4
In this chapter, I look at Ephrem’s poetic “I” from four broad perspectives. In the first part, I argue that Ephrem’s “I” emerged as a symbolic character within the imaginative world of the Madrashe on Faith. In the second and third parts, I trace two metaphoric ways that Ephrem articulated his poetic self. The metaphor of gift and exchange positioned Ephrem as a mediator between divinity and humanity, and his poetic body as deriving ultimately from God. Likewise, the metaphor of the lyre provided Ephrem with a way to root his poetic self in the Bible, while at the same time depicting himself as merely an instrument placed willingly before divinity. In the fourth part, I turn from these macro-metaphors to the way Ephrem compared himself as poet to specific biblical characters and events—a series of New Testament women, Noah, and the wedding at Cana.
A SYMBOLIC “I”
Ephrem’s madrashe speak with a distinct and dramatic first-person voice. More than forty-three of the eighty-seven Madrashe on Faith poems contain first-person references. In this respect, they are not unique in Ephrem’s corpus. Most often, these first-person utterances occupy a single stanza within a poem, and, as such, can be seen as “framing devices” that prepare his audience to hear the poems in a certain way.1 In presenting itself to the audience, Ephrem’s poetic “I” speaks with remarkable specificity and emotion. The final stanza of MVir 7 provides a particularly poignant example:
Who has buried my weak self beneath relentless waves?
As the waves of oil have lifted me up, they have given me Christ’s story.
Christ’s waves have struck me and given me the symbols of oil.
Look: waves crash against waves. I am stuck in the middle!
Like Simon I say, “Pull me out, Lord, like Simon!
See how the great waves weary me!” And pity rescues the one who is weak. (MVir 7:15)
This stanza concludes a set of four poems in which Ephrem reflects upon the olive and its oil as symbols for Christ. Here, at the poems’ conclusion, he presents himself as overwhelmed by all that he has found—overwhelmed by the very poem he has delivered.
Ephrem’s “I” exudes emotion and specificity, but does not reveal a historical biography. He is largely reticent about the details of his own life. One line perhaps suggests he was raised Christian, another that he was a deacon.2 But these lines read like the gnomic statements of a poet or the intentionally crafted statements of a rhetorician, and offer no historical specificity.3 More often, as in MVir 7:15, Ephrem’s “I” makes sense only as a character within the symbolic world of the poem—responding to and building upon the world he himself has articulated, and functioning within the literary universe he has constructed.4 In this sense, we can think of Ephrem’s “I” as reflective of the Greco-Roman rhetorical technique called prosōpopoia, “speech in character” or “invented speech.”5 Ephrem’s goal is not to reveal a historical self but to use his poetic “I” to articulate theological ideas and build an emotional weight in readers’ experience of the text.
In its representation of a type of poet, Ephrem’s “I” operates similarly to that of the sixth-century poet Romanos. As Derek Krueger has argued, Romanos’s “I” also does not reveal a biography but serves to model for its audience a paradigmatic Christian piety.6 In the case of Ephrem, however, the boundaries of this piety, as well as the persona of the poet, are shaped by the poems within which he speaks. And the poems, along with the “I” that operates within their imaginative world, arose as a product of real historical circumstances, engaged with real debates about the propriety of speech about God.7 The specific piety that the Madrashe on Faith articulates is one in which theological speech is discouraged and brought under suspicion. Ephrem’s “I” operates, in a sense, as a kind of cultural performance. The “I” represents to its audience the anxieties surrounding theological speech, and aims to defend its own speech and model appropriate speech.
The Bible provided Ephrem with the lexicon for articulating this “I” in the midst of this particular historical situation. In its words and narratives, Ephrem found the images with which to craft his identity as a poet and present it to an audience. In the process, the Bible and the audience came to meet in the poem itself. As Ephrem used the Bible to negotiate his identity as poet, his poems became a place where the Bible was mediated to his audience, and his audience was mediated to the God of the Bible. This particularly biblical “I”—this biblical self—emerged in a number of ways, through biblically located metaphors that echoed throughout the corpus, the interpretation of biblical parables and verses, and the identification of the poetic self with biblical characters.
AN ECONOMIC “I”
Ephrem depicts his poetry as resulting from a divine-human transaction.8 The sine qua non of this transaction as Ephrem presents it is the incarnation. The incarnation renders Ephrem’s speech possible and forms the primary content of that speech. Ephrem structures his “I” with reference to the divine-human exchange manifest in the incarnation. His articulation of it in economic language weaves together seamlessly God’s acting in the incarnation and the human response to this act, manifest in the process of giving. In this respect, two foci obtain in Ephrem’s presentation of the economics of the incarnation. First, this language enables him to explain how the incarnation saves humanity, and second, it helps him explain how the incarnation establishes a structure of human giving to God as salvific. His own poetic gift is situated within this larger structure of giving.9
Ephrem uses a variety of economic terms in his poems, the most common of which are “gift” (mawhabtâ),10 “treasure” (gazzâ),11 “treasure-keeper” (gezzabrâ),12 and “debt” (ḥāb),13 and this language is explicitly combined with the speaker’s “I” in five of the Madrashe on Faith (5, 10, 16, 25, and 38). Ephrem first uses economic language to address himself in 5:20:
May your faith be
Rennet in my thinking.
May it gather my dispersed mind
From discussing and wandering (‘ûqqābâ w-pahyâ).
I will knock, Lord, at your door,
That you might drop down to me, as alms,
Your gift, which unexpectedly
Will come and enrich my poverty.
Though I am in debt ten thousand talents
You make me a creditor
So that I lend you what belongs to you.
The connection between economic language and poetic speech is not explicit here. The first economic terms appear in lines seven and eight. Echoing Matthew 7:7 (“Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you”), Ephrem asks for the Lord to reveal his “gift” (mawhabtâ), which will overcome his “poverty” (ṣrîkûtâ). Ephrem then invokes Matthew 18:23–35 but changes the narrative in subtly significant ways. The biblical parable tells of a king who forgives his slave a debt often thousand talents.” Once forgiven, however, the slave demands the immediate repayment of one hundred talents owed to him by someone else. When that person cannot repay it, the slave has him thrown into jail. Eventually, the king finds out what the slave has done, revokes his initial forgiveness, and throws him into jail. The moral of the story is clear: the Lord has forgiven humanity in immense ways, and humans must do likewise.
