5
Soon after Ephrem’s death, the genre of the madrasha came to be associated closely with the arena of liturgical performance. As I argued in chapter one, some of his madrashe certainly suggest their origin in liturgical performance, but many others do not. Most of the Madrashe on Faith seem to have been composed for small groups engaged in lives of asceticism and study, and for occasions not obviously connected to liturgical events. Yet to say that the poems were not always performed in liturgical contexts is not to say that they were not performed before, and with, an audience. These are still texts marked by a dialogical style—they are texts that betray the presence of an audience. From the collection’s very first stanza, Ephrem speaks to some unseen other, and he continues to do so throughout the collection.1 He refers to his audience as “my brothers” or “my son,” asks them rhetorical questions, voices strict commands, and places himself beside them in first-person plural reflections.2 The recipients of these exhortations, questions, and commands—the “we” to whom, and with whom, he sang—are unknown to us in specific detail.3 Like Ephrem’s “I,” the “you” of the Madrashe on Faith reveals not a historical audience but an ideal one. These poems structure this ideal audience and build exempla onto which the real audience can map itself. Within the Bible, Ephrem found the material with which to construct this ideal audience. Ephrem rewrote the lives of biblical characters as a drama for his audience to behold and directed them to locate themselves in his poetically reconstructed biblical scenes.4
Yet, while we cannot move simplistically from the “you” that Ephrem addresses to the socio-historical audience that actually heard these madrashe, there is a historical setting within which this constructed audience resonates. As we have argued throughout this book, the poems collected in the Madrashe on Faith emerged in the shadow of the Trinitarian controversies. In these poems, Ephrem negotiated the contours of these controversies as they took shape around Antioch in the 360s. Moreover, as I argued in the first chapter, the Madrashe on Faith most likely formed texts composed for settings of study, where they performatively acted out a right relationship to the Bible in the context of the Trinitarian controversies. As a whole, the Madrashe on Faith concern themselves with condemning investigation. In this chapter, we see Ephrem rewrite biblical narratives as dramatic scenes of investigation, before and within which he situates his audience. The audience that emerges differs from poem to poem. Sometimes he finds in the biblical scenes direct analogues—sometimes heroic, sometimes villainous—in which he exhorts the audience to see itself. At other times, he merely constructs the text as a spectacle for them to look upon as outsiders. In all these poems he brings the Bible to life for his fourth-century audience.5
This chapter seeks to uncover how Ephrem shaped the biblical text in light of his audience, and how, in turn, he situated his audience before and within that biblical text.6 I examine this phenomenon by looking at a particular set of poems—MF 7, 8, 9, 28, and 47. These madrashe are unique within the collection both in terms of their compositional technique and in the way they situate the audience with respect to their content. Compositionally, these poems compile a series of characters taken from throughout the Bible and unite them around a single argument a minore ad maius (though the particular content of the argument varies from poem to poem). Within these poems, Ephrem describes these biblical characters using visual and emotional language; he asks his audience to look upon the characters and respond to what they see. What they observe in the biblical text before them, however, is a world invested with the same values that Ephrem insists his audience adopt. It is one in which biblical characters stand before God with the choice to investigate or express awe and wonder, and in which the consequences of that choice play out in dramatic ways.
In order to contextualize these five poems, I first look at the element of visuality that develops throughout Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith and upon which he draws in his construction of these compilation poems. I suggest that we can see in Ephrem’s presentation of the text an analogue to the Greco-Roman practice of ekphrasis. The analysis of the poems follows and proceeds in two distinct parts. For each poem, I first analyze its rhetoric and compositional structure, and then the way the poem situates its audience with respect to the biblical text. My aim is not only to think through Ephrem’s construction of his audience but also to reveal the uniqueness of these compilation poems. I conclude this chapter by reflecting in broad terms on the Madrashe on Faith’s construction of an ideal audience.
