripts often manifest different refrains for single madrashe. This could suggest that the refrains postdate Ephrem’s life. More likely, given their perennial attestation, it suggests that the refrains always formed a flexible element in the performance of the madrashe, one which easily morphed in performative contexts. For a thoughtful reflection on refrains in Romanos’s kontakia, see Thomas Arentzen, “Voices Interwoven: Refrains and Vocal Participation in the Kontakia,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 66 (2016): 1–11.
39. On this point, Bell further suggests that ritual and performance aim “to reduce and simplify [the world] so as to create more or less coherent systems of categories that can then be projected onto the full spectrum of human experience” (Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 161).
1. The Madrashe on Faith is found complete in BM Add. 12176 (5th-6th c.) and Vat. Syr. 111 (dated to 522 C.E.). Portions of the Madrashe on Faith are found in Vat. Syr. 113 (dated to 552 C.E.) and BM Add. 14571 (dated to 519 C.E.). On these manuscripts, see Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide, CSCO 154 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1955), iiiii and Sebastian Brock, “The Transmission of Ephrem’s madrashe in the Syriac Liturgical Tradition,” Studia Patristica 33 (1997): 490–505. The other madrashe collections found among these early manuscripts are MAH, MAJ, MChurch, MCruc, MFast, MNat, MNis, MPar, MRes, MUnlB, and MVir. On the transmission of Ephrem’s madrashe collections, see the classic studies of Brock, “Transmission” A. de Halleux, “Une clé pour les hymnes d’Ephrem dansle ms Sinai syr. 10,” Mus 85 (1972): 171–199; de Halleux, “La transmission des hymnes d’Ephrem d’aprés le ms Sinai syr. 10,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 197 (1974): 21–63; and B. Outtier, “Contribution a l’étude de la préhistoire des collections d’hymnes d’Ephrem,” Parole de l’Orient 6–7 (1975–76): 49–61. Recently, Aaron M. Butts has argued compellingly for a new approach to these manuscript collections. Butts notes that after the sixth century, Ephrem’s madrashe begin to circulate in a piecemeal fashion. This breaking up of the older collections was not random but represented a specific way of receiving Ephrem in a post-Chalcedonian Syriac environment. Butts writes: “[T]he changes we see in the transmission of Ephrem’s hymns around the sixth century, when we cease having complete hymns and start having only excerpts, serve as evidence that Ephrem was no longer entirely acceptable theologically to post-Chalcedonian Syriac Christians” (“Manuscript Transmission as Reception History: The Case of Ephrem the Syrian [d. 373],” Journal of Early Christian Studies 25, no. 2 [Summer 2017]: 284). My argument for the emergence of Ephrem’s poems in contexts of study may suggest another reason for the madrashe’s later piecemeal circulation: as the madrasha became a strictly liturgical genre it made less sense to preserve and transmit those madrashe that were not explicitly connected to events on the liturgical calendar.
2. The fifth- and sixth-century madrashe collections often contain smaller “subcollections”—groups of madrashe internally united by melody, meter, and sometimes title, number, and even theme. The clearest example of one of these internally embedded subcollections can be seen in MF 81–85. These five madrashe are given their own title—The Madrashe on the Pearl—and their own colophon—“The [Madrashe] on the pearl are complete.” It may be the case that these subcollections represent earlier versions of the fifth- and sixth-century collections, but we cannot know for certain. Blake Härtung argues that these subcollections manifest the earliest editorial layer of the larger hymn cycles and should thus be our entry point into studying Ephrem. See Hartung, “The Authorship and Dating of the Syriac Corpus attributed to Ephrem of Nisibis: A Reassessment,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 22, no. 2 (2018): 318–20.
3. The apocryphal Testament of Ephrem, in which Ephrem, upon his deathbed, delivers a metered discourse to his disciples, contains no reference to the collecting of his madrashe. See Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones IV, CSCO 334/335 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1973), 43–69 (Syriac text) / 53–80 (German translation).
4. Sidney Griffith says that “[a]fter Ephraems lifetime, his followers and admirers collected his madrāšê and continued to use them for both liturgical and instructional purposes; they began to arrange them into thematic compilations” (“St. Ephraem, Bar Dayṣān, and the Clash of Madrāšê in Aram: Readings in St. Ephraems Hymni contra Haereses,” The Harp 21 [2006]: 447–72). Christian Lange thinks Ephrem compiled the collections himself (The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, CSCO Subsidia 616 [Louvain: Peeters, 2005], 29). Likewise, Sebastian Brock suspects that at least some of the cycles derive from Ephrem himself (“Poetry and Hymnography [3]: Syriac,” in Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S. A. Harvey and D. Hunter [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 660). On these questions, however, see Hartung, “Authorship and Dating,” which argues that “the cycles postdate Ephrem and were assembled by editors for purposes not necessarily correlating with Ephrem’s own” (p. 298).
5. See initially Jeffrey Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 47–52. I use this terminology as a window through which to observe Ephrem’s theological context and biblical poetics in chapter two of this book.
6. Hartung, “Authorship and Dating,” 306–7.
7. Moreover, none of the interpretations I offer below depends upon the structure of the Madrashe on Faith as it develops across the collection as a whole.
8. See Emanuel Fiano, “The Trinitarian Controversies in Fourth-Century Edessa,” Le Muséon 128 (2015): 96–99; Lange, Portrayal of Christ, 114–50; and Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 19–43.
9. Beck, Hymnen de Fide, 30–33. Clearly, however, he does take the work to derive from after 363 (see p. 119).
10. In his study of the Commentary on the Diatessaron, Christian Lange takes a general scholarly tendency to read Ephrem’s works loosely in connection with his biography and develops a strict chronological interpretation of these works (.Portrayal of Christ, 30–35). In Langes view, not only can we divide Ephrem’s life into three distinct periods—a period at Nisibis (306–363); period of relocation (363–364); and a period at Edessa (364–373)—we can map most of Ephrem’s authentic works onto these periods in fairly clear ways. Lange’s assignment of the works to different historical periods, however, seems to me to depend upon faulty assumptions. For example, he argues that the Memre on Nicomedia must date from soon after 358, because Ephrem’s tone of lamentation suggests that “the memory of the catastrophe was still fresh” (p. 30). But certainly Ephrem, like any skilled orator, was capable of articulating great pathos regardless of his personal connection to the events about which he spoke. In other places, Langes reasoning is simply not clear to me. For example, he dates the Memre on Faith to Nisibis, because Ephrem “argues against ‘Arians’ and Jews at Nisibis,” but does not specify what about those memre suggests a Nisibene rather than an Edessan context. See also Hartung, “Authorship and Dating,” esp. 312–16.
11. The literature is extensive, but see Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BC—AD 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 452–67.
12. For recent surveys and analysis, see Aaron M. Butts, Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in its Greco-Roman Context, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 11 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 27–30 and Scott F. Johnson, ed., Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek, The Worlds of Eastern Christianity, 300–1500 6 (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 8–27. See the classic studies of Sebastian Brock, “Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria,” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. A. K Bowman and G. Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 49–60. Fergus Millar has perhaps written most extensively on the topic of Greek and Syriac in late antiquity. I do not try to replicate his bibliography in its entirety here (for this, see Butts, Language Change, and Johnson, Languages and Cultures). For a sampling of his arguments, see esp., on the early period, Millar, “Greek and Syriac in Edessa and Osrhoene, CE 213–363” Scripta Classica Israelica 30 (2011): 93–111; Millar, “Greek and Syriac in Edessa: From Ephrem to Rabbula (CE 363–435),” Semetica et Classica 4 (2011): 99–113; and Millar, Religion, Language, and Community in the Roman Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the period after Chalcedon, see Millar, “The Evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Pre-Islamic Period: From Greek to Syriac?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 43–92. For a critique of Millar’s views, see Johnson, Languages and Cultures, 8–17 and 88–92.
13. The question of whether Ephrem wrote anything in Greek is not entirely closed, but it is very unlikely that he did so. Two fairly recent works—Ephrem Lash, “Metrical Texts of Greek Ephrem,” in Ascetica, Gnostica, Liturgica, Orientalia, ed. M. F. Wiles and E. J. Yarnold, Studia Patristica 35 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 433–48 and Trevor Fiske Crowell, “The Biblical Homilies of Ephreaem Graecus” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2016), esp. 58—offer initial analyses of early Greek prose and metrical works that bear the name of Ephrem, and which seem conversant with Syriac poetic styles, though not necessarily with the authentic works of Ephrem. The one exception here is the Ephrem Graecus homily “On the Prophet Jonah and on the Repentance of the Ninevites” which exists in very similar Greek and Syriac versions. See Crowell, “Biblical Homilies,” 214–36 and André de Halleux, “A propos du sermon éphrémien sur Jonas et la pentitence des Ninivites,” in Lingua Restituta Orientalis: Festgabe für Julius Assfalg, ed. R. Schulz and M. Görg (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz, 1990), 155–60. On the question of Ephrem’s knowledge of Greek, see below.
14. Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of Countries (ca. 200 C.E.), though written in Syriac, mimics Greek dialogue forms and betrays an acquaintance with Greek philosophical ideas. The Odes of Solomon (early second century C.E.) and the Acts of Thomas (second/third century) are attested in both Greek and Syriac versions very early on, rendering it impossible to discern which came first, and, more importantly, suggesting a context of close Greek and Syriac interaction. On a linguistic level, Aaron Butts has recently shown that Greek first manifests itself in Aramaic as early as the first millennium. By the third century C.E., “the Aramaic-speaking inhabitants of Syria and Mesopotamia had already been in contact with the Greco-Roman world and its Greek language for more than half a millennium” (Language Change, 202–3). On the level of art, a mosaic of Orpheus with a Syriac inscription is attested in 194 C.E. See Ute Possekel, “Orpheus Among the Animals: A New Dated Mosaic from Osrhoene,” Oriens Christianus 92 (2008): 1–35. On the Syriac inscription, see John F. Healey, “A New Syriac Mosaic Inscription,” Journal of Semitic Studies 51 (Autumn, 2006): 313–27. Note, too, that Orpheus is one of the only classical figures to which Ephrem alludes (MNis 36:5, Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Carmina Nisibena, CSCO 240 [Louvain: Secrétariat de CorpusSCO, 1963], 10).
15. Fergus Millar argues that, to the extent Syriac-speaking bishops communicated with Greek-speaking bishops in the Roman Empire, they would have carried out this communication in Greek. See Millar, “Greek and Syriac in Edessa and Osrhoene,” 96 and 106, where he states this generally, and Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosios II (408–450), Sather Classical Lectures 64 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 110–12, where he applies this specifically to the ecumenical councils. On this point, see also Johnson, Languages and Cultures, 9.
16. This scholarly tendency, and the related bibliography, has been thoroughly traced by Ute Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO Subsidia 580 (Louvain: Peeters, 1999), 1–12. We can think of the views as running on a spectrum from those who would simply cite Ephrem as an example of a Syriac author who knew no Greek to those that would see Ephrem as antagonistic to Greek culture as a whole. For an example of the former, see Brock, “Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria,” 156–58. For an example of the latter, see Peter Bruns, “Arius—hellenizans?—Ephräm der Syrer und die neoarianischen Kontroversen seiner Zeit,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 101 (1990): 47.
17. Even the Commenatry on Genesis, while closer perhaps to Greek biblical commentaries, is sui generis. See Thomas Kremer, Mundus Primus: Die Geschichte der Welt und des Menschen von Adam bis Noach im Genesiskommentar Ephräms des Syrers, CSCO Subsidia 128 (Louvain: Peeters, 2012), 431 and Lukas Van Rompay, “The Christian Syriac Tradition of Interpretation,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300), ed. M. Saebø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeckand Ruprecht, 1996), 627–28.
18. Not to mention works that arose just after Ephrem’s death, such as BL Add. 12, 150, a Syriac Codex from 411 that contains exclusively Syriac translations of Greek works. As Aaron Butts states, this manuscript attests to the fact that by 411 there existed in Edessa a “well-developed translation program from Greek into Syriac” (Butts, Language Change, 28). Such a program does not develop suddenly. On this manuscript and its relevance for Greek and Syriac in Edessa, see Millar, “Greek and Syriac in Edessa,” 104–6.
19. Butts makes this observation in service of a larger argument that Greek and Syriac language were already in close contact by the second century. Certainly, his argument is persuasive. But the point still stands that “the early third-century Book of the Laws of Countries contains a higher concentration of Greek loanwords than the equally philosophical Prose Refutations by Ephrem, which stems from the latter half of the fourth century” (Language Change, 203).
20. She writes, “[T]hese two cases do not indicate that Ephrem knew Greek. His inadequate translation may actually indicate the opposite: Ephrem did not properly translate these Greek exegetical comments because of his likely unfamiliarity, or at least insufficient familiarity, with Greek.” See Yifat Monnickendam, “How Greek is Ephrem’s Syriac? Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis as a Case Study,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23, no. 2 (2015): 243. While I am inclined to agree with Monnickendams conclusions regarding Ephrem’s knowledge of Greek language, her argument for Ephrem’s relationship to Greco-Latin exegetical traditions, at least in the two examples she studies, is less convincing to me. She argues that Ephrem develops exegetical arguments that, for linguistic reasons, would only make sense if he were aware of Greek and Latin exegetical problems. Aside from the fact that her connection of his exegesis to Greek and Latin figures appears somewhat circuitous (for example, Jerome, who writes after Ephrem’s death, becomes the primary depository for the traditions represented by his reading of Gen. 19:12), in both of the examples she provides, Ephrem’s exegesis seems to arise either from ambiguities in the Peshitta text itself (in the case of Gen. 19) or in the ambiguity of the Syriac language (in Gen. 49).
21. In “Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria,” 157, Sebastian Brock suggests that Ephrem’s ignorance of Greek reflects his provenance from Nisibis, a town whose “Christian community…was predominantly Syriac-speaking,” a Greek inscription on a baptistery notwithstanding. Elsewhere, Brock implies that Ephrem’s ignorance of Greek reflected his social background. Noting “a flourishing bilingual culture at Edessa,” he nevertheless says that the culture “left only a minimal mark on Ephrem himself, and in all probability it was the preserve of only the upper echelons of Edessene society” (Brock, “From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning,” in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, ed. N. G. Garsoïan, T. F. Mathews, and R. W. Thomson [Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982]), 19.
22. This is stated most dramatically by Peter Bruns, who argues that Ephrem opposed “everything Greek in theology” (“Arius—hellenizans?” 47).
23. The Madrashe on Faith twice more references the “Greeks” in terms that are arguably condemnatory. In MF 87:4, Ephrem identifies “accursed disputation” as “the hidden worm (sāsâ) of the Greeks.” In MF 47:11, he retells Paul’s visit to Athens (Acts 17:16–34) and names Athens “the mother of the Greeks.” Ephrem calls the Athenians “presumptuous ones” who “spit up the medicine of life.” He also says that Paul was “subtler” then the Athenians, a statement he clearly intends ironically, given that this quality of being “subtle” (qaṭṭîn) is one he associates with Aetius (MAH 22:4). The evidence here is less clear, but it seems reasonable to read Ephrem as intending to link “the Greeks” with these behaviors.
24. See Brock, “From Antagonism to Assimilation,” 19. Paul Russell takes the phrase in reference to “upper classes” in Nisibis and Edessa who were “much enamored with Greek philosophy” (“A Note on Ephraem the Syrian and ‘the Poison of the Greeks’ in Hymns on Faith 2” The Harp 10, no. 3 [1997]: 45–54).
25. “Letter to Alexander of Constantinople,” English translation by Andrew S. Jacobs in Christianity in Late Antiquity, 300–450 C.E.: A Reader, ed. Bart Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 160.
26. Brock, “From Antagonism to Assimilation,” 19.
27. Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts.
28. Though see my comments above. Elsewhere, Monnickendam notes that, in his legal terminology, Ephrem shows his dependence upon non-Greek Jewish legal traditions (“Articulating Marriage: Ephrem’s Legal Terminology and Its Origins,” Journal of Semitic Studies 58, no. 1 [2013]: 257–96.