Ephrem’s dependence upon this parable is manifest in his claim to “be in debt ten thousand talents.” The phrase “ten thousand talents” is taken verbatim from Matthew 18, and the verb ḥāb, “to be in debt,” appears eight times in the Syriac version of Matthew’s brief narrative. On one level, then, Ephrem is claiming a status analogous to the parable’s villainous character. Yet, on another level, Ephrem has distanced himself from that character, and in two important ways. First, while he uses the verb ḥāb in line 9 (“Though I am in debt…”), he initially refers in line eight not to his “debt” but to his “poverty” (ṣrîkût[y]), so that he merges two anthropological models (humanity in debt, and humanity in poverty). Second, and more important, Ephrem reverses the second half of the story: whereas in the parable the newly forgiven slave mercilessly demands what someone else owes him, Ephrem responds to the divine gift by imitating the Lord’s generosity, becoming an image of that generosity. Read alongside the biblical text, Ephrem’s poem reshapes this narrative to negotiate the ambivalence of his role as poet. By initially associating himself with a villainous biblical character, he eschews any claims to righteousness. Yet by reversing the narrative’s conclusion, and imitating divine generosity where his quasi-exemplar did not, Ephrem claims authorial virtue.
What is not immediately clear from this passage, however, is that Ephrem is depicting himself as poet—that what he claims to lend refers to the actual content of his poem, as opposed to a giving of literal alms. Here we need to examine the stanza more carefully. As a whole, the stanza breaks down into three parts. Lines 1–4, in which Ephrem asks for “faith” to deliver him from “debating and wandering,” establish the basic meaning of the passage. Lines 5–8 then rephrase this basic message using economic language. Ephrem says that the Lord’s “gift” (of “faith”) will enrich his “poverty” (a poverty which manifests itself in “debating and wandering”). The final three lines restate the first eight and explain the consequences of Ephrem’s receipt of this divine gift: on his own, Ephrem is “in debt ten thousand talents,” yet because God has given him the gift of faith, he, suddenly rich, can lend to others (albeit what belongs ultimately to the Lord).
Part of the economic metaphor is clear: “gift” stands for “faith,” and “poverty” stands for “debating and wandering.” But what about the actions that follow from these gifts? What is it that Ephrem lends? Gary Anderson has suggested a plausible interpretation. Addressing a passage three stanzas earlier (MF 5:17), Anderson takes Ephrem to be referencing literal alms.14 Noting the connection between “faith” and “lending,” Anderson writes, “Ephrem believes that the one who makes a loan to God through almsgiving is not simply doing a human work; he is making a public testimony to his faith.”15 Thus, God gives Ephrem “faith,” which enables him to give literal money to others, an act that builds faith within them.
Anderson is certainly correct that Ephrem sees his lending as emerging from and testifying to his faith. Elsewhere Ephrem describes literal almsgiving in very similar language.16 Yet, on the terms of MF 5:20 alone, it makes more sense to see Ephrem’s use of the language of almsgiving as a metaphorical way of presenting his own poetry. If, within the argument of MF 5:20, the “gift” of “faith” overcomes the “poverty” of “debating and wandering,” we would expect the final component—lending—to continue this abolishment of “debating and wandering.” We would further expect this “lending” to represent the vehicle by which Ephrem administers “faith.” This, in turn, raises a question of how Ephrem understands “faith.” Here we should note that Ephrem does not juxtapose “faith” with “lack of faith,” but with “debating and wandering.” Of course, within the Madrashe on Faith, “debating and wandering” represents the particular activity of Ephrem’s subordinationist opponents. Given this, “faith,” as the opposite of “debating and wandering,” refers not to an abstract conviction that some invisible thing is in fact true, but represents instead a very particular, anti-subordinationist confession.
So, what is the activity by which Ephrem lends this faith? It is his poem. “Faith” is thus the divine gift that Ephrem receives, but poetry is the vehicle through which he lends this faith to others. Here, “faith” functions as the means by which Ephrem delivers his poem, but also as the content of that poem. Stating this, even in metaphorical language, makes serious claims for the poem that Ephrem is delivering, as well as for the one who is delivering it. The poem emerges as nothing less than the product of divine inspiration, and it is precisely through the poet that this divine gift comes to others. The poet himself is the creditor, who now holds the Lord’s gift, and it is his responsibility to mediate this to others. Given Ephrem’s denigration of theological speech, this represents a bold claim. But Ephrem tempers it by drawing on the parable of the wicked servant. As a poet standing before an audience, Ephrem uses this narrative to underscore his humility, but he rewrites its ending to underscore his authority. He presents himself as standing in front of an audience only because the Lord has overcome his poverty and forgiven his debt. At the same time, he emphasizes his role as the Lord’s creditor. Yet even here the metaphor is ambiguous. Though he calls himself creditor, if he is following his divine exemplar, his poetry participates in a process of asymmetrical giving. His role is only to give and ask that his audience do the same for others. There is no mention of audience repayment to him.
The connection between these economic metaphors and Ephrem’s own poetic project is implicit here in MF 5:20, but it is made explicit elsewhere in the Madrashe on Faith. Poem 10 begins,
You dictated, my Lord, “Open your mouth and I will fill it.”17
Look: the mouth of your servant is opened to you, together with his mind.
Fill it, Lord, from your gift
So that I might sing your song according to your will!
In terms of economic language, Ephrem uses only the noun “gift” (mawhabtâ), the same noun used in 5:20, but the connection between this gift and the song that follows is stated outright. Because Ephrem’s mouth has been filled with the gift, he can thus “sing [the Lord’s] song in accordance with [his] will.” In this passage, as opposed to the last, Ephrem presents himself neither as debtor nor as poverty-stricken. Here, his poem and its petition for inspiration begin with a line taken from Psalm 81:11, which Ephrem quotes verbatim: “Open your mouth and I will fill it.” By quoting this psalm, Ephrem anchors his poetic delivery in a biblical command, reading the line almost as a prophecy that his poem fulfills. He is not taking up this authorial project of his own accord but is simply responding to God’s command, penned through David in the Psalms. The poem that follows develops as an outpouring of this divine gift.
Ephrem takes this language up again in the concluding stanza of poem 10: “As I worship withhold your gift / and as a deposit keep it in your treasury, so that you may return it to us again” (10:22:3–4). The conclusion of the poem is thus consummate with the Lord’s cessation of his gift of divine inspiration. This divine gift, referenced in the poem’s opening and concluding stanzas, frames the poetic contents as a product of that gift. Moreover, Ephrem introduces a new idea at the poem’s conclusion: because he has used this gift well—he has sung to the Lord, rather than debated—it can now become a deposit in the Lord’s treasury. There it will collect interest, enabling Ephrem to draw from it when he next needs to compose a song.18
This idea of heavenly interest is similar to one Ephrem articulates in another collection, the Madrashe on Abraham Qidunaya. The latter comprises fifteen madrashe devoted to the fourth-century Edessan ascetic Abraham Qidunaya.19 In MAQ 1:5, Ephrem presents Abraham’s economic activity as emerging in response to the divine command to love God and neighbor: “Two glorious commands—to love your neighbor and your God—/ you joined together as if with a yoke.” This dual focus on God and the other proves, in 1:6, to be mutually fulfilling:
You obeyed insofar as you acted.
You acted in order to lend.
You lent in order to believe.
You believed in order to receive.
You received in order to reign.
Abraham’s actions proceed in a descending and reascending pattern. He acts to prove his obedience; through his act of “lending,” he acquires belief; because of his belief, he “receives” and his “reception” leads to his stature in the heavenly kingdom.
Ephrem leaves the language in this stanza intentionally ambiguous so as to evoke a duality of meanings. The verb “to lend,” ‘awzep, has an explicitly economic resonance (that is, to lend money) and usually implies a loan that will collect interest.20 This resonance of interest explains the rather obscure phrasing of line 2—“you acted in order to lend.” The idea is that Abraham’s action was motivated in part by recognizing that his deed would accrue interest; by lending, he would make money. The object of his lending is equally left unstated because it is two-fold. As the stanzas that follow make clear, he gives “alms and prayers” to those in need, but this functions also as a gift to God, through which Abraham can build a heavenly credit. Ephrem articulates this in MAQ 1:7:
Look: everywhere your alms and prayers are like a loan.
Look: they enrich those who receive them, but to you they return
The principal and the interest that you have lent.
In response to God’s command to love the other, Abraham offers alms and prayers. In this symbiotic relationship, Abraham’s prayers and alms provide wealth for those who receive them, but they also accrue heavenly interest for Abraham, who will carry his wealth with him beyond the grave (MAQ 1:12).
In comparing Ephrem’s articulation of his poetic identity with his description of Abraham’s virtue, we can see a compelling difference. Whereas Abraham Qidunaya’s giving builds up his own inner treasure, Ephrem’s poetic gift (itself an outpouring of divine gift) builds up a communal treasure that he and his audience can draw upon in the future. Given the study context in which the Madrashe on Faith emerged, this, too, is a performative gesture. Ephrem models for his audience the appropriate posture of a theological poet and exhorts them to mimic his pose.21 Throughout the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem’s primary concern is that his poetry be “faithful”—that it remain clear of “debating and wandering,” as Ephrem phrases it in 5:20. This “faithful poetry” acts as the content of the gift that Ephrem asks for here and elsewhere. Ephrem asks the Lord to keep this gift within a treasury, acquiring interest, so that he, and through him, his audience, in their own poetry, may draw upon it in the future.
Ephrem’s use of the Bible in the articulation of a specifically economic identity can be seen most clearly in the twenty-fifth madrasha, which offers a first-person reflection on public theological speech. Here Ephrem negotiates precisely what divine inspiration means for his poems, and this is made explicit from the beginning:
[MF 25:1] O that someone would give me a little breath of the spirit!
Not for prophecy—this would be a request for death—
But that I might be able to proclaim the glory
Of him who is greater than all, with my poor tongue.
According to this stanza, Ephrem’s speech is divinely inspired, doxological (even though the object of his words transcends those words), but specifically not prophetic. Ephrem negotiates through these protestations the complex relationship between authority and humility that Derek Krueger has identified as characteristic of the late ancient author and that arises in Ephrem’s case through his concerns with poetry and theological speech.22 Affirming the meagerness of his spiritual portion (“a little breath of the spirit”), he nevertheless eschews any claims to prophecy and juxtaposes his “poor tongue” with the greatness of that which it aims to glorify (rather than discuss, investigate, or debate). At the same time, granting all these caveats, it is his speech that is inspired and which demonstrates doxology.
As poem 25 proceeds, Ephrem draws upon two types of metaphors—economic and natural. The economic metaphors affirm that the poem is inspired, while the natural ones negotiate how the speaker’s freedom can be preserved alongside this acknowledged divine inspiration. Ephrem states the connection between economic metaphors and poetic speech in the second stanza:
[25:2] Without the very gift of that Greatness,
Mouths could not distribute from its treasures.
Yet, with its key they are opened—
Its treasure, before its treasure-keepers.
There is no ambiguity here: the “gift” that “Greatness” gives enables “mouths” to access divine treasures and distribute the goods held there. This “gift” represents the ability to speak—“Glory to the gift of speech in the mouth of orators,” Ephrem exclaims in the following stanza—and the distribution of this divine gift represents the speaker’s poetic act. Here, moreover, Ephrem references a concept alluded to in 5:20, that of “creditor” or, as it is articulated here, “treasure-keeper.” By receiving the gift that enables him and his audience, through him, to open the treasure, they become its guardians. Though subtly articulated, the meaning is clear: Ephrem and his audience, to the extent they mimic his process of poetic speech, stand as privileged keepers of the teachings that they articulate in song.23
Within poem 25, this economic language disappears through stanzas 5–11 but reemerges in stanzas 12–17. Moreover, whereas in 10:22 Ephrem merely alluded to the idea of interest, in 25:16 he makes the concept explicit. In the stanzas leading up to it, Ephrem has referenced Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10) as an example for Ephrem’s own efforts to reach the Lord: “May the example of Zacchaeus, who grew up, instruct me. / In you his shortness grew tall and he rose up to come to you” (25:13).24 Ephrem’s choice of Zacchaeus as an example for his own effort to speak about the Lord resonates on two levels. First, Zacchaeus—humbled by appearance and by past failings—serves as a perfect example of the “humble boldness” so characteristic of Ephrem’s poetic “I.” Second, Zacchaeus is a character whose story has a particularly economic bent in that he is initially guilty of a kind of theft but repents by giving away even more than he has taken.25
Yet, it is precisely in Ephrem’s use of this economic exemplar that the particularities of his own project emerge. After reworking the Zacchaeus narrative in 25:13–15, Ephrem turns in 25:16 to his own request for doxological speech, built upon this biblical exemplar:
May your gift call out also to me, as to Zacchaeus.
Not because I have divided [my] riches like him, Lord (ʼepalleg neksê badmûteh mār[y]),
But because I have hastened—even me—
To return your money with interest!
The phrase “divided [my] riches” (ʼepalleg neksê) is a near quotation of Luke 19:8, where, having repented of his past economic duplicity, Zacchaeus tells the Lord that he will give “a division of [his] riches to the poor” (pelgût neksay yāheb-[ʼ]nâ l-meskinê). Strikingly, Ephrem distinguishes himself on this point, drawing attention to his own particular understanding of the language of almsgiving. As he presents it, he has not given away his riches, as has Zacchaeus.26 Nevertheless, his admission of what he has done is cloaked in economic language, the literal meaning of which he has just denied. So what, precisely, does Ephrem mean in his claim “to return [the Lord’s] money with interest”?