29. Jeffrey Wiekes, “Mapping the Literary Landscape of Ephrem’s Theology of Divine Names,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69 (2015): 1–13. There I note that in the Madrashe on Faith Ephrem never grounds his theology of divine names in a divine ontology. However, he does do so repeatedly in the Memre on Faith. I argue that he intentionally took this aspect of his thought from Aetius and Eunomius and developed it in the Memre on Faith in what he perceived as an orthodox direction, but then abandoned it in light of critiques of Eunomius.
30. In characterizing these debates as distinctly “Greek” debates, I do not mean to imply that they reflected an abstract “Greek” mode of thought, as something distinct from a “Semitic” mode of thought. For a classic dismantling of such juxtapositions from the perspective of biblical studies, see James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 8–20. Theologically, I also do not mean to imply that because Greek speakers developed these ideas they had some sort of monopoly on their interpretation, as if Ephrem’s particular receptions of these ideas, because he was a non-Greek speaker, should somehow be relegated as second class. In this case, I use the word “Greek” merely to indicate that these debates arose and developed in regions that were primarily Greek speaking, and that they migrated (in a way that could almost be described as simultaneous) from Greek to other languages (e.g., Syriac, Coptic, and Latin).
31. In MAJ 4:1–2, Ephrem refers to Julian’s transfer of the body of the martyr Babylas and the subsequent burning of the Temple of Apollo. See Kathleen E.McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 250–51.
32. To the best of my knowledge, Ephrem’s use of this line of rhetoric has not been studied, with the exception of one reference in Edmund Beck, Die Theologie des hl Ephraem in seinen Hymnen über den Glauben, Studia Anselmania 21 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum S. Anselmi, 1949), 22, in reference to MF 58:4. On this argument among Christians and Jews in late antiquity, see Elizabeth Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 64–65; David Daube, “Rabbinic Methods of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric,” Hebrew Union College Annual 22 (1949): 251–52; and David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 88–93.
33. Though Ute Possekel suggests that the Nisibene educational system “may well have been modeled after Graeco-Roman education,” given how Hellenized the city was by Ephrem’s time (Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts, 50).
34. Regarding the appearance of invented speech in Syriac literature, Susan Harvey says that “[w]hat we see in Syriac hymns and verse homilies is the utilization of rhetorical and narrative features familiar in the larger hellenized culture of the Roman Empire… articulated through the particular genius of Syriac poetical forms” (“Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in the Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 1 [2001]: 110).
35. Johnson argues, “[S]cholars of other eastern Christian languages…have a major role to play in defining the study of Greek in the East. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear today that a Hellenist writing a history of Greek literature in the late antique and Byzantine worlds will need to have ready access to more ancient languages than just Greek and Latin” (Languages and Cultures, 3).
36. For a similar approach applied primarily to piyyut, but with cross-linguistic late antique hymnography in mind, see Laura Lieber, “Theater of the Holy: Performative Elements of Late Ancient Hymnography,” Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 327–55.
37. Portions of the following appear in Jeffrey Wickes, “Between Liturgy and School: Reassessing the Performative Context of Ephrem’s Madrāšê,,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (2018): 25–51.
38. See Griffith, “St. Ephraem, Bar Dayṣān and the Clash of Madrāšê,” 454. For Brown’s comparison of Ephrem to Chrysostom, see his The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 329. Regarding the public nature of the madrashe, Joseph Amar says that Ephrem’s “liturgical compositions were public events in the church in his day” (The Syriac Vita Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO 629 [Louvain: Peeters, 2011],xii).
39. Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy, 1–2. Shepardson does not addresses Ephrem’s performative context outright. But her interpretation assumes that the madrashe are shaping the religious horizons of the general population of late antique Nisibis and Edessa. When she speaks specifically of the Madrashe on Pascha, her interpretations make sense, because, as I would argue, they were performed liturgically. At the same time, her monograph draws equally on the Madrashe on Faith, which, I would argue, were, for the most part, not performed liturgically. This manner of speaking collapses and makes monolithic the madrashe’s performative context but ignores the diversity of the madrashe corpus itself and the biases of the biographical tradition that informs us of their performance.
40. See Joseph P. Amar, A Metrical Homily on Holy Mar Ephrem by Mar Jacob of Sarug, Patrologia Orientalis 47, no. 209 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 15–18. On this homily, see also Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 8 (2005): 132–33.
41. On this aspect of the memra, see Kathleen E. McVey, “Ephrem the kitharode and Proponent of Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman for the Sixth-Century Viewer and Its Significance for the Twenty-first-century Ecumenist,” in Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology, ed. S. T. Kimbrough (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 229–53.
42. Ch. 31A. This chapter is only attested in two manuscripts—P and D. This quotation is from P. This translation is based on Amar, Syriac Vita Tradition, 76.
43. Ch. 31A, ms D. This quotation is adapted from Amar, Syriac Vita Tradition, 77–78.
44. Given that the Bible would be read in liturgical as well as scholastic settings, a madrasha that focuses on the Bible cannot be considered liturgical based upon that fact alone. Rather, its use of the Bible must be combined with some other liturgical element, for example, festal references, or references to ritual actions.
45. These criteria admittedly do not allow us to locate madrashe within the services of the daily office, but there are not really criteria that would allow us to do so. Perhaps we could trace references to Psalms, or references to times of days, or the lighting of lamps in the evening, but this would leave us on very speculative ground.
46. MUnlB 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 17, 18, and 19 evidence an underlying reading from Exodus. MUnlB 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, and 21 evidence an underlying reading from a Passion Gospel.
47. That is, these madrashe indicate that members of Ephrem’s congregations were attending Jewish Passover services alongside Christian Paschal services and seek to dissuade them from doing so. On this aspect of the Madrashe on Unleavened Bread see Shepardson, Anti-Judaism, 1. The meter of MUnlB 1–2 is 5+5 / 5+5 / 5+5. The meter of MUnlB 3–21 is 4+4 / 4+4.
48. See, for example, Madrashe on Nativity 1, which draws on Matthew’s genealogy, and messianic prophesies from the Old Testament.
49. A caveat: I obviously do not mean to imply that these documents lack any references to the Bible, but that the references to the Bible do not anchor the madrashe as scriptural lections generally do, and as the underlying scriptural lections do in the specific cases of the Madrashe on Unleavened Bread and Madrashe on Navitivity.
50. For example, MF 22 reflects upon the coherency of the Old and New Testaments, and the equal glory of the divine Father and Son. As one piece of this argument, in 22:7 Ephrem exclaims, “Great is the disgrace to the Three, / If someone is baptized with borrowed names.” In this line, Ephrem argues that using a Trinitarian baptismal formula while denying the equal divinity of the Father and the Son represents a contradiction. The madrasha as a whole, though, does not concern itself with baptism and thus presents little evidence that it was performed in connection with a baptismal service. For the most part, these polemical references to liturgical practices invoke baptism: see MF 13:2, 5; 23:14; 28:12; 39:4; 41:11; 52:3; 62:13; 65:4; 66:6; 67:10; and 77:22. For a use of the Eucharist for the same polemic, see MF 6:4 and 54:10.
51. MF 4 presents itself as a scene of heavenly worship, and twice references the birth of Christ. Andrew Palmer has argued that MF 4 and 5 “seem to imitate the two parts of the anaphora” of Addai and Mari (“The Fourth-Century Liturgy of Edessa Reflected in Ephraim’s Madroshe 4 and 5 on Faith,” in The Eucharist in Theology and Philosophy: Issues of Doctrinal History in East and West from the Patristic Age to the Reformation, ed. István Perczel, Réka Forrai, and György Geréby [Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005], 319). His argument is interesting but very speculative. MF 11, 14, and 19 use language that sounds vaguely eucharistie, but which is difficult to place precisely. MF 21 and 86 do not use liturgical language but do present themselves as the unified song of the Church. MF 35 repeatedly uses the language of “font” in a way that means equally to invoke baptism, Eucharist, and the Bible. Finally, MF 82:10 references baptism in a non-polemical way.
52. MF 1.
53. On the kinds of questions one can ask regarding divine nature, see MF 91; 21:4; 23:15; 27:3; 30:2–4; 33:3–8; 36:19; 40:11; 41:4–6; 43:5; 47:4; 50:1–4; 55:10; 57:4; 59:4; 64:2; 65:12; and 72:14. On Trinitarian metaphors, see especially MF 41.
54. On the cosmology, see MF 44:3, and on psychology—specifically, memory—see MF 57.
55. See MF 11:5–6; 12:7–18; 20; 21:6–11; 25:1–12; 34:3–6; 38:16; 41; 42:11–13; 48:7–10; 58:10–11; and 74:12.
56. For a recent summary of the fourth-century development of the lectionary, see Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 99–102. On the particularities of the Syriac lectionary system, see Willem Baars, New Syro-Hexaplaric Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1968); F. C. Burkitt, The Early Syriac Lectionary System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923); K. D. Jenner, “The Development of Syriac Lectionary Systems: A Discussion of the Opinion of P. Kannookadan,” The Harp 10, no. 1 (1997): 9–24; and Pauly Kannookadan, The East Syrian Lectionary: An Historico-Liturgical Sudy (Rome: Mar Thoma Yogam, 1991).
57. On the use of the verses in the debates, see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 110.
58. For a helpful summary of the importance of “teaching” in Ephrem’s overall corpus, see Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts, 33–54.
59. MF 32:1.
60. See Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts, 48–54. Her question does not relate to the school per se, but to the context within which Ephrem himself was educated. She speculates that it was some sort of circle built around the bishops of Nisibis, along with some sort of secondary school in Nisibis.
61. The literature on the “children of the covenant” is immense. See George Nedungatt, “The Covenanters of the Early Syriac-Speaking Church,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 39 (1973): 419–44 and Robert Murray, “The Exhortation to Candidates for Ascetical Vows At Baptism in the Ancient Syriac Church,” New Testament Studies 21 (1974): 59–80. For a more recent discussion of older literature, as well as a nuanced assessment of the terminology involved, see Sidney Griffith’s “Asceticism in the Church of Syria: The Hermeneutics of Early Syrian Monasticism,” in Asceticism, ed. V. L. Wimbush and R. Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 220–48.
62. Aphrahat’s sixth Demonstration (“On Covenanters”) speaks to this community most immediately. See Adam Lehto, The Demonstrations of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 169–98.
63. Demonstration 6, for example, first addresses men who might be tempted by women, and then turns to advise celibate women not to live with celibate men.
64. Regarding Aphrahat, his tirade against celibate woman and men living together suggests they had some freedom in how to structure their living arrangements. Ephrem similarly suggests the absence of communal living structures in MPar 7:15, where he refers to a widow who lives alone “in a lonely house.”
65. That is, fasting and vigilance (MF 6:3), chastity (MAH 6:19), poverty (MNis 19:15), and virginity (MPar 7:15, MAH 45:9–10, MNis 1:9).
66. On the Book of Steps, see Kristian S. Heal and Robert A. Kitchen, Breaking the Mind: New Studies in the Syriac “Book of the Steps” (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 1–14. On Pseudo-Macarius, see Columba Stewart, “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to AD 431 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the place of the Acts of Judas Thomas within early Syriac Christianity, see Hans J. W. Drijvers, “Apocryphal Literature in the Cultural Milieu of Osrhoëne,” in Apocrypha: Le Champ des Apocryphes 1. La Fable Apocryphe, ed. P. Geoltrain, E. Junod, and J. C. Picard (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), 238–44. On the Pseudo-Clementines in the context of late antique Syria, see Nicole Kelley, Knowledge and Religious Authority in the Pseudo-Clementines: Situating the Recognitions in Fourth Century Syria (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 179–212.
67. See, for example, Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 25–36 and Joseph Amar, “Byzantine Ascetic Monachism and Greek Bias in the Vita Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 58 (1992): 123–26. This approach takes its root in the formative studies of Edmund Beck, in which he distinguished the authentic and inauthentic works of Ephrem on the basis of a “monastic” lexicon that emerged in the spurious works. See especially his “Asketentum und Monchtum bei Ephraem,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 153 (1958), 341–62 and “Ein Beitrag zur Terminologie des altesten syrischen Monchtums,” Studia Anselmiana 38 (1956): 254–67.
68. Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 10.
69. Robert Murray remarks: “What the course of studies was like in the fourth century, we can doubtless imagine best from Ephrem’s ‘Exegetical Commentary’… on Genesis” (in Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition, rev. ed. [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2004], 23).
70. Lange, Portrayal of Christ, 162–63.
71. See especially Ephrem’s “Against Bardaisan’s ‘Domnus,’” in St. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations, 1:1–22 (English) and 2:1–49 (Syriac).
72. Jerome’s “Letter to Eustochium” counsels Julia Eustochium to construct her spiritual life through reading (translation in The Principal Works of St. Jerome, Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994], 45). In Egypt and Jerusalem, Evagrius’s letters depict a community carrying out theological debates through reading and writing (see especially letters 2, 9, 24, 50, and 51, which relate to the Origenist controversy, in Wilhelm Frankenberg, Euagrius Ponticus [Berlin: Weidmannsche buchhandlung, 1912]). On disputational communities in Antioch, see Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ch. 4.
73. This translation is altered from Gregory of Nazianzus, Autobiographical Poems, ed. Carolinne White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5.
74. See the material collected in James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. 67–120.
75. Cecilia Milovanovic-Barham, “Gregory of Nazianzus: Ars Poetica (in suos versus: Carmen 2.1.39),” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5, no. 4 (1997): 497–510; Frederick Norris, “Gregory Nazianzus‘ Poemata Arcana: A Poetic, Musical Catechism?” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 63, nos. 3–4 (2012): 62–75.
76. On this period of Gregory’s life, see John A. McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 371–98.
77. On Basil, Macrina, and Eustathios, see Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 233–69.
78. Paul Russell has compared Ephrem and Gregory Nazianzen (St. Ephraem the Syrian and St. Gregory the Theologian Confront the Arians [Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Center, 1994]); Sebastian Brock has compared Ephrem to Gregory of Nyssa, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985), 145–48. See, more generally, David Taylor, “St. Ephraim’s Influence on the Greeks,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 1, no. 2 (1998): 185–96.
79. Becker, Fear of God, 22–26.
80. Becker, Fear of God, 26–27
81. Becker, Fear of God, 81–97.
82. English translation in Becker, Fear of God, 82–84. Syriac text is provided in The Statutes of the School of Nisibis, ed. Arthur Vööbus (Stockholm: ETSE, 1961).
83. Becker, Fear of God, 88.
84. Becker, Fear of God, 89.
85. Becker, Fear of God, 89.
86. Becker, Fear of God, 90.
1. I take this language of “melding” from Kevin Kalish’s study of late antique Greek poetry and poetics. See his “Greek Christian Poetry in Classical Forms: the Codex of Visions from the Bodmer Papyri and the Melding of Literary Traditions” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2009).
2. C. W. Mitchell, St. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, vol. 1; The Discourses addressed to Hypatius, Text and Translation Society 7a (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), vi (English). Syriac text in S. Ephraemi Syri, Rabulae Episcopi Edesseni, Balaei Aliorumque: Opera Selecta, ed. J. J. Overbeck (Oxford: Clarendoniano, 1865), 28. As this passage suggests, Ephrem does envision some positive role for investigation, though his assessment is overwhelmingly negative. But see, on the positive, poems 2:12–24 and 5:1.
3. More commonly, Ephrem uses the term bṣātâ, which I also translate as “Investigation.”
4. Put most simply, investigation can be rendered licit insofar as it sets “revealed things” (galyātâ) as its object. Bible, nature, and the body of Christ represent the primary realms of the revealed. However, Ephrem is far more concerned with mistaken attempts to investigate that which is “hidden” (kasyâ). For him, the realm of the hidden is constituted primarily as the inner life of the Trinity, especially the way in which God begot a Son. See Sidney Griffith, “Faith Seeking Understanding in the Thought of Saint Ephrem the Syrian,” in Faith Seeking Understanding, ed. G. C. Berthold (New York: St. Anselm College Press, 1991), 35–55.