In Ephrem’s typically elusive style of biblical allusion, this line invokes another biblical narrative—the parable of the talents (Luke 19:11–27)—which, within Luke’s Gospel, follows the Zacchaeus narrative immediately.27 The allusion becomes clearer in the following stanza:
[25:17] Consider this: when he gave his money to the merchants,
He showed us that without his abundance there is no commerce,
Just as without
His gift, there is no true praise.
In the Lukan parable, a nobleman, before setting out on a journey, gives ten pounds to ten slaves, and instructs them to “do business with these [pounds] until I come back” (Luke 19:13). When the nobleman does return, he finds that two of his slaves have made more money with their initial gift (one has made ten pounds, another five), while one servant has, out of fear of his severe master, simply held tight to the single pound. Ephrem does not borrow any vocabulary from this parable, but the allusion to returning the Lord’s money with interest (25:16:4) and to an unspecified “he” who “gave money to the merchants” (25:17:1) suggests that this is the narrative to which Ephrem alludes.28 Moreover, in affirming that “without / his gift, there is no true praise,” Ephrem connects this parable to his own doxological poetry: reading backwards to MF 25:16:4, we can now take Ephrem’s claim that he has returned the Lord’s “money with interest” as a reference to his own poetic speech. As Ephrem presents it, the Lord has provided him with the gift of poetic inspiration, on which he can collect interest by “lending” this poetry to his audience.29
By rewriting this biblical material, Ephrem negotiates his role as theological poet. In MF 5:20 he maps himself onto a straightforwardly villainous biblical character, and in poem 25 he refuses to claim even the virtue of Zacchaeus. In MF 10:1 he frames his poetic speech as a mere response to a divine command, and throughout poem 25 he downplays its import. In all of these examples, moreover, he situates the Lord’s gift at the origins of his speech. At the same time, in each of these passages, Ephrem clearly claims an exemplary status for his poetry. In MF 5:20, he becomes the creditor who lends divine inspiration to the audience. In MF 10:22, he makes a deposit in the Lord’s bank, from which his audience can draw in the future. In MF 25:1, though he tries to mollify the claim, he nevertheless presents his poem as the product of divine inspiration. By drawing on images of divine inspiration yet simultaneously claiming poetic insufficiency, Ephrem makes a case for his poetic speech in an environment in which he also seeks to limit theological speech.
THE POET AS LYRE
Alongside the language of gift and exchange, the “lyre” (kennārâ) forms the most common biblically located metaphor with which Ephrem refers to himself and his poetry.30 Within Ephrem’s late antique context, the “lyre” was commonly attested in literature and art.31 Griffith suggests that Ephrem’s poems were themselves accompanied by the lyre.32 A passage such as MF 21:1, in which Ephrem petitions the Lord to “sing… on [his] lyre,” would make sense if Ephrem were actually accompanying his poems with that instrument. However, at MAH 40:4, in an interpretation of the wedding at Cana, Ephrem says that the story’s “new wine” (John 2:10) indicated a new kind of marriage song, in which the “instruments of song” gave way to the “full vessels of speech.” This passage resonates with similar Greek polemics against instruments in the church’s music and suggests that Ephrem’s lyre language should not be taken as a literal indicator of the musical setting of his madrashe.33 As we will see below, the language of the lyre within Ephrem’s corpus functions metaphorically, which makes it difficult to use the material to piece together a real musical context. Moreover, the metaphoric uses of “lyre” are clear, regardless of the performative context that may or may not have accompanied them.
Within the Madrashe on Faith, the metaphor of the lyre articulates Ephrem’s self-presentation in two primary ways. First, the metaphor enables Ephrem to situate his poetic project as imitative of David’s Psalms, and, by extension, as in continuity with the Bible. Second, the metaphor allows Ephrem to present his poetry as divinely inspired (and thus authoritative) yet marked by human limitation (and thus expressive of humility and restraint). Both functions of the metaphor can be contextualized more broadly within Ephrem’s theological and discursive contexts as revealed by the Madrashe on Faith. Put most simply, its poetry aims to discourage theological speech and encourage silence and doxology. Given this, Ephrem’s presentation of himself always functions as an apology for the very fact that he speaks. The metaphor of the lyre offers this apology by connecting his poetic voice to the Davidic Psalms and finding ways to balance claims of divine inspiration and human frailty.
Ephrem, David, and the Bible
Within the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem’s presentation of himself as “lyre” does not emerge as an exegesis of a specific biblical passage but evokes generally the picture of David as psalmist.34 In his MAH 53, Ephrem had also presented Bardaisan as modeling his madrashe on David’s Psalms. Yet Ephrem did not critique this aspect of Bardaisan’s madrashe per se but criticized him for imitating David for reasons of self-promotion.35 Thus, despite its connection with Bardaisan, Ephrem linked his own poetry to David but in subtle ways. For example, at MF 2:9, Ephrem writes:
Blessed is the one whose lyre has played the songs David played:
Revealed things, without debating (d-lâ metdaršā), and hidden things, without investigation (d-lâ metbāṣyān).
Though Ephrem posits the Psalms as ideal songs, the quality that he identifies as the basis for their exemplarity—that they treat only revealed things—reflects entirely the concerns of the Madrashe on Faith. Rather than claiming David as an exemplar outright, Ephrem presents David’s Psalms as doing exactly what he claims his madrashe are also doing. In MF 21, Ephrem again links his own poetry to David’s but in a subtle way. In MF 21:1, before invoking David as model, Ephrem uses the metaphor to objectify his own poetry—to present it as, in some way, independent of his human agency:
Sing, Lord, on my lyre, everything that is beneficial:
With sound words, let us sing for perfection,
With pure [words] for the virgins,
And with simple [words], let us sing for the simple.
Having articulated this three-fold character of the madrasha, Ephrem then in MF 21:11 indicates this aspect as imitative of David:
[21:11] David’s lyre sang three times:
With strings exalted, it sang your divinity;
With [strings] in the middle, it sang your humanity;
With weak [strings], it sang about your death!
Even here Ephrem finds a way to connect his poetic project to David’s Psalms while at the same time distancing his poetry from them. Whereas David’s “lyre” sang prophetically of Christ in three modes, Ephrem’s three modes all relate to his own audience; in none does he speak directly of God. He thus cites David as an exemplar, while situating his own poetic aims as significantly less ambitious than his. Only once, in MF 23:11, does Ephrem link the madrashe to David’s own utterances outright:
Do not sing to God in a backwards way….
Sing like David to the Son of David:
Call him “Lord”36
and “Son,”37
like David.
Here, however, Ephrem still does not claim David as an exemplar for his own poetry but exhorts his audience to imitate David in their own singing. In these passages, Ephrem uses the metaphor of the lyre, especially in its connection to David, to suggest an ambience of association between his own poetry and the Davidic Psalms.