5. For a fuller treatment of Ephrem’s extensive lexicon of investigation, see Jeffrey Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015) 43–52. For a different treatment of these issues, one which is much more concerned with a systematic reconstruction of Ephrem’s theology, see Kees den Biesen, Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006).
6. Though this history, outside of the Bible (on which, see below), is invisible to us. The term does not figure prominently in the Syriac literature that predates Ephrem.
7. The discussion that has been most helpful for me in thinking through this aspect of Ephrem’s language has been that of the musicologist Richard Taruskin. In his book Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 516–20, he distinguishes between “syntactic” symbols, which refer to and resonate within the artistic work itself, and “semantic” symbols, which point to the world outside of the artistic work. In the case of Ephrem’s lexicon for investigation, the terms would have a certain “syntactic” meaning, which would be acquired from his literary body But that “syntactic” meaning would be shaped as well by the terms’ “semantic” meanings, which would be acquired from the use of those terms outside of Ephrem’s literary works.
8. For example, Ephrem will refer to humans simply as “dust,” a term that ultimately derives from Genesis 2:7. But aside from his use of that simple word, he connects “dust,” to the biblical text in no obvious way (see, for example, MF 3:15, 9:16, 46:7). He will also refer to God as “consuming fire,” a term that derives from Deuteronomy 4:24 and 9:3, but which, again, Ephrem connects to the biblical source in no obvious way (see MF 28:2). And he will refer to heaven or sky as “heaven and the highest heaven,” a term that occurs, inter alia, in 1 Kings 8:27 and Psalms 148:4. In each of these cases, Ephrem has clearly taken a term from the Bible to name some other thing. In none of these cases does the biblical name accomplish something that any other noun would not. But it is clearly Ephrem’s preference to use biblical language to name things outside or transcendent of the Bible.
9. Note that I am not here talking about the ideas that lie behind this language. Den Biesen (Simple and Bold) does a fine job of unpacking these ideas in a theologically sophisticated way. His concern is not with the lexicon itself.
10. David Bundy suggests a more general anti-Arian and anti-Manichaean context for the language (“Language and the Knowledge of God in Ephrem Syrus” The Patristic and Byzantine Review 5, no. 2 [1986]: 91–103). With the exception of the philosophical-theological analysis of Den Biesen, Simple and Bold, discussion of Ephrem’s language of investigation tends to be either descriptive or aimed at establishing historical context. See Edmund Beck, Die Theologie des hl Ephraem in seinen Hymnen über den Glauben, Studia Anselmania 21 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum S. Anselmi, 1949), ch. 5; Peter Bruns, “Arius—hellenizans?—Ephräm der Syrer und die neoarianischen Kontroversen seiner Zeit,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 101 (1990): 1–57; Griffith, “Faith Seeking Understanding” Ute Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God,” in God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G. Patterson, ed. Andrew B. McGowan, B. E. Daley, and T. J. Gaden (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 195–238; Paul Russell, St. Ephraem the Syrian and St. Gregory the Theologian Confront the Arians (Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Center, 1994), 85–98; Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 113–16. Each of these authors highlights important aspects of Ephrem’s condemnation of investigation. None, however, investigate the biblical resonances of the language itself.
11. From the root b-‘-y, “to investigate,” Ephrem further derives bā‘ûyâ, “investigator,” and b‘ātâ, “investigation.” From b-ṣ-y, also translated as “to investigate,” Ephrem derives bāṣûyâ, “investigator” and bṣātâ, “investigation.” In its various forms, b‘â occurs roughly 105 times, and bṣâ roughly 240 times.
12. From draš, “to debate,” Ephrem also uses drāšâ, “debate” and dārûšâ, “debater.” From ‘qab, “to discuss,” he uses also ‘ûqqābâ, “discussion.”
13. Thirty-three times in its verbal form (šʼel) and 43 times in its noun form (šûʼʼālâ, “question,” or “questioning”).
14. This vocabulary is missing entirely only in hymns 14, 18, 19, 31, 60, 71, 76, 80, 82, 83, and 85.
15. J. S. Assemani, ed., Sancti Patris Nostri Ephraem Syri Opera Omnia quae exstant graece, syriace, latine, in sex tomos distributa (Rome: Vatican, 1732–43).
16. See Beck, Die Theologie; Bruns, “Arius—hellenizans?” Griffith, “Faith Seeking Understanding” Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God” Russell, St. Ephraem the Syrian and St. Gregory the Theologian, 85–98, and Shepardson, Anti-Judaism, 113–16.
17. On the Church is a single hymn which stands as a preface to the Madrashe Against Julian (Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und Contra Julianum, CSCO 174 [Louvain: Secrétariat de CorpusSCO, 1957], 67–70). It should not be confused with Ephrem’s cycle, On the Church, which consists in 52 hymns (Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Ecclesia, CSCO 198/199 [Louvain: Secrétariat de CorpusSCO, 1960]).
18. I do not mean to imply that these controversies ceased once Julian came into power, just that, in this particular context, Ephrem presents them that way.
19. The term bṣâ occurs thirteen times, b‘â occurs sixteen times, draš occurs forty times, ‘qab occurs eleven times. These numbers have been generated by the Oxford-BYU Syriac corpus (www.syriaccorpus.org).
20. See MAH 2:9 and 20; 5:5, 8, and 15; 10:1; 18:9; and 20:8. In each of these cases, Ephrem refers to investigation (or its connected vocabulary) in a single passage, without explication.
21. Ephrem takes the term “tares” (zîzānê) from the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24–30), and it becomes one of his favorite identifiers of heretical opponents. See Sidney Griffith, “The Thorn among the Tares: Mani and Manichaeism in the Works of St. Ephraem the Syrian,” Studia Patristica 35 (2001): 395–427.
22. “Setting Right the Church of Syria: Saint Ephraem’s Hymns Against Heresies,” in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus, ed. W. E . Klingshirn and M. Vessey (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 102, 107–8.
23. As “outsiders,” Ephrem also identifies followers of Valentinus, Quq (at MAH 22:2–3), as well as Sabbatians and Chaldeans (at MAH 2:3). See Griffith, “Setting Right the Church,” 102.
24. In MAH 22:20, Ephrem says that these insiders “received ordination from our church, / And some of them even subscribed / to the faith that was prescribed / at the illustrious synod” that is, presumably, Nicaea. See Griffith, “Setting Right the Church,” 102–3.
25. We see the same phenomenon in MAH 6:14–18. MAH 31 and 54, moreover, while they do not address anti-Arian issues directly, use language redolent of the Madrashe on Faith.
26. See MAH 2:9, 20; 5:5; 11:10; and 18:9. The language appears without negative connotations at MAH 1:7, 20:8, 26:1, and 29:33.
27. Using biblical parallels, we can make guesses about the Greek equivalents to Ephrem’s language of investigation (e.g., zēteō, exichneuō, dokimazō, ereunaō, and etazō). But, based on a TLG search, none of these terms appears with any significance in the Greek literature contemporary with him.
28. That is, certain terms, such as b‘â and ‘qab, are simply common Syriac terms. But while they appear in Syriac literature prior to Ephrem, the authors of those works do not impart any special significance to them. This is something of an argument from silence, as we do not have much Syriac literature prior to Ephrem with which to compare him. But given that none of the Syriac literature we do have develops this anti-investigative lexicon at all, there is at least good reason to suspect Ephrem is not simply borrowing it from an earlier source or intellectual tradition but is developing it himself.
29. A good point of comparison would be Sebastian Brock, “Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources,” Journal of Jewish Studies 30, no. 2 [1979]: 212–32, which argues for parallels between ideas and exegetical traditions that appear in Ephrem’s Commenatry on Genesis and which appear in the Targumim. Brock does not try to argue for specific borrowings one way or the other but says that the parallels suggest a shared exegetical culture. See also Thomas Kremer, Mundus Primus: Die Geschichte der Welt und des Menschen von Adam bis Noach im Genesiskommentar Ephräms des Syrers, CSCO Subsidia 128 (Louvain: Peeters, 2012), 417–21 and 424–27.
30. For example, in the theophanies of Exodus 33:18–23 and Job 38–41. The term “apophatic” first appears, and would come to be associated with, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. On the history of Dionysius in Syriac, see Emiliano Fiori, “The Topic of Mixture as Philosophical Key to the Understanding of the Divine Names: Dionysius and the Origenist Monk Stephen Bar Sudaili,” in Nomina Divina: Proceedings of the Colloquium Dionysiacum, Prague, 30–31 October 2009, ed. L. Karfikova and M. Havdra (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2011), 71–88 and Fiori, “Mystique et liturgie entre Denys ľAréopagite et le Livre de Hiérothée: Aux origins de la mystagogie syro-occidentale,” in Les mystiques syriaques, ed. A. Desreumaux (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 27–44. For a basic introduction, see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, reprint ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
31. On the culture of debate that took shape during the fourth century, see Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. chs. four and five, and Averil Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2014).
32. De deitate filii et spiritus sancti et in Abraham, Greek text in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, vol. 10.2; Sermones, pars III, ed. Ernestus Rhein and Friedhelm Mann (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1996), 121, lines 3–14.
33. See Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2004, 11–84 and John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2; The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004).
34. See Emanuel Fiano, “The Trinitarian Controversies in Fourth-Century Edessa,” Le Muséon 128 (2015): 96–99; Christian Lange, The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, CSCO Subsidia 616 (Louvain: Peeters, 2005), 114–50; Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God,” 195–237; Russell, St. Ephraem the Syrian and St. Gregory the Theologian 146–84; Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 19–43.
35. On the following, see also Jeffrey Wiekes, “Mapping the Literary Landscape of Ephrem’s Theology of Divine Names,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69 (2015): 1–13.
36. See Thomas A. Kopeck, A History of Neo-Arianism, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979); Richard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius: The Extant Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Kopeck, Eunomius of Cuzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
37. For text and translation, see Lionel Wickham, “The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968): 532–69. I have used this translation, with some modifications.
38. On the relationship of Aetius and Eunomius to Ephrem, see Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God.” Eunomius would later write an Apology for the Apology (Vaggione, Eunomius: Extant Works), but it was written ca. 378–81, after Ephrem’s death.
39. On Basil’s response to Eunomius, see Mark DelCogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, St. Basil of Caesarea: Against Eunomius, Fathers of the Church 122 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011). See also the study of DelCogliano, Basil of Caesarea’s Anti-Eunomian Theory of Names: Christian Theology and Late-Antique Philosophy in the Fourth Century Trinitarian Controversy, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianiae 103 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
40. Gregory Nazianzen writes, “These people I speak of have versatile tongues, and are resourceful in attacking doctrines nobler and worthier than their own. I only wish they would display comparable energy in their actions: then they might be something more than mere verbal tricksters, grotesque and preposterous word-gamesters….” (Frederick Williams, trans., On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002]). The earliest treatise against Eunomius is actually Basil’s, from ca. 364–365 (DelCogliano and Radde-Gallwitze, St. Basil of Caesarea), but Basil does not emphasize Eunomius’s “investigative” rhetoric as later authors will, nor does he lean so heavily on an argument from God’s unknowability.
41. On Ephrem’s theology of names generally, see T. Koonammakkal, The Theology of Divine Names in the Genuine Works of Ephrem, Mōrān Ethō 40 (Kerala, India: SEERI, 2015); Corrie Molenberg, “An Invincible Weapon: Names in the Christological Passages in Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith XLIX-LXV,” in Symposium Syriacum V, 1988, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 236, ed. R. Lavenant (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1990), 135–42; and Robert Murray, “The Theory of Symbolism in St. Ephrem’s Theology,” Parole de l’Orient 67 (1975–76): 1–20. On parallels with the Cappadocians on names, see Beck, Die Theologie, 66 n. 1 and 77 n. 5 and Beck, Ephräms des Syrers: Psychologie und Erkenntnislehre CSCO Subsidia 58 (Leuven: Peeters, 1980), 105–17. I develop this further in chapter three.
42. On Basil’s critique of the unscripturality of Eunomius’ “Unbegotten,” see Behr, Nicene Faith, 282–90. For a similar critique in Ephrem, see MF 52:14 and the discussion in Wickes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 38–39.
43. That is, rather than simply arguing against the divine name Eunomius saw as essential—Unbegotten—he provocatively calls Christ “Begotten” to emphasize as a mark of divinity the very name Eunomius took to signify Christ’s subordinate status.
44. He mentions “Aetians” once, in MAH 22:20.
45. Griffith, “Faith Seeking Understanding,” 40–43; Bruns, “Arius—hellenzians?” 47–52; Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God,” 202; Paul Russell, “An Anti-neo-Arian Interpolation in Ephraem of Nisibis’ Hymn 46 on Faith,” in Studia Patristica 33, ed. E. Livingstone (Louvain: Peeters, 1997), 568–72; and Russell, “Ephrem the Syrian on the Utility of Language and the Place of Silence,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 1 (2000): 26.
46. Hans Brennecke, Studien zur Geschichte der Homöer: Der Osten bis zum Ende der homöischen Reichskirche (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988).
47. Brennecke, Studien zur Geschichte der Homöer.
48. Brennecke, Studien zur Geschichte der Homöer, 2–3.
49. See Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 37–39
50. Lewis Ayres (Nicaea and Its Legacy, 138) says that, in using language of “like,” and “like according to the Scriptures,” Homoians intended a “clear subordination” of the Son to the Father. However, Brian Daley has a more positive assessment of their motivations (“The Enigma of Meletius of Antioch,” in Tradition and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church: Essays in Honor of Joseph T. Lienhard, ed. R. J. Rombs and A. Y. Hwang (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press), 128–50. It is clear that Ephrem, in avoiding language of essence, did not intend to imply subordination of the Son to the Father.
51. See Wickes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 37–39. I discuss this in detail in the following chapter.
52. The critique of paganism runs throughout the Madrashe Against Julian. The praise of Constantius appears in MAJ 3, and in MNis 21. Note also Ephrem’s critiques of the “wisdom of the Greeks” in MF 2:24 and 87:4, a criticism that may also reflect his anti-pagan zeal.
53. Christian Lange situates Ephrem in the Trinitarian debates in a slightly different way. First of all, he divides Ephrem’s Memre on Faith and Madrashe on Faith, situating the former entirely in Nisibis and the latter entirely in Edessa. He associates the Memre on Faith with the “Dedication Synod” of Antioch (341), based on Ephrem’s emphasis on the three qnômê of God, his eschewal of the ousia language of Nicaea, and a general lack of awareness of Nicaea (Lange, Portrayal of Christ, 116–17). He sees the Edessan period as signaling a new embrace of Nicaea on Ephrem’s part (based on the allusion to the Council in MAH 22:2) and, generally, a greater connection to events in Antioch (based on the apparent reference to divisions among the “Arians” in MAH 22:4). Yet, as he notes, Ephrem still does not use Nicaea’s language of homoousios in this period. He suggests that this tension—an embrace of Nicaea with a continued hesitancy toward the council’s key term—reflects Ephrem’s place in the compromise that emerged between the “homoousians” and “homoiousians” after 362. This rapprochement would give rise to the “pro-Nicene” party, among which Lange would count Ephrem. Lange therefore suggests we associate Ephrem with the homoiousian community attached to Meletius of Antioch, a commitment that also would have aligned him with Basil (Portrayal of Christ, 114–49, esp. 147–49). I am largely sympathetic to Langes conclusions. My interpretation differs in two ways. First, my interest here is in the context of Ephrem’s specific anti-investigative language. For whatever reason, Lange does not mention this aspect of Ephrem’s works in his reconstruction of Ephrem’s place in the Trinitarian controversies. Yet, when we focus specifically on this anti-investigative language—language that has as much to do with rhetoric and epistemology as it does theology—Ephrem profiles somewhat differently than when we focus on his Trinitarian doctrines (which is Langes primary approach). Second, as stated earlier, I am uneasy with Langes tendency to divide Ephrem’s works according to a strict Nisibis–Edessa chronology, and his tendency to read Ephrem as providing an unproblematic window onto events as they happened (see, for example, his interpretation of MAH 22:4; Portrayal of Christ, 147).
54. Interestingly, Ephrem never appears to draw a distinction between the world of nature and the world of technology and society. While the bulk of his natural language refers to organic and cosmic material, he seamlessly incorporates societal and technological images into this otherwise “natural” discourse. In MF 5:4, he tells us that the ordering of nature mirrors the ordering of the divine realm. Then, as an example of this natural ordering, he states: “Rank passes on rank, / all the way up to the crown.” Thus, in Ephrem’s presentation of it, royal society provides an example of an ordering that is “natural.”
55. This is not to say that Ephrem never suggests an anagogical relationship between the two. See MF 25:1–12, where nature provide positive evidence for the way God gives speech to those who wish to praise God.
56. For example, MF 5:2.
57. On Job’s use of the rhetoric of nature, see Brian R. Doak, Consider Leviathan: Narratives of Nature and the Self in Job (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). For an intriguing comparison between the view of nature reflected in Job and that reflected in 4 Ezra, see Ithamar Gruenwald, “Knowledge and Vision: Towards a Clarification of Two ‘Gnostic’ Concepts in Light of Their Alleged Origins,” Israel Oriental Studies 3 (1973): 63–107.
58. In both cases it uses an identical formula to introduce a new round of divine questioning of Job: “Gird up your loins like a warrior! I will question you (ʼašʼ elāk)! Make known to me!”
59. That is, all of these terms appear in the Bible but there is no way to make the argument that Ephrem is intentionally invoking any particular biblical passage.
60. I would like to thank Amy Alexander for suggesting this allusion to Wisdom 11:20.
61. See, for example, Proverbs 1, 9, and 10 and Sirach 3, 6, and 9. On the role of this wise man in ancient biblical interpretation, see James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9–14.
62. Bez’alel and Oho’liab are described in this way (Exod. 35:35): “He has filled them with wisdom of heart (ḥekmat lebbâ), to make everything (l-me’bad kul): working, manufacturing, crafting (ʼûmmān), and depicting, with red dye and purple and fine linen; with dyed garments and fabric (zqûrâ)—makers [who can] make anything—even conceivers of things conceived.” The first phrase that Ephrem takes from this verse, “the work of craftsmen” (bādâ d-ʼûmmānê), echoes the use of the verb ‘ûmmān and the repeated use of ‘bad. The next phrase, “fabric of the wise” (zqûrâ da-ḥkîmê) borrows the word zqûrâ, “fabric,” and the root ḥ-k-m, “to be wise,” from the opening declaration that God filled them “with wisdom of heart” (ḥekmat lebbâ). Ephrem’s reference to “calculations” (ḥûsbānê) probably derives from the final reference to “conceivers of things conceived” (metḥašbay maḥšabbātâ).
63. See also Sirach 1:3, “The height of heaven, the breadth of the earth, the abyss, and wisdom—who can investigate them?”
64. “In a scale” (b-metqālâ) does not occur in this particular hymn, but Ephrem uses it elsewhere in similar fashion (e.g., MF 12:5, 28:3, 30:1–4, and 66:4).
65. Within the Bible, draš does not seem to carry the negative connotations that Ephrem ascribes to it.
66. On the use of bṣâ to describe a positive behavior, see Deuteronomy 4:29, Sirach 6:27, and Matthew 7:7.
67. For a similar idea, see also Amos 9:3 and Zephaniah 1:12.
68. Literally, “all the rooms of the belly.”
69. In Job 10:6, Job accusingly asks God why he “investigates (‘qab) my debts and my sins, even though you know that I am innocent.”
70. Here the Peshitta of Romans 8:27 uses māš, a term Ephrem uses to denote investigation thirty-nine times and, in the negative, to denote God as “unable to be investigated” seven times.
71. The manuscript is Milan, Ambrosian Libr., MS B. 21, and the text of 4 Ezra is contained on fols. 267a -276b. See The Old Testament in Syriac According to the Peshitta Version, Part IV, fasc. 3: Apocalypse of Baruch and 4 Esdras, ed. R. J. Bidawid (Leiden: Brill 1973), ii. There is an extensive bibliography on this manuscript. Philip Forness surveys this bibliography, and argues that the manuscript was produced by a seventh-century community that was also reading and producing historical chronicles. See Forness, “Narrating History through the Bible: A Reading Community for the Old Testament Milan Bible (Ambrosian Library, B. 21 inf.),” Le Muséon 127, nos. 1–2 (2014): 41–76. On the textual history of 4 Ezra generally, see Michael E. Stone, Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra (Minneapolis Fortress Press, 1990), 1–9. Hindy Najman, in her study of 4 Ezra, privileges this Syriac manuscript. See Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 8–11. As far as I have been able to tell, no one has identified any citations of 4 Ezra in fourth-century Syriac literature, but neither has there been an exhaustive search for them. 4 Ezra is apparently quoted in Apostolic Constitutions. 2.14.9 and 8.7.6. Though the Apostolic Constitutions are later than Ephrem, they derive from the Antiochene region with which he elsewhere attests close familiarity. My aim in this section is not to investigate the presence of 4 Ezra in Syriac per se but to account for the particularity of Ephrem’s anti-investigative language. I have found 4 Ezra to be the text most helpful in suggesting a parallel to his language, a parallel that certainly existed in the fourth-century world, but which we admittedly cannot be sure that he knew.
1. See, for example, MF 35:1.
2. “Old Testament” appears in MF 56:7, and “New Testament” in MF 86:7. In MF 86:22, he refers to “the Testament of Moses.”
3. See, for example, MF 2:11.
4. The term ûrāytâ, “Torah,” only occurs once and in a context where Ephrem is speaking of the fufillment of Old Testament symbols. Nāmûsâ, “Law,” occurs more frequently, and with a wider range of meanings. It can refer generally to Jewish law, or to that part of the Old Testament that has been fulfilled in Christ, or simply to laws which everyone observes.
5. In MF 8:12, for example, it refers to a physical book.
6. There are some very good studies that do try to piece together his hermeneutics. Perhaps the best remains Sidney Griffith, Faith Adoring the Mystery: Reading the Bible with Saint Ephraem the Syrian, Pere Marquette Theology Lecture (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997). See also Nabil el-Khoury, “Hermeneutics in the Works of Ephraim the Syrian,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 229 (1984): 93–99; and Shinichi Muto, “Early Syriac Hermeneutics,” The Harp 11–12 (1998): 45–65.
7. See Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985), 46–51; Muto, “Early Syriac Hermeneutics” and Robert Murray, “The Theory of Symbolism in St. Ephrem’s Theology,” Parole de l’Orient 6–7 (1975–76): 1–20.
8. Comm. Dia. 7:22..
9. On his polemics against Jews and their “misreadings” of the Bible, see especially Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008).
10. See MAH 2:10–20.
11. Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea:The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 36–38.
12. Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1997), 30.
13. See Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 109, and Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 110.
14. “All of this smallness which is in the Books, / is fulfilled in the humanity of our Savior.” See also MF 77–79, where Ephrem address subordinationist readings of Matthew 24:36.
15. See Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy on the “Dedication” Council of Antioch (p. 117–22) and Young, Biblical Exegesis, 31. See also Hans Brennecke, Studien zur Geschichte der Homöer: Der Osten bis zum Ende der homöischen Reichskirche. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988), 2–3. On Ephrem’s suspicion of the term, see MF 52:14 and Jeffrey Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 38–39.
16. See John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2; The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 282–90 and Mark DelCogliano, Basil of Caesarea’s Anti-Eunomian Theory of Names: Christian Theology and Late-Antique Philosophy in the Fourth Century Trinitarian Controversy, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianiae 103 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
17. Note also, for example, MPar 5:7, where Ephrem admits to asking a nonbiblical question but which was answered by taking recourse to the Bible: “I enquired into this, too, / whether Paradise / was sufficient in size / for all the righteous to live there. / I asked about what was unwritten (d-lâ ktîb), / but my instruction came from what is written (b-da-ktîbān).” Cf. also MF 64:11.
18. The verb for “I should destroy” is ‘awda’, a first-person imperfect verb. Regretfully, I mistakenly took this as a third-person masculine perfect verb in my translation (see Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 323).
19. MF 64:10.
20. MF 64:12.
21. On the extent of Eunomius’s use of the Bible, see the index to Richard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius: The Extant Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). On Athanasius defense of the unscripturality of homoousios, see Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 140–44.
22. MF 65:1.
23. The decisiveness of npaq(w) in MF 65:1 can be juxtaposed with the indecisiveness of ṭāp (“to wander”) in MF 64:11. In the latter instance, Ephrem highlights those who simply wander aimlessly after errant ideas. In the former, Ephrem depicts his opponents as very decisively choosing errant ideas.
24. See also MF 53:2: “Women fall upon women, / men upon their friends, and priests upon kings.” See also SF 6:9: “Since priests have fallen into debating, look: kings are thrown into war. / War outside [of the church] has vanished, for war inside is so strong.”
25. See Sidney Griffith, “Ephraem, the Deacon of Edessa, and the Church of the Empire,” in Diakonia: Studies in Honor of Robert T. Meyer, ed. T. Halton (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 34; Andrew Palmer takes this even further and suggests that the last three stanzas of MF 87 “can be read as a tactful appeal to Valens” (“The Prophet and the King: Mår Afrem’s Message to the Eastern Roman Emperor,” in After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour of Professor Han J. W. Drijvers, ed. G.J. Reinink and A.C. Klugkist, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 89 [Louvain: Peeters, 1999], 213). Edmund Beck takes MNis 26–30 in reference to this same period (Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Carmina Nisibena, CSCO 218 [Louvain: Secrétariat de CorpusSCO, 1961], iv). But in his commentary on MF 87:21, he sees this passage simply as representing a general aspect of Ephrem’s response to the Trinitarian controversies (see Beck, Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide, CSCO 155 [Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1955], 231 n. 21. Christian Lange does not address this passage, but, like Beck’s reading of MF 87:21, takes SF 6:9 in a general sense (The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, CSCO Subsidia 616 [Louvain: Peeters, 2005], 116). On Valens role in Edessa, Emanuel Fiano reminds us, “The extent and general significance of Valens’ intervention in ecclesial matters is debated, and it is hard to establish what exactly it might have meant for Edessa” (“The Trinitarian Controversies in Fourth-Century Edessa,” Le Muséon 128 [2015]: 100).
26. Literarily, this is similar to Ephrem’s use of the Bible in MF 53. At MF 53:4 he first alludes to Deuteronomy 19:15, but he does not actually quote it until 53:8.
27. See MF 10:7.
28. See MF 12:10, 32:2–3, and 80:6.
29. Regarding Ephrem’s Eucharistie theology, Joseph Amar says that Ephrem utilizes a “flexible and often complex exchange of images” that allow “the Eucharist to be viewed from seemingly paradoxical vantage points simultaneously” (“Perspectives on the Eucharist in Ephrem the Syrian,” Worship 61 [1987]: 445). On Ephrem’s view of the Eucharist generally, see Pierre Youssif, L’Eucharistie chez Saint Ephrem de Nisibe,Orientalia Christiana Analecta 224 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientale, 1984).
30. In articulating a specific link between the Bible and the natural world, Ephrem is also making a subtle critique of his opponents’ habits of reading. In his MAH 16:3–8, Ephrem insists upon the inherent order of the natural world and critiques those, such as “Manichees,” who read the world’s disorder as providing evidence for a duality of divine beings. This is a critique that would have resonated strongly with Ephrem’s opponents, who undoubtedly would have shared Ephrem’s critique of “Manichees.” Ephrem draws upon this shared idea to critique his opponents’ reading practices. By connecting subordinationist readings of the Bible with Manichean readings of nature, Ephrem argues that his own anti-subordinationist reading of the Bible is as obvious as his subordinationist opponents’ reading of the natural world. If they can “read” the world as good, in spite of evidence to the contrary, should they not be able to read the Bible as evidencing the divinity of the Son, in spite of passages that seem to suggest his subordination?
31. Instead of the “your feet” (reglaykôn), as it appears in Ezekiel 34:19, Ephrem supplies “your heels” (‘eqbayhôn), which suggests a pun with ‘ûqqābâ, “discussion.”
32. Christine Shepardson has extensively treated the anti-Jewish aspects of Ephrem’s use of biblical villains in Anti-Judaism and Christianity Orthodoxy and ‘“Exchanging Reed for Reed’: Mapping Contemporary Heretics onto Biblical Jews in Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 5, no. 1 (2002): 15–33. Shepardson argues that in his anti-subordinationist writings, Ephrem presents New Testament villains as “proto-Arians.” He does this not by identifying them as “Arians” outright (a term he uses only once), but by constructing a particular anti-Arian lexicon—the lexicon of investigation—and using it to describe New Testament villains. By using this anti-subordinationist language to describe them, Ephrem’s “maps” contemporary Arians onto the biblical antagonists of Christ, becoming literarily constructed “proto-Arians.”
33. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy, esp. chs. three and four.
34. See MF 39:4, 41:7, and 44:9. On this, see Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy, 116–17.
35. The term b‘el dînâ does appear in Matthew 5:25 and Luke 12:58, but Ephrem does not seem to be taking it from there. For the more general characterization, see Matthew 22:15 and Luke 11:53.
36. Ephrem nearly quotes the Peshitta, only making changes for metrical reasons:
MF 54:10: ‘aykan mṣâ hānâ /pagreh d-nettel lan
John 6:52: ‘akannâ meškaḥ hānâ pagreh d-nettel lan l-mêkal
37. See Edmund Beck, Die Theologie des hl Ephraem in seinen Hymnen über den Glauben, Studia Anselmania 21 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum S. Anselmi, 1949), 62–80; T. Koonammakkal, The Theology of Divine Names in the Genuine Works of Ephrem, Mōrān Ethō 40 (Kerala, India: SEERI, 2015), 73–74; Ute Possekel, “Ephrem’s Doctrine of God,” in God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G. Patterson, ed. Andrew B. McGowan, B. E. Daley, and T. J. Gaden (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 212–16; and Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 36–37.
38. Muto, “Early Syriac Hermeneutics,” 47. Sebastian Brock suggests a similar idea in St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 45 and Luminous Eye, 60–64. See also MF 25:18: “Run, my brothers, and collect all the images with us! / Look how many there are for our mouths to depict! / Come and take delight in our discoveries!”
39. There is an extensive literature treating Ephrem’s understanding of names. Much of the literature has focused on lending coherence to Ephrem’s theory of names, tracing the relationship between his theory of names and his theory of symbols, and situating both within a literary and historical context. Robert Murray’s classic article, “The Theory of Symbolism in St Ephrem’s Theology” (Parole de l’Orient 6–7 [1975–76]: 1–20) still offers the most succinct orientation to these issues. Murray organizes Ephrem’s use of symbols in three ways—symbols (or “types”) that come from the Bible, those that come from nature, and their cohesion in his overall sacramental theology Recently, Thomas Koonammakkal has exhaustively catalogued Ephrem’s references to divine names and situated this within Ephrem’s broader theology of the “chasm” between Creator and created and the divine descent into created language (Theology of Divine Names). In a more specific study, Corrie Molenberg (“An Invincible Weapon: Names in the Christological Passages in Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith XIX-LXV,” in Symposium Syriacum V, 1998, ed. René Lavenant, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 236 [Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1999], 136) offers some historical antecedents for Ephrem’s theories of names, noting parallels to Plato’s Cratylus, Albinos’s Didaskalion, and the Stoics. Edmund Beck, too, notes parallels with Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Clement of Alexandria (on Gregory, see Die Theologie, 66 n. 1 and 77 n. 5; on Gregory, Basil, and Clement, see Ephräms des Syrers: Psychologie und Erkenntnislehre, CSCO Subsidia 58 [Leuven: Peeters, 1980], 105–17). Tanios Bou Mansour (La pensée symbolique de Saint Ephrem le Syrien [Kaslik, Liban: Université Saint-Esprit, 1988], 160) distinguishes Ephrem generally from “la théologie cappadocienne.” My own attempt to enter into these debates can be found in Wiekes, “Mapping the Literary Landscape of Ephrem’s Theology of Divine Names” (Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69 [2015]: 1–13), where I point to parallels in the Gospel of Philip, Aphrahat, Aetius, and Eunomius. The following develops some of the material that first appeared there.