The metaphor of the lyre links Ephrem’s poetry to the Psalms of David. It also enables him to present his poetry in terms of instrumentality. Like the metaphors of “tongue,” “mouth,” and “pen”—all of which Ephrem used to speak of himself in his role as poet—the metaphor of the lyre downplayed Ephrem as authorial agent and instead presented him and his poems as passive instruments of the divine.38 When, in MF 21:1, Ephrem exhorts the Lord to “sing, on [his] lyre, every beneficial thing,” he presents his madrashe as emerging from the Lord not from himself. He stands passive to the process.
Yet, even as Ephrem claimed himself as merely an instrument of the divine, he also wanted to eschew a mantic model, in which a divinity would simply take over and speak through him.39 Through the language of the lyre, Ephrem was able to present his poems as divinely inspired but limited by the particularities of his own speech.
Lyre, Controversy, and the Image of the Poet
The metaphor of the lyre presented Ephrem’s poetry in relationship to David’s psalmody and helped him claim poetic inspiration in a self-effacing way The broader context of his use of the metaphor concerns the general dynamic surrounding theological speech in the fourth century In this respect, Ephrem seemed to draw on the metaphor of the lyre especially when he spoke about theological controversy as a way of defending the very existence of his poetic speech. It is helpful to remember here that Ephrem did not sing alone but with a choir. That performative context bifurcated his poetic identity in a complex way, in that he could exhort his choir as an entity that existed independently of him, even as it sang the words he himself composed. For example, in MF 23:1, he writes:
[23.5] Lyre, cleanse yourself from controversy!
Do not let pride sound its own will within you.
Do not let arrogance chant within you
With its songs, for it is utter ruin.
We can take “lyre” in this passage as referring to Ephrem’s own poetic voice but also as the choir who would then respond, “The earth sings glory to you, for it has been redeemed in you!”40 Similarly, at 23:8, he exhorts his “lyre”:41
Stand up straight and sing—no controversy!
Cleanse the rust from your songs and sing for us—no hidden things!
Be a disciple of all revealed things
And without fear speak of beautiful things.
Ephrem’s madrashe brought theological speech under suspicion but at the same time served as examples of it. From this perspective, we can read the lyre language as preparing his audience to hear his poetry as doxology. Catherine Bell discusses how rituals benefit from framing devices, which signify the content of the ritual itself as distinct from everyday life.42 The lyre language provides just such a frame. As Ephrem begins and ends these poems by condemning a discourse that engages in debating, he performatively frames the content of his poetry as distinct from the type of theological speech that he wishes to condemn.
EPHREM’S MIMETIC “I”
The language of gift and exchange and the metaphor of the lyre extend throughout Ephrem’s corpus. By connecting these metaphors with the Bible, Ephrem establishes a resonance between his poetic corpus and the corpus of the Bible. These metaphors, since they are connected with the Bible in only loose ways, also enable him to bring together a series of biblical words, verses, and narratives and articulate his poetic self in biblical terms. Elsewhere in his corpus, Ephrem shapes his poetic “I” by representing and reshaping very particular biblical narratives, events, and characters.
An Assembly of Women
The tenth MF has been titled by Sebastian Brock as “A Hymn on the Eucharist.”43 This title is certainly accurate, but the first six stanzas function more basically as a didactic petition for the inspiration to speak at all and, more specifically, to speak about the Eucharist. Ephrem uses the narratives of the Canaanite woman, the hemorrhaging woman, and the so-called sinful woman as exempla for his own petition to speak. Poem 10 begins:
[10:1] You dictated, my Lord, “Open your mouth and I will fill it.”
Look: the mouth of your servant is opened to you, together with his mind.
Fill it, Lord, from your gift
So that I might sing your praise, according to your will!
[10:2] Your story has steps of every size, for every person.
To the lowest step I approach, though I presume.
Your begetting is sealed within silence:
Whose mouth will presume to rush toward it?
In 10:1 and 2, Ephrem petitions the Lord to enable him to sing praises about the Lord’s “story” or “narrative” (taš‘îtâ), a story which, he tells us, has “steps of every size, for every person,” the lowest of which he himself will approach. From one perspective, Ephrem here crafts a very basic rhetoric of humility. He does this, however, not through a simple statement of his own humility but by relying upon and shaping an already dramatic biblical scene, within which he positions himself as a character. The portrait begins in the first two stanzas of poem 10. Following from there, the first two lines of 10:3 contain a second-person address to God, and then, in the last two lines, Ephrem shifts to speak about himself—petitioning the Lord to enable him to deliver the poem he is already delivering. It is in this context that he aligns himself with the biblical narrative:
Though your nature is one, its interpretations are many (kad ḥad hû kyānāk pûššāqaw[hy] saggî]in);
[There are] things (šarbê) exalted, intermediate, and even lowly.
On the lowly side, like a crumb (partûtâ),
Deem me worthy to gather the particles (netrâ) of your wisdom.
Ephrem begins by stating his lowly state outright. He then signals the biblical narrative as a way of dramatizing this lowliness but also as a way of placing his poetic self within the biblical text. The allusion here is minimal, lacking any explicit quotation of the narrative upon which Ephrem draws or the use of any relevant proper nouns. Rather, Ephrem borrows only a single noun—“crumb”—which he quotes in line 3, and then uses “particles” as a synonym in line 4. This is enough, though, to establish the connection between his poem and the biblical narrative to which he alludes, namely, that of the Canaanite woman. In that story, preserved in both Matthew and Mark, a woman comes to Jesus and asks him to heal her demon-possessed daughter.44 At first he snubs her, reminding her that he ministers only to the children of Israel, and likens his healing to bread reserved only for his children (the Israelites), whereas she, as a Gentile, is but a dog. The woman accepts the metaphor and furthers it, begging only to eat “the crumbs (partûtê) that fall from the table of [the dogs’] master.”
Though Ephrem invokes this narrative through one noun only, the semantic shape of his poem and the biblical narrative coalesce. Semantically, the story resonates within Ephrem’s poem on three levels. In 10:8 (albeit still five stanzas away), Ephrem will begin to speak about the Eucharist. The fact that here he draws upon a biblical narrative that mentions bread enables him to foreshadow this eucharistie theme, as well as, in retrospect, recast the begging woman from the biblical story as an exemplum of appropriate eucharistie reception.