40. Here I am sympathetic to the approach of Kees den Biesen, Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 91–99, who suggests similarly that we cannot distinguish Ephrem’s literary medium—poetry—from the theology that he articulates in that medium. The two are mutually informing. My argument here is that we cannot separate Ephrem’s view of the Bible’s language from his own poetic use of that language.
41. Brock, Luminous Eye, 10–11; Koonammakkal, Theology of Divine Names, 51–72.
42. Kathleen E. McVey, “Ephrem the Syrian,” in The Early Christian World, Volume II, ed. P.E. Esler (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1228–1250; Murray, “Theory of Symbolism,” 5–7.
43. MVir 20:12 (Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Virginitate, CSCO 223 [Louvain, 1962], 70–71). See also MVir 29:1, where Ephrem says that nature witnesses to the “two harps” of the Old and New Testament.
44. MPar 5:2: “Moses wrote (ktab) the creation of nature into his book [i.e., Genesis], / so that both nature and the book would witness to the Creator” (Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und Contra Julianum, CSCO 174/175, SS 78/79 [Louvain: Secrétariat de CorpusSCO, 1957]).
45. McVey, “Ephrem the Syrian,” 1241–46; Murray, “Theory of Symbolism,” 5–7.
46. On Ephrem’s theological reading of the olive, see MVir 4–7. McVey, “Ephrem the Syrian,” 1243–46.
47. Murray, “Theory of Symbolism,” 5.
48. Ephrem, Comm. Gen., prologue, 2 (translation in Joseph Amar and Edward G. Mathews, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works, Fathers of the Church 91 [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994], 67–68). On this reading of the origins of the Bible, see also Lukas Van Rompay, “The Christian Syriac Tradition of Interpretation,” In Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300), ed. M. Saebø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996), 623.
49. Ephrem presents this process as beginning after the Tower of Babel and accelerating once the Israelites were in Egypt (Amar and Mathews, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 67).
50. MPar 5:2 (quoted above) can be taken to evidence Ephrem’s belief in a dual process of revelation, in which God concurrently reveals himself in the Bible and in nature. Through these two sources, in turn, humanity can acquire divine knowledge. Certainly, this reflects Ephrem’s use of biblical and natural material. But Ephrem’s account in the Commentary on Genesis suggests a slightly different way of reading MPar 5:2, one which calls the symmetry of Bible and nature into question. Note the first two lines of MPar 5:2: it is because Moses has inscribed creation—has written it into his book—that Ephrem and his audience can then locate in it symbols of the Creator. Ephrem’s “nature” must first be located in a book, before it can be found in the world.
51. Specifically, the “true” names of which we will speak below.
52. Young builds her argument by drawing on a paradigm constructed by Northrop Frye, who suggested two phases in the historical development of language. According to Frye, the first stage is marked by a view of language in which linguistic signs exhaustively convey that to which they point—sign and signified are completely merged. Frye suggests a second view according to which signs still accurately convey the thing to which they point, but nevertheless stand distinct from it as a metonym. Young, without necessarily endorsing Frye’s historical schema, argues that it provides a helpful heuristic for thinking through Ephrem’s understanding of language, in which he can be seen to stand at a point between the two “historical” stages. See Young, Biblical Exegesis, 140–52. Young draws on Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1981), esp. 3–30.
53. Young’s interpretation is similar to that articulated by Sebastian Brock, who suggests that, in the ancient world, “a symbol actually participates in some sense with the reality it symbolizes, whereas for most people today the term symbol’ tends to imply something essentially different from the thing it symbolizes” (Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 42).
54. MF 22:6; 29:3; 44:2; 46:4; 61:14; 62:11; 63:1; and 63:10.
55. MF 53:13 and 62:12.
56. MF 44:2–3.
57. MF 44:3.
58. See MF 53:13.
59. MF 22:7; 44:2; 46:4,12; 52:2; 62:7,13; and 63:10.
60. MF 44:2.
61. MF 63:10. See, though, 63:6, where kûnāyâ and šmâ are synonymous. As far as I know, no one has suggested an origin for Ephrem’s use of the term šʼîlâ (“borrowed”) to denote human names applied to God. Given Ephrem’s abundant use of economic metaphors in other contexts of theology, it seems to me likely that this term has an economic resonance. As we will see in the following chapter, Ephrem emphasizes God’s condescension to humanity in economic terms, depicting him as poor and a beggar. Connected to this, then, would be the idea that God “borrows” human names, mimicking human need, to make himself comprehensible to humanity.
62. Within the Christian tradition, the classical exposition of this can be found in Origen’s On First Principles, bk. 4. Stephen D. Benin (The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought [Albany: State University of New York, 1993], esp. chs 1–3 and 5–6) surveys the development of an accommodationist theology from Justin through the Rabbis. Though he does address Ephrem, he deals there only with what he calls the “negative” side of accommodation, namely, the idea that the Jewish law arose in order to accommodate Jewish propensity toward disobedience. For this notion in Philo, see M. Tzvi Novick, “Perspective, Paideia, and Accommodation in Philo,” The Studia Philonica Annual 21 (2009): esp. 55–60.
63. The place of accommodation within Rabbinic thought is outside the scope of this book, but there are interesting parallels between Ephrem’s understanding of accommodation and that attested in Rabbinic sources. See Benin, Footprints, 129–131.
64. Interestingly, Ephrem only uses the language of borrowing when addressing anthropomorphisms. When addressing language which is obviously metaphorical, or which is simply not offensive, his tone is much less defensive (see, e.g., MF 62:3).
65. The term ‘bādâ refers in its basic sense to the process of making. Michael Sokoloff notes that it can also come to refer to the thing that has been made, that is, meaning, inter alia, “thing,” or “creature” (LS 1060). I have taken it in this passage in the latter sense.
66. Here we find an instance in which kûnāyâ (“name” or “title”) is clearly used to denote “true” names and is synonymous with šmâ. As for Ephrem’s statement that “Moses and Joshua” put on the Lord’s names, the names “Jesus” and “Joshua” are, of course, identical in Syriac. The reference to Moses probably has Exodus 4:16 in mind, where the Lord tells Moses that he will be Aaron’s “God.”
67. On this line, see Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 83 n. 19.
68. In MF 26:5, Ephrem likens God to the sun, and the Bible to its far dimmer rays. Just as humans cannot look upon the sun but only observe things illumined by it, neither can humans look upon, or speak about, God. Rather, God is manifest through the dim language of the Bible.
69. Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian, 49. See also Muto, “Early Syriac Hermeneutics,” 45–47.
70. On this metaphor, see also Brock, Luminous Eye, 42–43.
71. Elsewhere, he will merge the two, shifting seamlessly between God’s two “bodies.” See, for example, MF 31:1–3, where he uses “names” (šmāhê), “form” (ʼeskimâ), and “images” (demwātâ) interchangeably.
72. In MF 63:8, he references the same idea, but in a way that suggests that he has the Isaian passage in mind: “And though they walk around, he called himself ‘wearied.’” This would make no sense as an allusion to John 4:6, where Jesus himself is walking around.
73. Genesis 6:6; Numers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:11, 29; 35; and 2 Samuel 24:16.
74. Two of the classic articles on Ephrem’s theology of names did not treat this aspect of Ephrem’s thought: David Bundy, “Language and the Knowledge of God in Ephrem Syrus,” The Patristic and Byzantine Review 5, no. 2 (1986): 91–103 and Murray, “Theory of Symbolism,” 1–20. Sebastian Brock does not address the distinction in St. Ephrem the Syrian, but in Luminous Eye, 62–64, he offers a thorough treatment of the idea.
75. Ephrem here evokes the divine name of Exodus 3:14. On the importance of the divine name for Ephrem, see Koonammakkal, Theology of Divine Names, 194–206.
76. The “crucibles” are Bible and nature.
77. For example, in Ephrem’s MAJ 2:24, he refers to the Roman-Persian war as a crucible, testing the strength of one’s faith.
78. See esp Athanasius’s Orations against the Arians 1:2–34 (K. Metzler and K. Savvidis, eds., Athanasius Werke, vol. 1, pt. 1, fasc. 2 [W. de Gruyter: Berlin and New York, 1998]).
79. On Ephrem’s conception of the elements of the universe, see Ute Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO Subsidia 580 [Louvain: Peeters, 1999], 99–103.
80. As far as I have been able to tell, the only linguistic overlap between the two involves Ephrem’s use of the noun ‘ûdrānâ, “benefit, aid,” or “help.” The latter term appears in Ephrem, for the most part, in two guises. Predominantly, Ephrem describes the incarnation as having been undertaken for human “benefit.” Occasionally, however, Ephrem applies this same word to his own madrashe, typically within petitions for inspiration. Thus, for example, the very first hymn ends with Ephrem petitioning God, “May I learn beneficial speech.” Ephrem’s poems, then, continue the therapeutic process which the Bible begins.
1. I take the concept of “framing devices” from Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, rev. ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 160–61.
2. On his potential Christian upbringing, see MAH 26:10 “In the way of truth was I born, even if my childishness did not recognize [it],” and MVir 37:10, “Your truth was in my youth; your truth is in my old age.” And on his diaconate, see MAH 56:10, “O Lord, let the labors of your herdsman (‘allānâ) not be despised.” But these statements are difficult to classify biographically. In addition to their metaphoric language (does “herdsman” refer specifically to a diaconal office?), they each could be interpreted in a variety of ways. See Jeffrey Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 8–12.
3. Ruth Webb criticizes the way we tend to read poetry as more “personal” and “sincere,” whereas with genres such as rhetoric we are willing to assume an artistically crafted persona (“Poetry and Rhetoric” in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 B.C.-A.D. 400, ed. S. Porter [Leiden: Brill, 1997], 339–40). But as Webb notes, in classical antiquity, both poetry and rhetoric were “rhetorical” in that they are directed toward an audience. I would argue something similar is at work in the way scholars tend to focus on Ephrem’s first-person statements only insofar as they are thought to reveal something about his biography.
4. As Carol Newsom has articulated it with respect to the Qumran community, “subjectivity, no matter how natural it feels to an individual, is not natural but rather belongs to the sphere of the symbolic. It is a matter of representation” (The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran [Leiden: Brill, 2004], 192). This is to say that Ephrem’s “I” does not represent the historical “Ephrem,” but a voice that emerges specifically within the symbolic space of the hymn. Using the language of Wayne Booth, we can think of Ephrem’s “I” as representing the poems’ narrator, whereas the implied author would represent that unnamed “self” that emerges subtly from this collection as a whole. See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 67–86.
5. On prosōpopoia in Syriac literature, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 1 (2001): 105–31. Also helpful is J. A. Harrill, “Paul and the Slave Self,” in Religion and the Self in Antiquity, ed. D. Brakke, M. L. Satlow, and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington, 2005), 51–69. Harrill bases his study of Paul on a classic article by Krister Stendahl (“The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 199–215), which notes that the guilty conscience that speaks in Romans 7:7–25 is remarkably out of sync with other autobiographical statements within the Pauline corpus. On this basis of this insight, Harrill argues that we should view the “I” of Romans 7 as a fictional “I”—representative of a character Paul has constructed to make an argument. While Ephrem’s “I” is as literarily constructed as Paul’s, I would argue that it is nevertheless remarkably in sync with the rest of his corpus. Just as the Madrashe on Faith asks questions about faith, presumptuous debate, and the limits of speech and the knowledge of God, the self that speaks within these hymns is one always poised on the brink of saying too much but finally withdrawing into appropriate silence, or simply confessing his sin of wordiness.
6. Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 29–65. Sarah Gador-Whyte calls this processs “auto-ethopoeia” (“Self-Construction: ‘Auto-Ethopoeia’ in Romanos‘ Kontakia,” Cultural (Re)constructions, Melbourne Historical Journal 39, no. 2, special issue (2011): 23–37.
7. F. Cassingena-Trevedy, “Les ‘confessions’ poétiques d’Éphrem de Nisibe,” Le Muséon 121, nos. 1–2 (2008): 11–63, offers a helpful cataloguing of Ephrem’s first-person references.
8. While there is no extensive treatment of Ephrem’s economic language, several scholars have noted its existence in particular contexts. Gary Anderson reads Ephrem’s economic language as of a piece with a wider tendency of Aramaic language to conceive of sin and righteousness in economic terms (Sin: A History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010], 152–60]). Sidney Griffith notes the preponderance of economic metaphors in the Madrashe on Julian Saba, and attributes this to the centrality of trade to Edessan life (“Julian Saba, ‘Father of the Monks’ of Syria,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2, no. 2 [1994]: 213–14). Andrew Hayes offers a close study of the economic language of the Madrashe on Abraham Qidunaya in Icons of the Heavenly Merchant: Ephrem and Pseudo-Ephrem in the Madrashe in Praise of Abraham of Qidun (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016), 89–105 and 114–17. Blake Hartung connects the language to Ephrem’s conception of sin and death, and suggests that the economic language reflects broader Mediterranean ways of envisioning the divine-human relationship in terms of patron and benefactor (“ ‘Stories of the Cross’: Ephrem and His Exegesis in Fourth-Century Mesopotamia” [PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 2017], 142–52).
9. On the incarnation as the piece that holds all of Ephrem’s theology together, see Kathleen E. McVey, “Ephrem the Syrian,” in The Early Christian World, Volume II, ed. P. E. Esler (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1233–37.
10. This term occurs in a variety of contexts throughout the Madrashe on Faith. I note here only the passages where Ephrem uses it in conjunction with first-person speech: MF 5:20; 10:1, 22; 25:1, 2, 3, 4, 12; 16:2; 25:16, 17.
11. Passages where it occurs in conjunction with first-person speech: MF 10:22; 16:3, 5; 25:2; 32:2, 3; 38:4, 20.
12. In conjunction with first-person speech: MF 6:3; 25:2; 32:3.
13. In conjunction with first-person speech: MF 5:20, 16:4, 38:20. A huge lexicon develops based on the centrality of the metaphor of “treasure.” Thus, he refers to the “key” which opens the Lord’s treasure (‘aqlîdâ, 25:2), “to steal” (i.e., from the treasure) (gnab, 16:5), “debt” (gu‘lānâ, 10:22; 16:3), “to lend” (‘awzep, 5:20), “money” (kespâ, 25:16, 17), “to grow rich” (‘tar), “wealth” (neksê, 25:16), “to repay” (pra’, 25:16; 38:20), “capital” (qarnâ, 38:4), “interest” (rebîtâ) (38:4), “coffers” (sîmātâ, 16:3, 25:2, 38:4), “to borrow” (šʼel, 16:4), “commerce” (taggûrtâ, 25:17), and “merchant” (taggārâ, 25:17; 38:3). In addition to these obviously economic terms, he uses some that are not primarily economic, but have economic resonances in some contexts, namely, “to increase” (ʼawsep, 16:4), “profit” (yûtrānâ, 25:16), “plate (of abalance)” (kappâ, 38:8), “scale” (massattâ, 38:8), “to return” (pnî, 10:22, 16:3), “to open” (ptaḥ, 25:2), “to empty” (sraḥ, 25:2), and “to suffer damage” (ʼatekk, 38:3).
14. Ephrem writes, “Give thanks to the One who brought a blessing / and received from us prayer. / Since the Venerable One came down to us, / he has made worship ascend from us. / Since he gave divinity to us, / we have given humanity to him. / As he brought a promise to us, / we have given faith to him—/ that of Abraham, his friend. / Since we lent him alms, / Let us demand it hack again (MF 5:17, emphasis mine). See Anderson, Sin, 155.
15. Anderson, Sin, 155 (emphasis mine).
16. Most notably, MAQ 1:6.
17. Psalm 81:11.
18. On the development of this idea in antiquity, see Anderson, Sin, 135–51.
19. The authenticity of these hymns has been debated. Andrew Hayes has recently argued convincingly that at least the first five hymns are authentic (Icons of the Heavenly Merchant, 29–67). On the particular madrasha cited here, see also Anderson, Sin, 157–58 and Hayes, Icons of the Heavenly Merchant, 94–96.
20. The derived word ‘îzeptâ means “loan” or “debt.”
21. See MF 23 and 58.
22. Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 94–109.
23. See also MF 16:3, “Your treasure is sweet, and we are your guard.”
24. Luke 19:2–10.
25. Gary Anderson argues that alongside the emergence of a notion of sin as “debt” there develops the notion of “credit” as virtue, and as particular people as capable of embodying such virtue (Sin, 135–37). Zacchaeus clearly represents this idea of the holy man: his sin is of a particularly economic kind, but so is his redemption, worked out through giving his goods to the poor.
26. I am grateful to Carl Griffin for pointing out to me that this reading of Zacchaeus is strikingly unique even within Ephrem’s corpus. He shows this by comparison with the portrait of Zacchaeus in Cyrillona. See his “Cyrillona’s On Zacchaeus,” in Bountiful Harvest: Essays in Honor of S. Kent Brown, ed. A. C. Skinner, D. M. David, and C. Griffin (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2011), 175–203.
27. In the Commentary on the Diatessaron, the Zacchaeus narrative is followed by the narrative of the blind man from Jericho (Luke 18:35–43) (Comm. Dia. 15:20). The parable of the talents is only alluded to in the Commentary on the Diatessaron.
28. The noun which translates “merchants” is taggārê. It does not appear in the parable of the talents. (Luke 19:13 refers to ‘abê, “servants”) In fact, according to George Kiraz’s Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1997), taggārâ appears only once in the New Testament, in the parable of the “pearl of great price” (Matt. 13:45ff). But note also MF 54:7, in which Ephrem unambiguously refers to this parable and uses the same term, “merchants.”
29. The connection to audience is made even more explicit, albeit without economic language, in MF 25:19, where Ephrem states, “Dough is unable, without the gift / of leaven, to share its tastes.” Here, Ephrem’s mundane speech is the dough which, when combined with the “leaven” of divine inspiration, can become bread for his audience.
30. On this metaphor, see Andrew Palmer, “ ‘A Lyre without a Voice’: The Poetics and the Politics of Ephrem the Syrian,” Aram 5, nos. 1–2 (1993): 371–99.
31. Palmer, “Lyre without a Voice,” offers a helpful summary of the various attestations of the metaphor prior to Ephrem. Especially interesting is the attestation of an Edessene Mosaic, datable to 228 A.D., in which Orpheus holds a lyre (Palmer, “Lyre Without a Voice,” 392). There is also the well-known passage in Odes of Solomon 6:1–2 (albeit using qîtārâ), in which the Odist writes, “As the [wind] moves through the harp (qîtārâ) / and the strings speak, / so the Spirit of the Lord speaks through my members, / and I speak through his love.” It is noteworthy that whereas the Odist retains the distance between himself and the “lyre” (suggesting through the use of “as” that it is only a metaphor), Ephrem collapses this distance, and refers to himself simply as “lyre.”
32. Sidney Griffith, “St. Ephraem, Bar Dayṣān and the Clash of Madrāshê in Aram: Readings in St. Ephraems Hymni contra Haereses,” The Harp 21 (2006): 455.
33. On Greek polemics against musical instruments, see James McKinnon, The Temple, the Church Fathers, and the Early Western Chant (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998); Egon Wellesz, “Words and Music in Byzantine Liturgy,” Music Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1947): 297–310; Johannes Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Washington, DC: National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983); and J. A. Smith, Music in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
34. In only one place does Ephrem anchor his presentation of David as hymnic exemplar in a specific biblical passage: “Thus, do not sing to God in a disordered way, / instead of [singing] praise, lest you go astray and sing wickedness. / Sing like David to the Son of David / and call Him ‘Lord’ and ‘Son,’ like David” (MF 23:11). This passage cites Psalms 110:1 as evidencing the kind of ordered hymnody that the Madrashe on Faith aim to promote. On the presence of “lyre” in the Bible, Palmer notes that the term appears forty-one times in the Hebrew Bible (“Lyre without a Voice,” 373–74). In Ephrem’s corpus more broadly the term can be used flexibly in connection with a range of figures. In MF 51:5, Ephrem refers to the “lyres” of the angels. Outside the Madrashe on Faith he also depicts Adam, Moses, Mary, and the prophets as playing a lyre. On this, see Palmer, “Lyre Without a Voice,” as well as Robert Morehouse, “Dueling Lyres: Prophets and Heretics as Instruments in Ephraem of Nisibis” (unpublished paper, delivered at SBL 2011). I am grateful to Robert Morehouse for sharing with me a copy of this paper.
35. MAH 53:6: “[Bardaisan] wanted to look to David—to be clothed in his beauty, / to be praised like him. / He too composed one hundred and fifty / psalms. My brothers, he abandoned [David’s] truth/ And imitated [only] his number. David never sang / the songs of the deniers. Their lyre lies….” On this passage, see Griffith, “St. Ephraem, Bar Dayṣān, and the Clash of Madrāšê,” and Kathleen E. McVey, “Were the Earliest Madrāšē Songs or Recitations?” in After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour of Professor Han J. W. Drijvers, ed. G. J. Reinink and A. C. Klugkist, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 89 [Louvain: Peeters, 1999], 185–99.
36. See Psalms 110:1; Matthew 22:44; Acts 2:34
37. Cf. Psalm 2:7
38. On this issue of instrumentality, see Morehouse, “Dueling Lyres.”
39. See MF 25:1, quoted above.
40. As we noted in chapter one, there is no way to be certain whether these specific refrains reflect later tradition or go back to the time of Ephrem. But it is certainly the case that there was some refrain in his time.
41. The previous stanza, MF 23:7, makes it clear that he still speaks to the lyre. The first line reads: “For you, lyre, are living and speech-endowed!”
42. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 160.
43. He offers an English translation in Brock, A Hymn on the Eucharist (Hymns on Faith, no. 10) (Lancaster: J. F. Coakley, 1986). See also Robert Murray’s translation, “A Hymn of St Ephrem to Christ on the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, and the Sacraments,” Eastern Churches Review 3, no. 2 (1970): 142–50. An earlier version of the material that follows can be found in Jeffrey Wickes, “The Poetics of Self-Presentation in Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Faith 10,” in Syriac Encounters: Papers presented at the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium, 2011, ed. Maria Doerfler, Emanuel Fiano, and Kyle Smith (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 51–63.
44. Matthew 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30. The story is only alluded to in Comm. Dia. 11:27. See also MPar 5:15, where Ephrem uses this same narrative to refer to himself.
45. In 10:2, Ephrem indeed protests: “To the lowest step I draw near, though I presume.”
46. On these polarities in Ephrem’s thought, see Phillipus Botha, “Antithesis and Argument in the Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies 44 (1988): 581–95 and Botha, “The Structure and Function of Paradox in the Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian,” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 68 (1990): 50–62. See also Kees den Biesen, Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 51–62.
47. The verb Ephrem uses for “to declare” (ʼešta’‘î) is the same verb used in Isaiah 53:8, “Who shall declare his generation?” In MF 5:2 Ephrem takes this to refer to the Son’s generation, and he assumes the question is rhetorical—that no one can declare his generation. Arguably he here echoes the verse, but it is the Son’s body—the locus of what is revealed—that he declares, rather than his divine generation.
48. Similar stories are found in Matthew 6:6–13, Mark 14:3–9, and John 12:1–8, but only the Lukan version identifies the woman as ḥaṭṭîtâ. On the sinful woman in Syriac literature, see Scott F. Johnson, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Sinful Woman, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 33 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 1–24 and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Why the Perfume Mattered: The Sinful Woman in Syriac Exegetical Tradition,” in In Dominico Eloquio / In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, ed. P. Blowers et al. (Grand Rapids., MI: Eerdman’s, 2002), 69–89.
49. There are versions preserved in Mark 5:25–34 and Luke 8:43–48. The story appears as well in Comm. Dia. 7:1–2. There is nothing in the present allusion to suggest that Ephrem drew on one particular biblical version (and this portion of the Commentary on the Diatessaron is preserved only in Armenian). Note that the Peshitta of Mark and Luke use different terms for garment than Ephrem (Mark uses Ibûšâ and Luke, mānâ), but Ephrem’s term—naḥtâ—is paralleled in Codex Curetonianus.
50. This is a compelling notion when connected to Shinichi Muto’s idea (“Interpretation in the Greek Antiochenes,” 219) that, while Ephrem has no term parallel to the English term “meaning,” ḥaylâ (“power”) carries a very similar sense. Reading Luke in Ephremic terms, we can see this moment (when, at the woman’s touch, Christ’s power goes out from him) as a hermeneutic moment: Ephrem, reading the narrative of Christ giving his power to this woman, similarly takes this divine power / meaning (ḥaylâ), mediated through the text, and performed before an audience.
51. MVir 16:2, 33:1–2; MAH 40:14, 47:3; MChurch 39:5–6; 41:14; MAQ 5:28; MEpi 3:22; MNat 4:8, 4:92. The story of the wedding at Cana appears in Comm. Dia. 5:1–12.
52. In MAH 40:14, he uses the narrative to distinguish Christian speech from pagan song. In MAH 47:3, he reads the narrative as indicating Christ’s approval of marriage and suggests that the wine poured into different cups at the wedding symbolizes the divided speech of the Marcionites. Finally, in MAQ 5:28, in a move almost identical to what we see in MF 14, he reads the transformed water as a symbol for his own hymnic speech.
53. Metrically, while meštûtâ does carry one more syllable than ḥlûlâ, Ephrem’s addition of the preposition l- to ḥlûlâ means that it is also vocalized with three syllables (la-ḥlûlâ), and thus this substitution cannot be explained metrically.
54. “…The bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast” (bêt ḥlûlâ).
55. On a more general level, Ephrem favors marital imagery when speaking of heaven. See MF 4:8 and 11:18. See also Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985), 94–97.
1. The first two lines of the collection speak clearly to an audience: “In place of that all-vivifying sign which the Teacher-of-all has set before us, / This presumptuous generation of ours has established a new faith.”
2. He refers to “my brothers” at 24:7, 25:18, 26:5, 28:6, 38:8, 38:16, 52:14, 59:1, 63:11, 65:6, 79:11, and 81:1. “My son” appears at 21:4, 22:2, 6, 23:6, 39:1, 46:2, 55:1, 9, 63:1, 79:1. Once (55:9) he refers to “my beloved” (plural). His questions and commands appear on almost every page. An example of a question: “How do you presume to meditate upon the birth of that Knower-of-all” (MF 1:16:2)? An example of a command: “Do not honor what is holy / in a way not commanded you” (MF 8:11:1–2)!
3. The role of the audience in early Christian homilies has increasingly become a topic of focus for scholars. Ramsay MacMullen has argued that homilies were attended and understood primarily by elite males (“The Preacher and his Audience [AD 350–400],” Journal of Theological Studies 40 [1989]: 503–11). Wendy Mayer has granted MacMullen’s position as a plausible reading of John Chrysostom’s homiletic material but warns against making a simplistic move from the rhetoric of the homilies to the reality that lies behind them. See Mayer, “Female Participation and the Late Fourth-Century Preacher’s Audience,” Augustinianum 39 (1999): 139–47 and “Who Came to Hear John Chrysostom Preach? Recovering a Late Fourth-Century Preacher’s Audience,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 76, no. 1 (2000): 73–87. See also the essays collected in Mary Cunningham and Pauline Allen, eds., Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998). In a Syriac context, Philip Forness has applied these discussions of audience and homily to Jacob of Sarug, but argues that, because the memre lack much in the way of audience cues, it makes more sense to analyze the audiences implied by their transmission (see Forness, “Preaching and Religious Debate: Jacob of Serugh and the Promotion of his Christology in the Roman Near East” [PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2016]). These reflections are helpful in thinking through Ephrem’s audience and performative context, but only to a point. Unlike Chrysostom, we know little about the geographic and physical spaces in which Ephrem performed his madrashe. Regarding gender, we have, in the case of Ephrem, the unique testimony to the madrashe’s performance by women. And unlike Jacob, Ephrem’s madrashe do suggest a live audience, both in the presence of refrains and in the madrashe’s continued reference to that audience. Nevertheless, Aaron Butts has recently shown the fruit that a study of the manuscripts of Ephrem’s madrashe can yield in regards to later audiences (“Manuscript Transmission as Reception History: The Case of Ephrem the Syrian [d. 373],” Journal of Early Christian Studies 25, no. 2 [Summer 2017]: 281–306).
4. Note the similar phenomenon that Laura Lieber observes in piyyut. The piyyut, she argues, collapses the distance between the figures depicted in the biblical text and the audience: “the biblical stories become experiences rather than narration, events that the listeners witness through the power of poetic rhetoric” (Lieber, “The Rhetoric of Participation: Experiential Elements of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” Journal of Religion 90 [2010]: 146).
5. Georgia Frank has also sought ways to find the “audiences” of late antique poetry. She has analyzed the way sensory language in Romanos’s kontakia enabled the audience to find themselves in New Testament texts. See Frank, “Romanos and the Night Vigil in the Sixth Century,” in A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 3: Byzantine Christianity, ed. D. Krueger (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 59–78.
6. Carmen Maier has studied a similar phenomenon in Ephrem’s MPar and MUnlB. See Maier, “Poetry as Exegesis: Ephrem the Syrian’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation Especially as Seen in His Hymns on Paradise and Hymns on Unleavened Bread” (PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2012), 148–235.
7. Edmund Beck, Ephräms des Syrers: Psychologie und Erkenntnislehre, CSCO Subsidia 58 (Leuven: Peeters, 1980), 135–47.
8. Sidney Griffith, “The Image of the Image Maker in the Poetry of St. Ephraem the Syrian,” in Studia Patristica 25 (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 258–69.
9. Griffith, “Image of the Image Maker,” 269.
10. Ute Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO Subsidia 580 (Louvain: Peeters, 1999), 205–29.
11. It often repeats in single stanzas.
12. On this lexicon, see the introduction.
13. Nor in the fourth century is this unique to Ephrem. Georgia Frank notes the preponderance of visual metaphors in John Chrysostom: “The Image in Tandem: Painting Metaphors and Moral Discourse in Late Antique Christianity,” in The Subjective Eye: Essays in Culture, Religion, and Gender in Honor of Margaret R. Miles, ed. R. Valantasis (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006), 39–43. See also Frank, “Death in the Flesh: Picturing Death’s Abode in Late Antiquity,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. C. Hourihane (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 58–74. On exegesis as portraiture in Chrysostom’s reading of Paul, and in Pauline interpretation more generally, see Margaret Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), esp. 409–23.
14. Mitchell, Heavenly Trumpet, 267–68. The passage appears in Ephrem’s “Fifth Discourse to Hypatius” (C. W. Mitchell, St. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, vol. 1: The Discourses Addressed to Hypatius, Text and Translation Society 7a [London: Williams and Norgate, 1912], 126–27). This passage is interesting because in it Ephrem does not condemn Mani’s construction of images per se, and he articulates what will become one of the primary Christian defenses of religious art, namely, that they function pedagogically for the illiterate. On the late antique context of this argument more generally, see Robin Jensen, “Pictures and Popular Religion in Early Christianity: Art as the Bible of the Illiterate?” in The Subjective Eye: Essays in Culture, Religion, and Gender in Honor of Margaret R. Miles, ed. Richard Valantasis (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006), 294–309.
15. The literature on ekphrasis is extensive, but I have found especially helpful G. Downey, “Ekphrasis,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 4 (1959): 921–44; Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Webb, “Imagination and the Arousal of the Emotions in Greco-Roman Rhetoric,” in The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, ed. S. Morton Braund and C. Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 112–27; Webb, “Picturing the Past: Uses of Ekphrasis in the Deipnosophistae and Other Works of the Second Sophistic,” in Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, ed. D. Braund and J. Wilkins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 218–26; and Webb, “Poetry and Rhetoric,” in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 B.C. – A.D. 400, ed. Stanley Porter (Leiden: Brill, 1997), esp. 344–48. See also Jas Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and. Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 4. On ekphrasis in late antique literature that is not obviously dependent upon the progymnasmata, see Laura Lieber, “Theater of the Holy: Performative Elements of Late Ancient Hymnography,” Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 327–55.