Second, and more important for our purposes, Ephrem uses this pericope to negotiate his own voice within the poem. From one perspective, poem 10 finds Ephrem doing a rather presumptuous thing, given the censure he repeatedly makes of theological speech. In 10:1 he has clearly asked for divine inspiration and implicitly presents the poem that follows as a product of such inspiration. Yet, immediately following this bold request, he has protested his own lowliness, depicting God, or speech about God, as a staircase, and himself as gingerly stepping onto the lowest step. Thematically, the first stanza exemplifies Ephrem’s poetic boldness (potentially, his presumption), while the second exemplifies his humility.45 The third stanza, then, where he first alludes to a biblical narrative, combines the two. It is a narrative of a Gentile woman who demands something from a Jewish man and, surprisingly, garners his blessing. Ephrem’s invocation of this narrative enables him to justify his claim of inspired status for his poem. But it also enables him to dramatize the biblical narrative, insofar as he rewrites it as a plea for poetic inspiration.
On a third level, Ephrem uses this biblical narrative to dramatize his own experience of God and to construct an image of God by way of an image of himself experiencing God. The biblical narrative enables him to cast the relationship between himself and God not only as one of low (Ephrem) to high (God), but also of lack to excess.46 The poem results from this divine excess descending onto the poor poet. Ephrem draws this out in the opening and concluding lines of this third stanza, identifying the divine nature as one that inspires a variety of interpretations (MF 10:3:1). Nevertheless, though the nature is manifest in a variety of interpretations, Ephrem positions himself beside only the lowliest (MF 10:3:2–3). MF 10:3 then concludes: “Deem me worthy to gather the particles of your wisdom.” The “particles” of line four gloss the “interpretations” of line 1. By reading the particles that “fall from the master’s table” as a metaphor for the endless interpretations that depict the one divine nature, Ephrem transforms this image of poverty—the image of the begging woman, onto which Ephrem has mapped himself—into an image of excess. The crumbs are no longer the lowest but the most numerous.
This image of excess comes out more fully in MF 10:4. There Ephrem exclaims, “A small drop of your explanations for the earthly (taḥtāyê), my Lord, / is a flood of interpretations (tûrgāmê)” A similar emphasis closes this tenth poem. Here, again alluding to the passage from Matthew, Ephrem begs the Lord to “withhold [His] gift,” because “my lap has become full of the crumbs (netrâ) of your crust; / There is no place left in my garment” (MF 10:22). By reading his own plea for poetic inspiration through the lens of the Canaanite woman, Ephrem can emphasize, at the same time, his humility alongside the divine glut that his poem represents. And like the metaphor of the lyre, by morphing the language of the biblical crumbs with the inspiration that gives birth to his poetry, Ephrem places his poetry on a continuum with the Bible—he looks like the Canaanite woman, and his poem emerges through the same process by which she procured the Lord’s blessing.
Twice more in these opening stanzas Ephrem alludes to himself, and both times he adds a new biblical image to that of the Canaanite woman. The overall dramatic effect of his self-presentation depends on the compilation of these three images. Significantly, he begins MF 10:5 by refusing to claim John the Baptist as an exemplum. Instead, he takes upon himself the image of the woman who anointed Christ’s feet with ointment and tears, and, in MF 10:6, the image of the woman with the issue of blood who touched Christ’s garment and was healed. His references to these two women run together across the two stanzas:
[10:5] For if John, that great one, called out,
“I am unworthy of the straps of your sandals, my Lord,”
Then like the sinful woman, I will take refuge
In the shadow of your garment, dwelling inside of it.
[10:6:1–2] And like her who was afraid and then took heart when she was healed,
Heal my fearful trepidation and let me be heartened by you.
From the side of your garment I will be brought (ʼetyabbal)
To the side of your body, that I might declare it (ʼešta’‘êw[hy]) in accordance with my strength.47
As with the earlier reference to the Canaanite woman, the manner in which Ephrem here alludes to these two narratives is incredibly minimalistic. In 10:5, he refers simply to “the sinful woman” (ḥaṭṭāytâ) and states that, like her, he will take refuge “[i]n the shadow of your garment.” The term ḥaṭṭāytâ (“sinful woman”) is used in the Syriac versions of Luke 7:37 to describe the woman who anointed Christ’s feet with ointment and tears.48 Yet, none of the Syriac versions of the story mention “garment.” Instead, they say that the woman “stood behind him, at his feet.” What we have here, then, is a dramatic, even ekphrastic, rendering of the scene, in which the text’s simple detail that she “stood behind him, at his feet” is represented as her taking refuge “in the shadow of [his] garment.” But through this slight rewriting, Ephrem merges this story of the sinful woman with yet another New Testament woman.
In the first line of 10:6, Ephrem shifts his allusion to the story of the so-called hemorrhaging woman, in which the main character is miraculously healed when she secretly touches Christ’s garment in the midst of a crowd.49 Initially, Ephrem does not mention the word “garment” in his allusion to her, instead allowing its echo from the previous stanza (where it is supplied to the biblical text) to linger. The two images are thus connected by the single term “garment,” which is then reiterated in the third line of 10:6.
In three stanzas, Ephrem builds his own poetic persona by melding these three exempla: the Canaanite woman who seeks healing for her daughter; the sinful woman who anoints Christ’s feet; and the woman with the flow of blood, healed by Christ’s touch. All three of these narratives involve women who, in addition to gender, are marginalized by either ethnicity or moral standing. All three come to Christ in an audacious manner but of necessity and humility. In the stories of the Canaanite woman and the woman with the flow of blood, the text says that they “worshiped” Christ, while the sinful woman performs an act of adoration. All three receive healing of sins. Iconically, too, all three women assume humble bodily postures, thus externally indicating their internally humble disposition, as well as becoming visual depictions of Ephrem’s constant juxtaposition of high (God) and low (human).
Nevertheless, a key difference between Ephrem’s appropriation of these three stories is how the metaphors of excess function. In his reading of the Canaanite woman, Ephrem exploits the ambiguity of the image of the crumbs falling from the table. On one level, by emphasizing the obvious sense of the crumbs, he read them in the humblest of terms, as leftover food fit only for a dog. On that level, the crumbs provide him with a language to underscore his own humility. Yet, on another level, having accessed the image at its lowest, he shifts the metaphor of crumbs, stressing not its lowliness, but its abundance. In that case it becomes a metaphor for the excess of God’s abundant interpretations—interpretations out of which Ephrem builds his own poetry. It is only in his allusion to the Canaanite woman that Ephrem specifically draws out this theme of excess. Strikingly, it is the only one of these three narratives where that excess is not suggested in the story. The theme of excess does come out in the narratives of the sinful woman and the hemorrhaging woman. In the story of the sinful woman, her adoration of Christ is excessive, marked by expensive perfume and her own profuse weeping. The theme of excess is even more pronounced in the story of the hemorrhaging woman. There her claim on Christ—the effect of her touching him—is so intense that it provokes Luke to say that Jesus perceived that “power (ḥaylâ) had gone forth from him.”50 Arguably, Ephrem has taken the theme of excess present in the narratives of the sinful woman and the hemorrhaging woman and read it back into the narrative of the Canaanite woman. By melding the language of these different narratives, they appear within Ephrem as types of one another, all put to the service of his rhetorical end.