16. Theon’s Progymnasmata defined ekphrasis as “a descriptive speech which brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes” of the audience (Theon, Progymnasmata, 118.7). This “vividness” of a speech was spoken of in terms of enargeia. See Webb, “Picturing the Past,” 221. See also Ruth Webb, “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre,” Word and Image 15 (1999): 7–18.
17. Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1989), 39.
18. Roberts, Jeweled Style, 40–41.
19. In using visual language to foster this sense of awe, Ephrem also resembles the method developed by Theodore of Mopsuestia in his catechetical homilies. Daniel L. Schwartz argues that we can think of Theodore’s presentation of the liturgy in terms of ekphrasis. According to Schwartz, Theodore reinterpreted liturgical acts as depictions of the biblical life of Christ and then aimed to make the audience feel as if they were beholding those events. See Schwartz, Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia, Hellenic Studies Series 57 (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 117–20.
20. Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 39–41.
21. In terms of comparative literature, it is interesting to read Ephrem’s constant compression of biblical narrative alongside Erich Auerbach‘s comparison of Homer’s Odyssey and the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), as articulated in “Odysseus’ Scar.” Auerbach argues that, whereas the Odyssey always externalizes the characters’ internal world, Genesis 22 revels in minimalistic detail and internal states left unexpressed (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003], esp. 11–15). There is something similar in the way Ephrem presents biblical characters for his audience to look upon. He typically focuses on very particular details of the characters as they are manifest in the text but does not develop these details in exhaustive ways. This is noticeably different, of course, from the way slightly later Syriac authors whom Susan Ashbrook Harvey has studied approached the biblical text (see Harvey, “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 1 [2001]: 105–31, esp., in comparison with Ephrem, 112–14).
22. Within the Madrashe on Faith, he does this in seventeen different poems: 5:17 (Abraham), 12:11–14 (good thief and hemorrhaging woman), 14:6–8 (Joseph and wife of Pharaoh), 20:9 (Jonah); 21:6 (Abraham); 26:9, 12 (Moses); 37:1 (Isaiah); 38:17 (Uzziah); 41:7 (Balaam’s ass); 46:5–6 (Tamar, Moses, Elijah, John); 52:9 (Moses); 59:12 (Ezekiel); 60:12 (Tower of Babel); 61:10–13 (Moses, John, Daniel); 66:4 (Moses and Mt. Sinai); 66:8 (Noah); 80:10 (Lazarus).
23. See, for example, MNat 1, in which he offers a litany of Old Testament figures who looked for the coming Christ.
24. There are three exceptions here. First, there are two compilation poems that focus primarily on Christ. I treat these two in chapter six. Second, MF 56 also compiles various biblical characters, but I have left it out of this chapter because its tone is so different from those examined here. With a voice that is consistently ameliatory and muted, Ephrem calls on his audience to imitate the biblical characters together.
25. The melody is “On the birth of the firstborn.” All the madrashe in this subset feature eleven-line stanzas, consisting in variations of five and six syllable lines.
26. All of these madrashe have eight-line stanzas, and a meter of 9+9+9+9+10+10+6+9.
27. MF 31 also bears this melody. All these madrashe have six-line stanzas, and a meter of 5+5 / 5+5 / 5+5 / 5+2 / 5+6 / 5+5.
28. Laura Lieber notes the tendency of late antique hymnographers to reduce the distance between the text and the audience’s own world (“Rhetoric of Participation,” 146). Certainly that is often characteristic of these poems. Yet, as we see here, and as will be shown in several of these poems, Ephrem also emphasizes the distance between text and audience but in a surprising way: Ephrem situates his audience as closer to the divine world that the Bible depicts than the biblical characters themselves.
29. In the language of “gaze,” Ephrem plays with the ideas of seeing and being seen. The following stanzas present scenes in which biblical characters look upon Christ. They are able to do so, as Ephrem understands it, because he has covered his divine self and thus made himself visible to humans. Yet, these scenes are introduced by saying that Christ covered his “gaze,” not his “appearance.” As Ephrem presents it, the onlookers are shielded not from Christ’s appearance but from Christ’s gaze. The idea of Christ’s gaze being the foundation of any human ability to gaze upon him parallels Ephrem’s understanding of investigation (see chapter one). Both—seeing and understanding—are properly divine activities, in which humans can participate, but which they can never claim as their own. For a similar idea, see MF 8:3, where Ephrem says that if God merely looks at the angels, they tremble. Note, too, that, following the apparent logic of the poem, rather than Ephrem’s logic of divine vision, I translated “gaze” as “appearance” in Jeffrey Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 100.
30. Ephrem takes this title of Peter, James, and John from Galatians 2:9.
31. From a compositional perspective, Ephrem has pieced together discrete biblical scenes in a way that is reminiscent of Christian art from the same period. Robin Jensen notes that fourth-century Christian funerary art represents narrative scenes from the Bible in a way that is “episodic rather than continuous” (“Compiling Narratives: The Visual Strategies of Early Christian Visual Art,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23 no. 1 [2015]: 15). Like Ephrem, the sarcophagi allude to biblical narratives in a highly minimalistic way, in which one or two biblical figures—Daniel and a lion, for example—evoke an entire narrative. These single images are then compiled with other images, evoking other stories, so that a single sarcophagus may draw upon several distinct biblical narratives, each evoked through minimal visual allusions. Jensen argues that these Christian sarcophagi “present an assortment of fragmentary references to different biblical stories, each one signifying its source narrative through a single, emblematic figure” (“Compiling Narratives,” 16). Like the sarcophagi, Ephrem alludes to biblical narratives using extremely terse language giving his listeners only enough information to identify the key part of the story.
32. Andrew Hayes notes that, overall, Moses functioned in Ephrem’s corpus as a model for ascetics, by signaling spiritual nourishment, divinization, and eschatological transformation. In the Memre on Faith and the Madrashe on Faith, however, he serves as a type of the ineffability of Christ (Hayes, “The Transfiguration of Moses: A Survey and Analysis of St. Ephrem’s Interpretation of Exodus 34, no. 29,” Oriens Christianus 97 [2013]: 67–99). As Sebastian Brock has shown, MF 8 provided Jacob of Sarug with the primary source through which he read Exodus 34. See Brock, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Veil on Moses’ Face, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 20 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 4–7.
33. R. Roukema notes that, after the third century, Christian writers came to see Exodus 34 through the lens of 2 Corinthians, and thus to associate both with Jewish incomprehension of Christ (“The Veil over Moses’ Face in Patristic Interpretation,” in The Interpretation of Exodus: Studies in Honor of Cornelis Houtman, ed. R. Roukema [Leuven: Peeters, 2006], 237–52). Yet Hayes notes that whereas this is true for Greek patristic readings of the narrative, Ephrem tended not to couple his anti-Jewish polemic with readings of Exodus 34 (“Transfiguration of Moses,” 68). Indeed, in MF 8 Ephrem never concretely refers to 2 Corinthians. There are certainly similarities between the way Ephrem and 2 Corinthians read Exodus 34. Both proceed as arguments a minore ad maius. In both, Moses functions as a shadow upon which Christ has shown light. Both of their arguments depend upon this typological distinction—that with Christ, something clearer and more luminous than Moses has come. Yet Ephrem never references the 2 Corinthians passage outright and, for all their similarities, there are also intriguing differences. For example, Ephrem’s way of constructing the scene of Exodus 34 is noticeably different from that of 2 Corinthians. Ephrem buttresses his reading of the former with several other Old Testament scenes. This lends his reading a distinctive exegetical character, so that his argument emerges as he fleshes out a biographical portrait of Moses based on various biblical scenes. Also, Ephrem’s concern is not with the written Torah (“the dispensation of death”) versus the law written on the heart (“the dispensation of the Spirit”), as is the concern in 2 Corinthians. Rather, Ephrem is concerned with vision itself. The inability of the biblical audience to sustain a vision of Moses serves as a type of the inability for Ephrem’s own audience to look upon, or speak about, God. By using vision as a metaphor for speech, Ephrem rephrases the central question of the Madrashe on Faith in terms given by Exodus 34.
34. The five scenes are prefaced, in stanza 7, with a general statement of the sanctity of the holy of holies. Ephrem reads its sanctity as offering but a shadow of the holiness of “the power that dwelt inside of it” (8:7:8). On these scenes, see also Wiekes, St. Ephrem, 108–11.
35. Whereas in scene 1 Ephrem used “vision” as a metaphor for speech, here he uses ritual spaces as a metaphor for speech, marking these villainous attempts to transgress sacred space as akin to his own audience’s tendency to misspeak.
36. This stanza opens with a reference to Psalms 114:3—“The Jordan saw the ark and was divided…it fled back”—a verse Ephrem already drew upon in the previous madrasha and upon which he will draw again in madrasha 9. Psalm 114:3 is itself rewriting a scene from Joshua 3, in which the Israelites cross the Jordan river into the promised land. The Psalmist merges this scene with the crossing of the Red Sea from Exodus 12. So, in drawing on Psalm 114, Ephrem is using a biblical text that is already rewritten. Ephrem himself is only interested in the crossing of the Jordan—only there does the ark play a role—so he reshapes the Psalmist’s language to eliminate references to the Red Sea crossing.
37. See Wiekes, St. Ephrem, 111.
38. The inability to look upon holy things and the inability to enter holy spaces are connected in Ephrem’s mind: a person or thing (such as Moses or the ark of the covenant) becomes transfigured when they enter a sacred space.
39. For example, “If the priesthood of Aaron was this dreadful, / how much more dreadful is the Lord of priests?”
40. For example, Korah is ushered into the poem through his narrational connection to Moses. He then introduces the series of ritual transgressions, all of which are thematically connected to him.
41. In his Commentary on Genesis, Ephrem exonerates the patriarch by arguing that his “drunkenness was not from an excess of wine but because it has been a long time since he had drunk any wine” (Comm. Gen. 7:1). On ancient interpretations of Ham’s act, see James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 222–23.
42. In her characterization of ritual and performance, Catherine Bell notes that both aim “to reduce and simplify [the world] so as to create more or less coherent systems of categories that can then be projected onto the full spectrum of human experience” (Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, rev. ed. [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 161). In this sense, Ephrem’s “stripping down” of the Genesis narrative represents his rereading of a very particular Near Eastern narrative so as to apply it to a very different context.
43. In Ephrem’s use of this passage, we find two forms of the root šʼel, “to ask”—šʼel, (“to ask”) and šûʼâlâ (“questioning”). This verb derives from Job 38:3 and 40:7, in which, when God commences his questioning of Job, he commands him: “Gird up your loins like a warrior, and I will question you” (ʼešʼalāk). On Ephrem’s use of this passage, see also chapter two.
44. Ephrem’s presentation of Ezekiel as evidencing a holy reticence creates a problem in the text that Ephrem resolves exegetically. In chapter 37, Ezekiel is set down in the midst of “a valley…full of bones.” The Lord asks him, “O son of man, will these bones live” (37: 3)? To this, Ezekiel responds simply: “You, O Lord of Lords, know.” In the biblical text, Ezekiel’s response to the Lord suggests that the Lord alone knows the answer, and that Ezekiel himself does not. Of course, by Ephrem’s time, the scene in the valley of the dry bones would have supported a belief in the resurrection of the dead, and, specifically, would have been seen as a type of the resurrection of Christ. Yet, rather than letting Ezekiel’s apparent ignorance challenge Christian exegetical assumptions, Ephrem shapes this ignorance as a testament of Ezekiel’s humility, situating it poignantly within the rhetorical shape of the Madrashe on Faith. As Ephrem presents it, Ezekiel knew the answer to the Lord’s question, but “he did not presume to say what he knew.” Zechariah also functions as a model of holy ignorance, and Ephrem builds this image exegetically. In Zechariah 4, an angel presents the prophet with a vision of temple objects, set beside olive trees. Zechariah describes what he sees to his angelic guide, and then asks, “What are these, my Lord” (v. 5, mānâ ʼennôn hālên mār[y])? Ephrem’s use of this short narrative begins with the fact of Zechariah’s questioning, but connects it lexically to the previous stanzas by replacing the text’s “he replied and answered” (‘nêt w-ʼemrat) with the familiar šʼel (here without any apparently negative valence). Following Zechariah’s question to the angel in 4:4—“What are these?”—the angel responds “Do you not know what these are”? Ephrem chooses to omit Zechariah’s response to the question—“I do not know, my Lord”—but clearly reads Zechariah’s negative reply as a testament to his humility. Decontextualized from the biblical book, Zechariah thus becomes another means of exemplifying the rhetoric of the Madrashe on Faith. Cast together, these three characters—Job, Ezekiel, Zechariah—further Ephrem’s rewriting of the Bible as a complete testimony to this dramatic struggle between silence and investigation.
45. Though on the connections between Zechariah and Ezekiel, see D. Nathan Phinney, “Life and Writing in Ezekiel and First Zechariah,” in Tradition in Transition: Haggai and Zechariah 1–8 in the Trajectory of Hebrew Theology, ed. Michael H. Floyd and Mark J. Boda (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 83–103 and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, “Zechariah’s Spies and Ezekiel’s Cherubim,” in Tradition in Transition, 104–27.
46. Ephrem’s use of Miriam in this madrasha is intriguing. Christine Trevett has argued that Miriam tends to show up in early Christian literature in instances where women’s roles are up for debate or female authority is specifically being denied (“Wilderness Woman: The Taming of Miriam,” in Wilderness: Essays in Honour of Frances Young, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah [London: T&T Clark, 2005], 26–44). Given that Ephrem’s madrashe were performed, at least some of the time, by women’s choirs, Miriam’s inclusion may suggest a similar sort of rhetoric. However, two factors recommend against this reading. First, the troika of villains that will appear later in the madrasha—Korah, Aaron’s Sons, and Uzziah—all seem to function for Ephrem as ways to critique bishops and priests. So, Ephrem’s polemic in this madrasha seems to be against the behaviors of certain authority figures, not against figures who are illegitimately claiming authority It may be the case, though, that this madrasha does have a specifically female audience as its target. If that is the case, though, I would understand Ephrem to be critiquing their practice of a particular theological style, not their claim of certain positions of authority On Miriam in the Rabbis, see also Devora Steinmetz, “A Portrait of Miriam in Rabbinic Midrash,” Prooftexts 8, no. 1 (1988): 35–65.
47. Ephrem’s initial allusion to this narrative relies on a word play between “Gehazi” gḥzy and “to mock,” bzaḥ. The second line does allude to the specific language of the biblical text in an interesting way. In the Peshitta of 2 Kings 5:26, Elisha asks Gehazi, “Did my heart not reveal [it] to me when the man came down from his chariot to meet you,” (lebb[y] ḥawwyan[y] kad naḥteh gabrâ men markabteh l-ʼûraʼāk). This is certainly the source of the poem’s second line (“He deceived the heart of his master”).
48. Interestingly, Ephrem here refers to the characters as “two hundred,” even though the text identifies them as two hundred fifty, as does Ephrem himself in MF 8:8.
49. Compare the very similar exhortation, also in connection with Uzziah, in MF 8:11: “Do not honor what is holy / in a way not commanded you!”
50. Note the first line of MF 47:6:1: “Know that pride motivates your controversy.” The “you” here is singular.
51. The picture of Moses as educated certainly does not begin with Ephrem and derives from Moses’s upbringing in a royal Egyptian household. On Moses’s “education,” see Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 509. Interestingly, Ephrem does not comment on Moses’ education at all in the Commentary on Genesis.
52. Intriguingly, the episode upon which Ephrem draws (Acts 17:18–34) begins by stating that Paul’s philosopher opponents “debated with” him (dāršîn), but the word “to debate” (draš) does not appear in this stanza or in the entire madrasha. Instead, Ephrem uses a range of other vocabulary to denote the phenomenon—bṣâ (47:2, 5, 6, 9, 13), b‘â (47:3, 13), šʼel (47:8, 10), and ‘qb (47:2, 5, 9, 10, 11).
53. “Look at Daniel!”
54. The Pharisees (MF 7), scribes (MF 7), the condemned thief (MF 7), Herod (MF 7), Korah and the rebel band (MF 8, 28), Aaron’s sons (MF 8, 28), Uzzah (MF 8), Uzziah (MF 8, 28), Noah’s sons (MF 9), and Gehazi (MF 28).
55. Ephrem repeats this warning using very similar language in MF 28:13: “Do not touch what belongs to him, lest you perish.”
56. Moses forms an interesting case. In MF 8 he does not really function as a model. Rather, Ephrem uses him—like Christ in MF 7—as a figure upon whom the audience can look but whom they cannot comprehend. However, in Andrew Hayes’s analysis of Moses in the rest of Ephrem’s corpus, he does seem to function as something of an ascetic model (“Transfiguration of Moses”).
57. Elsewhere in the Madrashe on Faith he does do so, but in ambiguous ways. For example, in MF 56:1, he asks “Who would not imitate those fathers / who believed simply? They neither investigated nor discussed.” He goes on to present brief portraits of Noah, Abraham, and Moses. However, while he begins the poem by asking his audience to emulate these figures, when he actually presents them, he does so in a way that distances them from the audience. He begins the stanza on Noah by asking, “Who could comprehend Noah’s immense silence” (MF 56:2:1)? Similarly, Abraham: “Who would look upon Abraham and not be silent” (MF 56:3:1)? Moses, moreover, functions as an ironic villain: “Who would not be threatened by Moses? When he slipped / only a little… / … he was forbidden to enter / the Promised Land” (MF56:9:1–4)? In stanza 8, Ephrem does offer a general moral lesson on the basis of these characters: “The two Testaments instruct us / that the faithful never debate or discuss.” But, after the first line of the poem, he never specifically exhorts them to imitate these figures.
1. Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2: The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004). For two examples in which scholars of Syriac have viewed the legacy of Nicaea in terms other than Nicaea, see G. A. M Rouwhorst, Les Hymnes Pascales d’Ephrem de Nisibe: Étude, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianiae (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 195–203 and Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), esp. 21–68.
2. This is not to say that Ephrem never mentions ritual or social practices. There are statements in the poems regarding baptismal practices, but these construct arguments on the basis of shared baptismal practices (see, however, MF 13:5–6, which seems to reference single immersion baptism). Likewise, Ephrem’s criticism of bishops suggests a concern with church order but not in any precise way. MF 87 is the only piece within the Madrashe on Faith with a clear and sustained anti-Jewish polemic (see Christine Shepardson, ‘ “Exchanging Reed for Reed’ “: Mapping Contemporary Heretics onto Biblical Jews in Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 5, no. 1 [2002]: 15–33).
3. On Ephrem’s Trinitarian theology, see Christian Lange, The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, CSCO Subsidia 616 (Louvain: Peeters, 2005), esp. 80–98. My interest in this chapter is not in Ephrem’s christology per se, but on the way his anti-subordinationist emphases shaped his literary representation of Christ.
4. Though see, for example, MF 40–43.
5. My approach in this chapter is shaped by the approach of Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), esp. ch. 6, where she argues for a new style of representation which emerged in light of, and beyond, the fourth century. Moreover, the third chapter (“Stories People Want”) of that book still offers perhaps the best insights into the significance of narrative as it relates to the overall shape of early Christian discourse.
6. Narrative, as M. M. Bakhtin has highlighted, is inevitably a messy business, leaving a lot open to interpretation. See “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 1–40. We can think of Ephrem’s re-presentation of the Gospel as seeking to eliminate this messiness and ambiguity.
7. Matthew 8:28–34, Mark 5:1–20, and Luke 8:26–39. In Matthew there are two “demoniacs,” whereas there is only one in Mark and Luke. Ephrem seems to reflect this in his telling of the story. Mark, however, refers to the demon as an “unclean spirit” (v. 2, rûḥâ ṭanptâ), whereas Luke (and Ephrem reflects this) refers simply to šîdâ Within the Commentary on the Diatessaron, Ephrem alludes to this narrative (4:7) but does not discuss it at length.
8. These basic details appear in each of the synoptic accounts of the baptism (Matt. 3:16–17; Mark 1:10–11; Luke 3:22) and in the transfiguration (Matt. 17:5; Mark 9:7, and Luke 9:35). The phrase is also quoted in Comm. Dia. 9:1. Ephrem’s representation of these details does not provide enough evidence to suggest a dependence upon one particular version over another. Given the early development of hymnody for the feast of Theophany (which was almost certainly connected to Nativity), the baptismal pericope is one Ephrem, as well as his audience, almost certainly would have known.
9. We should note how different Ephrem’s use of the baptismal scene is outside of the Madrashe on Faith. In the Sermo de Domino 50–56, for example, Ephrem emphasizes the scene of the baptism as the place where Christ deposited the “robe of glory,” and from which those baptized can procure it. This is, in fact, his most common emphasis when dealing with Christ’s baptism. See Georges Saber, La théologie baptismale de saint Ephrem (Kaslik, Liban: Université Saint-Esprit, 1974). In the Madrashe on Faith, however, this theme does not appear at all. The scene is entirely read as evidence for the priority of the name “Son.”
10. As will become obvious in the discussion of these verses, it is almost impossible to determine on their basis which version Ephrem is using. The quotation in Comm. Dia. 9:1, albeit only extent in Armenian, and quoted in an indirect way, appears identical to the Peshitta of Matthew 3:17: da ē ordī īm sīrelī. The synoptic parallels to Matthew 3:17 are Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22. Mark 1:11 reads w-qālâ-[h]wâ men šmayyâ ʼa[n]t hû ber[y] ḥabbîbâ bāk ʼeṣṭbît (Peshitta) (“And [there was] a voice from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son. With you I am well pleased.’ ”). Luke 3:22 reads w-qālâ-[h]wâ men šmayyâ d-ʼāmar ʼa[n]t hû ber[y] ḥabbîbâ d-bāk ʼeṣṭbît (Peshitta) (“And there was a voice from heaven that said, ‘You are my Beloved Son. With you I am well pleased.’ “) However, the material below often combines “Son” and Beloved,” as it is found in the Peshitta of Matthew 3:17.
11. Codex Curetonianus just has ʼeštma‘ (“was heard”) instead of hwâ (“there was”). The Markan and Lukan versions are identical, except that they do not keep the words “With him I am well pleased” (Mark 9:7 and Luke 9:35). Codex Sinaiticus of Luke 9:35 has “chosen” (gabyâ) intead of “beloved.”
12. See also Comm. Dia. 14:9, where the Syriac text is identical to 14:7.
13. On the possibility of interpolations in this poem, see Andrew Palmer, “Interpolated Stanzas in Ephraim‘s Madroshe III–VII on Faith,” Oriens Christianus 93 (2009): 1–27.
14. Little can be read into Ephrem’s use of the emphatic brâ without the pronoun, as he uses it with the pronoun elsewhere.
15. On anti-Arian rhetoric derived from baptismal practices, see Rowan Williams, “Baptism and the Arian Controversy,” in Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Controversies, ed. Michel R. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 162.
16. This translation differs slightly from my translation in St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 318.
17. Matthew 27:54 reads, šarrîrâʼît hānâ breh hû d–ʼallāhâ, “Truly, this one is the son of God.” While in Mark 15:39 the Centurion declares (v. 39) hānâ gabrâ breh-[h]wâ d-ʼallāhâ, “This man was the Son of God,” in Luke 23:47 he says hānâ gabrâ zaddîqâ-[h]wâ, “This man was innocent.” Ephrem only alludes to this scene in his treatment of the crucifixion in Comm. Dia. 20:28.
18. He takes “centurion,” “to guard” (nṭar), “out loud” (b-qālâ), “to shake” (zā‘), “earth” (ʼar‘â), and “to become dark” (ḥšak) from the scene of Matthew 27.
19. Note the similarity to Ephrem’s use of the Bible in MF 7:3 and 4: he rewrites the scene of Christ’s walking on water so that the water responds actively to Christ.
20. R. B. ter Haar Romney, A Syrian in Greek Dress: The Use of Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac Biblical Texts in Eusebius of Emesa’s Commentary on Genesis, Traditio Exegetica Graeca 6 (Louvain: Peeters, 1997), 16–17.
21. Carmen Maier, building upon Jacob Neusner’s concept of a “base verse” and an “intersecting verse,” suggests that within the madrashe Ephrem typically identifies a “base narrative,” which functions as a template as he “constructs subsequent narrative layers” (“Poetry as Exegesis: Ephrem the Syrian’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation Especially as Seen in His Hymns on Paradise and Hymns on Unleavened Bread” [PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2012], 138–39). She conceives of this as akin to Greek theoria, in which each new narrative layer indicates a higher, or more spiritual, interpretation of the base narrative. It is somewhat unclear whether Maier’s “base layer” refers to a biblical text or the narrative that the poem itself seeks to construct, into which it embeds narratives taken from the Bible. That said, her analysis is helpful in leading us to think through the different narrative layers at work in a given madrasha. In the case of this one, I would take the “base narrative” to be Ephrem’s own: the divine Father and Creator has a Son who comes to creation in order to represent the Creator and care for creation. The actual biblical narratives are taken up into this “base narrative.”
22. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, rev. ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 160–61.
23. See also Comm. Dia. 4:16, which, albeit preserved in Armenian, appears to reflect the text of Matthew.
24. Note here the difference between Ephrem and Matthew: by alluding to the Elijah narrative, Matthew’s rhetorical point is to place Christ in a typological relationship with him, thus arguing that Christ is the new Elijah, or has even superseded Elijah. For Ephrem, this scene unambiguously bespeaks the relationship between Father and Son.
25. Ephrem treats this scene in Comm. Dia. 12:1–5.
26. Edmund Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen auf Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide,CSCO 155 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1955), 145 n. 4. Paralleled in Mark 2:1–2 and Luke 5:17–26. See also Comm. Dia. 5:19–20.
27. The story is also addressed in Comm. Dia. 8:1–7, but there it omits verse 6, “When Jesus saw him lying there….”
28. The word ʼetḥlem is preserved only in the Peshitta. The Sinaiticus and Curetonianus read tehwê šarrîr, “to be made whole.”
29. While Ephrem identifies this person as ‘abdâ, “servant,” the syllable count would have allowed him to use either Matthew’s mšaryâ, “paralytic” or John’s gabrâ, “man.” His use of “servant” suggests two interpretations: first, it is possible that Ephrem has used the non-specific “servant” (ʼabdâ) so as to invoke both of the narratives—the healing of the paralytic from the synoptics, and the healing of the sick man at Bethesda from John. Another possibility is that, given the polemical context of this madrasha, Ephrem’s identification of the man as “servant” may simply intend to emphasize Christ’s divine power over things made.
30. Matthew 8:14–17, Mark 1:29–34, and Luke 4:48–41.
31. This is implied in the Matthew 8:15, where it says that “he touched her hand, and the fever left her.” Ephrem simply eliminates the distance between the two steps.
32. Matthew 14:13–21, Mark 6:30–44, Luke 9:10–17, and John 6:1–13. See also Comm. Dia. 12:1–5. Ephrem’s allusion to this scene does not suggest one version over another.
33. Ephrem interacts with the narrative of the wedding at Cana in concrete ways, incorporating some of its basic vocabulary—meštûtâ (“feast”), as well as the phrase ḥamrâ b-ʼaggānê (“wine in vessels”).
34. For an analysis of the biblical allusions in this second half of the poem, see Jeffrey Wiekes, “Out of Books, A World: The Scriptural Poetics of Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Faith” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2013), 323–28.
35. On the feast in the fourth century, see J. F. Baldovin, “The Empire Baptized,” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed. G. Wainwright and K. B. Westerfield Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 114–16.
36. He begins the stanza with an athletic metaphor: “With the weapons of a vanquished athlete, our Lord conquered.”
37. The term ḥîṣûtâ (“strength”) also has the sense of “abstinence.”
38. Matthew 21:1–9, Mark 11:1–10, Luke 19:28–38, and John 12:12–18.
39. See also Comm. Dia. 18:1–4. The same term makkîk appears in Comm. Dia. 18:1.
40. Comm. Dia. 18:1 reads “Rejoice daughter of Zion, for your king comes to you righteous and humble” (makkîkâ). This is closer to Zechariah 9:9 (“rejoice,” dûṣ, and “righteous” zaddîqâ, both derive from there).
41. In thinking about exegesis by concordance, I have been helped especially by John Alford’s study of quotations in Piers Plowman; see Alford, “The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 52, no. 1 (1977): 80–99.
42. The proper name Nabal is coupled with the verb bla‘—“to be swallowed up,” or “punished”—which is Ephrem’s own addition to the story (the Peshitta has “to smite,” mḥâ). But Ephrem’s substitution is motivated by the similarity of bla‘ to the name Nabal (n-b-l).
1. On architecture, see Sarah Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On material culture generally, see Robin Jensen, “Material Evidence (2): Visual Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S. A. Harvey and D. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 104–19. On literature, see Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). On liturgy, see J. F Baldovin, “The Empire Baptized,” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed. G. Wainwright and K. B. Westerfield Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 77–130. As Baldovin notes, however, the extent to which the fourth century marked a radical change from what came before can be overstated. He emphasizes the way in which, prior to the fourth century, Christians already conducted elaborate rituals, often in public spaces.
2. On Nicaea as a touchstone for later Syriac Christians, see David A. Michelson, The Practical Christology of Philoxenus of Mabbug (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the picture of Constantine among Syriac Christians, see Kyle Smith, Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia: Martyrdom and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
3. Ephrem, of course, seems to allude to the council in MAH 22:20. Yet he never mentions the name of the council outright, and in his madrashe never uses its controversial term homoousios (bar kyānâ). This term does show up in his Commentary on Genesis, on which see Jeffrey Wiekes, St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 38 n. 153.
4. See chapters one and two.
5. Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
6. On Latin paraphrases, see Wolfgang Kirsch, Die Lateinische Versepik des 4. Jahrhunderts, Schriften zur Geschichte und Kultur des Antike 28 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1989). On Nonnus and Apollinaris in Greek, see Andrew Faulkner, “Faith and Fidelity in Biblical Epic: The Metaphrasis Psalmorum, Nonnus, and the Theory of Translation,” in Nonnus of Panopolis in Context: Poetry and Cultural Milieu in Late Antiquity, ed. K. Spanoudakis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 195–210.
7. David W. Halivni, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, trans. J. Rubenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
8. Blake Hartung powerfully articulates just how significant Ephrem’s poetic corpus is within the context of other late antique poets. See Hartung, “The Authorship and Dating of the Syriac Corpus attributed to Ephrem of Nisibis: A Reassessment,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 22, no. 2 (2018): 302–6.
9. Here we can think of the quote by F. C. Burkitt: “Ephrem is extraordinarily prolix, he repeats himself again and again, and for all the immense mass of material there seems very little to take hold of” (Early Eastern Christianity [London: J. Murray, 1904], 96). Michael Roberts argued for a similar tendency to read late antique Latin poetry as representing a decline in literary standards (The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity [Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1989], 1–5).
10. Roberts notes that Cyprianus Gallus, in the Heptateuchos, focuses on the first seven books of the Bible in a way that is “often dictated by his notion of the poetic” (Jeweled Style, 10). In the case of Cyprianus, the breastplate of Aaron receives extensive treatment because a poetic rewriting of it enabled him to highlight his particular aesthetics, in which he ornately developed minimalistic figures. Ephrem’s aesthetics are very different. Ephrem clearly privileges small scenes retold with great emotion. But Ephrem’s tendency to focus selectively on small moments within broader narratives, and for these choices to be motivated by his particular aesthetics, is very similar.
11. On this general tendency of late antique homiletics, typically associated with Chrysostom, Antioch, and the influence of the second sophistic, see the specific study of the catechetical homilies of Daniel Schwartz, Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia, Hellenic Studies Series 57 (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013).
12. On this aspect of late antique rhetoric, see “The Power over the Past,” in Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 120–54. On this element in Ephrem specifically, see Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 69–105.