These three New Testament women provide Ephrem with a means to underscore his own humility but also to argue for the divinely given power of his poem. His posture as poet is as one placed before the biblical text, recipient of it only at its lowest, but finding its crumbs filled with divine power. Within his poem—a work both lowly and exalted—Ephrem merges these distinct biblical women with one another but also with himself. They become types of one another, and he, rewritten in the pages of his own writing, becomes a type of them.
The Wedding at Cana
In MF 14, Ephrem represents the event of his poetry as a replaying of the New Testament story of Jesus’s miracle at Cana. He is first Mary, who petitions her son to make wine from water, and then the water itself, transformed and poured into the ears of his audience. The New Testament story, found in John 2, appears eleven times in Ephrem’s corpus (including the Madrashe on Faith).51 Interestingly, four of the times that he draws on the narrative he uses it to address the issue of Christian speech.52 Yet nowhere in his corpus does the parable so infiltrate the setting of his poem as it does here in MF 14. Structurally, this short poem reflects upon the narrative in half its stanzas (14:1–5). In these, Ephrem uses the scene of the wedding at Cana to provide an imagined setting for the delivery of his poem.
As seen so far in this chapter, Ephrem used biblical characters, language, and metaphors to fashion a distinct poetic “I.” On the one hand, he claims before his audience undeniable poetic power and authority. On the other hand, he presents his poems as simple acts of devotion, or even, in his use of New Testament women, desperation, born out of his own infirmity. In these examples, Ephrem’s poetic “I,” while melding with the Bible, has been situated firmly before his audience. Perched between divinity and humanity, between the Bible and audience, he speaks to them, and does so with authority.
In MF 14, as Ephrem reads the scene of the wedding at Cana, there are striking differences with what we have already seen. First, in MF 14, Ephrem is drawing upon a biblical scene rather than a particular biblical character or set of metaphors. Second, because he is not drawing on an ambiguous biblical character (such as Zacchaeus or the sinful woman), his self-portrait, while still reflecting the ideals of humble authority, reflects these ideals in distinct ways. Finally, here Ephrem is presenting himself through a representation of his whole community, at the center of which he nevertheless sits. Thus, rather than standing in prayer before God and audience, here Ephrem sits in the midst of the assembly, asking for his speech to be transformed as a part of that whole context.
Poem 14 begins:
[14:1] I have invited you, Lord, to a feast of madrashe.
The wine—a discourse of praise—has run out in our feast.
The one whose vessels are full of good wine is invited.
Fill my mouth with your song!
Ephrem’s invocation of the biblical scene is initially terse. The Syriac of John 2:1–2 reads, “And on the third day, there was a wedding feast…. And Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding feast.” The words in the first line of Ephrem’s poem that connect to John 2:1–2 are “invited” and “feast,” but Ephrem uses synonyms for both of these. In John 2:1, “invited” is ʼetqrî (literally, “to be called”), and in Ephrem it is zammen (“to invite”). “Feast” is meštûtâ in John, whereas Ephrem uses the word ḥlûlâ. Ephrem’s substitution of these synonyms cannot be explained simply in terms of meter, because the biblical language would have met the poem’s metrical needs.53 Rather, Ephrem’s use of ḥlûlâ, “feast,” likely has an interpretative function. This term appears in Matthew 25:10, where it describes the eschatological wedding banquet.54 In MF 11:18, Ephrem references Matthew 22:1–14—the parable of the king’s feast— and substitutes ḥlûlâ for Matthew’s meštûtâ.55 In his use of ḥlûlâ, Ephrem represents the wedding scene of John 2, as well as the setting of his poetry, in subtly eschatological terms.
The appeal of substituting John’s passive “they were invited” (‘etqrî) with the active “I have invited” (zammentāk) is more obvious. By offering this active invitation, the poet situates himself —and, through him, his audience—squarely within the biblical narrative. The poet invokes the Lord’s presence on the assembly, merging his poetic self with the unnamed party who initially invites Christ to the wedding and with Mary who actively petitions Christ to change the water into wine. By subtly inserting his active voice into the text’s passive voice, Ephrem recontextualizes his poem, and the gathering for which it was composed, as a replaying of the Lord’s first —and already attested—miracle. As in the previous examples, Ephrem plays a central mediating role between the Lord and the assembly. Here, however, it is not just his speech that he seeks to be transformed but the whole context for the delivery of that speech.
The connection to John 2 becomes clearer in the second line of 14:1, as Ephrem begins to embed John’s specific vocabulary. In John 2:3, the reader is told, “the wine had run out” (wa-ḥsar hwâ ḥamrâ). Using the same words for “had run out” (ḥsar) and “wine” (ḥamrâ), Ephrem more clearly evokes the wedding at Cana, presenting his poetic assembly as a replaying of that biblical event. Only now it is not literal wine that is needed but “a discourse of praise” (mêmar šûbḥâ). Line three continues the association, taking two more terms from John 2:6–10 (ʼaggānê, “vessels,” from John 2:6, and ḥamrâ ṭābâ, “good wine,” from John 2:10). MF 14:2 reuses the same Johannine vocabulary as 14:1—“wine,” “vessels”—and further glosses the particular “wine” for which Ephrem asks: “this is speech-endowed wine, which begets praise. / This wine has begotten praise / among drinkers, who have seen a marvel!” The absence of a first-person reference in this stanza underscores the particularly communal nature of Ephrem’s petition.
It is typical of Ephrem’s exegetical style to allude to a narrative elusively before finally indicating it outright. In the second chapter, we saw this with his use of Ezekiel 34 in MF 35. We see a similar approach here. In the first two stanzas of this poem, Ephrem has evoked the biblical narrative through vocabulary whose origin is recognizable if not explicit: he uses two synonyms (“feast,” ḥlûlâ; “invited,” zammen) and three terms taken directly (“wine,” ḥamrâ; “has run out,” ḥsar; and “vessels,” ʼaggānê). In 14:3, Ephrem finally anchors the poem explicitly in its biblical source by offering a terse narration of the story: “It was right that at someone else’s feast / you filled six vessels with good wine.” The line clearly connects Ephrem’s words to the biblical narrative to which he has subtly alluded. But even in this simple renarration, the consequences for Ephrem’s poetic identity are manifest. Rather than glossing the story in the third person, Ephrem voices this brief narration as a direct address to the Lord. This summary enables him to nuance his initial petition and further the link between his assembly and the biblical text. Having articulated for his hearers these basic narrative details—“you filled six vessels with good wine”—he rewrites his own context as a further playing out of this initial wedding feast: “In this feast, instead of vessels, / Lord, fill a myriad of ears with delight!”
In so thoroughly emphasizing the role of his audience and the need for their ears to be transformed, Ephrem’s voice in MF 14 is strikingly different from what we have seen previously. Whereas before his emphasis has been solely on his own plea for inspiration, here he emphasizes his audience’s need for inspiration. Still, his poetic voice sits at the center of this inspired assembly. We can see the privileged role of that voice in the poem’s connection with John 2. In MF 14:3, Ephrem petitions the Lord to “fill a myriad of ears with delight.” The audience, then, will receive the water transformed into wine, poured out by the Lord. But it is Ephrem himself—his poetic words—that parallels the biblical water. His words, mundane on their own, have been transformed and now nourish his audience like the miraculously formed wine of John 2.
The biblical text thus provides a metaphor through which he and his audience can conceptualize the poetic event. Ephrem initiates the event by petitioning the Lord to come to the feast and to transform it, like water into wine. Following the biblical narrative, he initially plays an active role—first as host of the feast, then as Mary, goading him toward a miraculous act. Responding to this “invitation,” the Lord—in the biblical text and in the poem—takes action, pouring water into vessels. At this point, Ephrem’s own place in the metaphor shifts. He is no longer the active agent (the host or Mary) but entirely passive; water is transformed and poured into vessels—the ears of his audience. By casting himself, finally, in terms of passivity, Ephrem strikes the pose characteristic of his poetic self. On the one hand, he stands at the center of the poem; it is his language that the Lord transforms and pours into the ears of his listeners. But, on the other hand, through the biblical images he borrows, he represents his authorial role in entirely humble terms—as mundane water, transformed through no virtue of its own.
Noah and Ephrem’s Poetic Guilt
MF 49 is the shortest poem in Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith, and it is also the only poem entirely devoted to a single biblical character. The previous two poems addressed—MF 10 and 14—begin with clear first-person statements and slowly build in biblical allusions before Ephrem finally connects his poetic “I” to a specific biblical text. Poem 49 works in the opposite direction. The poem begins as a simple reflection on the narrative of Genesis 6:
How glorious was Noah, who by comparison outweighed
All the children of his generation! When they were weighed with justice
They were found wanting in the scale. One soul righted the scale
With the weapons of modesty. They sank down in the flood,
Weighing too little in the balance. But chastity and honor
Were lifted up in the ark. Glory to the One who delighted in it!
The poem continues through five stanzas to reflect on Noah and his ark as a sign of the cross and a symbol of Torah. It is only at the poem’s conclusion that Ephrem finally situates himself within this poetic retelling:
Look: my mind has wandered, for it has fallen into the terrible
Flood of our Savior! Blessed is Noah: though
His ship—his ark—sailed through the flood,
He himself was calm. Lord, may my faith become
A ship for my weakness. Look: fools are drowning
In the depth of your disputation (‘ûqqābāk)! Praises to your child!
Ephrem situates his poetic “I” on the boundaries of the biblical narrative. His opening confession places him firmly outside the ark, drowning among those “found wanting in the scale” (49:1). The verb that Ephrem uses for “wandered” (phâ) commonly denotes a particular kind of errant wandering—wandering from the right path—though it does not always have a negative connotation. In MF 81:5, he again connects the verb with the ark but this time positively. Reflecting on a pearl, he says, “It became larger to me / than the ark, so that I roamed around (phêt) inside it.” Here, at the conclusion of MF 49, he reflects on the intellectual roaming that he has undertaken in this poem—pressing the Genesis narrative to draw ever more meaning from it—and he finds that he has wandered off the ark and fallen into the “terrible / flood of our Savior.”
Ephrem’s poetic voice occupied an ambiguous place in fourth-century Mesopotamia. Ephrem was deeply critical of the culture of theological debate that developed after Nicaea. Yet he voiced these criticisms through the medium of his own public, theological poetry. In this poem, Ephrem’s admission of poetic guilt—to have fallen into the flood on account of his own intellectual wandering—serves as a framing device that distances him from the negative associations he and his audience carry regarding theological speech. By performatively claiming what he fears, he makes a literary confession—one that assumes repentance. Repentance here is very concrete: it means claiming faith, a faith that is the opposite of “disputation.” This faith becomes a ship on which Ephrem can find salvation.
In this stanza, Ephrem initially emphasizes his own wandering. But from his imagined place outside the ark, drowning in the flood, he remembers Noah—calm as his ark carried him through the flood, trusting in the ark to save him. Remembering Noah, Ephrem gestures toward claiming him as an example—gestures towards presenting himself, in his poetic role, as another Noah. But he gestures only. In asking that his faith be a ship to carry him and his poetry, he chooses his words carefully. Noah was buoyed not just by any ship but by “his ark” (kewwêlâ). Ephrem’s faith serves the same purpose, but it is a ship (‘ellpâ) that carries him, not an ark. Though he initially admits to having fallen into the flood, he claims just enough of the righteousness of Noah to draw himself up, look around, and see that “fools are drowning / In the depth of your disputation” (‘ûqqābāk). Yet he gestures to his audience that, because of his faith, because of his praise, he is no longer among them.
CONCLUSION
In his construction of a poetic self, Ephrem used the Bible to articulate a humble boldness. By drawing on economic metaphors rooted in biblical narratives, Ephrem presented himself as, on the one hand, poverty-stricken and in need of relief but, on the other hand, a broker of poetic inspiration, meted out to his audience. Through the metaphor of the lyre, he attached his poetic self to David and expressed the instrumentality of himself as poet, a set of wood and string played by the Spirit. The Canaanite woman, the sinful woman, and the hemorrhaging woman provided him with humble exempla who nevertheless became recipients of the Lord’s excessive healing. Through the narrative of the wedding at Cana he cast himself as active—as host, as Mary—but also passive, in that his speech was like mundane water, transformed into wine through no virtue of its own. And through the story of Noah, he situated himself between the flood and the ark—at first drowning in the former, then clinging to a version of the latter.
In all of these examples, Ephrem depicts himself and his poetry as existing on a continuum between the Bible and his audience. He rewrites the biblical scenes and narratives in light of his own concerns as poet. But, in articulating his poetic voice, he brings himself and, through him, his audience into the Bible, weaving his narrative into its narratives, and creating an imaginative space where text and audience meet. Ephrem’s poems become that imaginative space. The drama of his poetic self merges with the Bible’s own drama; his poetic self represents and rewrites the narratives of the flood, the wedding at Cana, and the trials of marginalized New Testament women. In this sense, Ephrem uses the Bible to do something—to construct an image of self, and to process that self before an audience. Ironically, he processes this self in a body of poetry that aims to censure theological discourse. From this perspective, the poetic “I” operates both as exemplar and as framing device, to signal to the audience the legitimacy of the words contained in the poems.