EKPHRASIS AND THE TEXT
There is a noticeable emphasis on visuality in Ephrem’s madrashe, which Edmund Beck first drew attention to in 1980. His study of Ephrem’s psychology and epistemology showed that Ephrem conceived of knowledge in terms of sight.7 Sidney Griffith developed Beck’s insights, arguing that vision provided one of the primary metaphors for Ephrem’s conception of the relationship between humanity and God.8 So thoroughly immersed are Ephrem’s works in the language of visuality, Griffith argued, that we should think of the poet not simply as a proponent of a “symbolic theology” but as developing an “iconic theology,” in which poems profile as “verbal icons.”9 More recently, Ute Possekel has shown the degree to which Ephrem’s ideas on visuality reflect broader Greco-Roman conceptions of sight and vision.10
The language of sight and vision also formed one of the primary ways that Ephrem spoke to his audience about the biblical text. Within the Madrashe on Faith, the verb ḥzâ (“to see”) occurs in 140 different stanzas.11 The verb ḥār (“to look”) occurs in 45 different stanzas. This explicit language of seeing can be connected to Ephrem’s broader representational lexicon, much of which is visual in nature.12 Ephrem’s repeated commands to his audience to look upon the subjects about which he speaks, and his tendency to speak of these subjects in visual terms, lends the Madrashe on Faith a consistently visual ambience.13
Ephrem gives us no sense that his lexicon of visuality arose in response to actual works of art. As Griffith notes, his only reference to literal images appears in a passage in which he condemns Mani’s creation of an illuminated manuscript.14 Yet we can think about his presentation of the biblical text in visual terms as akin to the Greco-Roman practice of ekphrasis.15 As Ruth Webb has argued, in antiquity, an ekphrastic speech was simply one that was so richly descriptive that it enabled one to “see” the object being described.16 As Michael Roberts articulates it, the goal of ekphrasis was “to turn [the rhetor’s] hearers…into spectators.”17 According to Quintillian, the rhetorician would do this by concentrating on the distinct parts of a source narrative and retelling this narrative by focusing on “a larger number of details,” to the point that one could create the “impression of exhaustivity.”18
Ephrem’s presentation of the biblical text as a visual object resembles this practice. The poet fixes his attention on small narrative scenes within larger biblical books and presents these scenes as objects for his audience to look upon. He describes the scenes using emotional language and asks his audience to imagine them with a sense of awe and wonder.19 Yet, the quote from Quintillian also highlights one way Ephrem’s vivid speech differed from that of Greco-Roman rhetoricians. While his speech sought to create the text as a visual object and used emotional language to heighten the scene’s vividness, Ephrem’s visual descriptions of biblical scenes did not delight in detail. According to the handbooks, an ekphrasis should fix upon, and endlessly expand, minute narrative details.20 But Ephrem’s depiction of the biblical texts, while using the language of visuality and emotion, reveled in minimalistic allusion and extreme compression. In crafting the text as an object for his audience to behold, he stripped individual narratives of all extraneous detail, so that otherwise distinct biblical stories and characters came to bear close relationships to one another, as well as to the audience for whom they were rewritten. The extreme compression of Ephrem’s descriptive scenes lends them a unique character among late antique instances of visual description.21
TEXTUAL IMAGES
Ephrem connects his audience members to the biblical text by focusing their attention on biblical characters and depicting these characters using visual language. They enter his madrashe in a number of ways. At times, Ephrem places before his audience a biblical character in a single stanza, or a quick succession of biblical characters in a single stanza, to make a rhetorical point. For example, he references Jonah in the middle of MF 20, a poem about the relationship between faithful speech and silent prayer: “Jonah prayed silently…. / But the Exalted One heard. To him, silence is shouting” (20:9). Ephrem draws Jonah into this otherwise nonbiblical poem as a type, providing a brief narrative anchor. In this instance, Ephrem references biblical characters in a single stanza set in an otherwise nonbiblical poem.22
Ephrem also weaves together multiple characters across successive stanzas, so that a single poem comes to function as a mosaic of distinct biblical scenes. Examples of this style of poetry are found throughout his corpus.23 Within the Madrashe on Faith, he links biblical characters across the whole of the poem, as in MF 7, 8, 9, 28, and 47.24 In each of those poems, Ephrem crafts biblical scenes as a way of discouraging investigation and encouraging his audience to look upon the world of the Bible with awe and wonder.
Poems 7, 8, and 9 share the same meter and melody, and exist as part of a distinct subset within the Madrashe on Faith that runs from poems 4 to 9.25 We do not know whether Ephrem intended these three poems to be read together, but as they sit within the collection, they clearly function as a unit. On a basic compositional level, they all consist in compilations of biblical characters, but they also develop in logically coherent ways. MF 7 draws entirely upon New Testament characters, MF 8 upon Old Testament characters, and MF 9 brings together characters from both and incorporates nonbiblical exempla taken from the natural world. The idea of theophany—of God appearing in, as well as transcending, visible forms—connects the three, though in a loose way. It forms the centerpiece of MF 7, introduces and concludes MF 8, and introduces MF 9, before disappearing thereafter.
MF 28 runs sixteen stanzas and integrates material taken from the Bible and the natural world to argue that investigation must proceed according to a proper order. It sits in a series of madrashe that extends from poems 26 to 30 and which all share the melody “God in his mercy.”26 MF 47 is a thirteen-stanza poem that reflects generally on the unknowability of God and argues against those who think theological education could allow them to know God completely. The poem sits in a subcollection that extends from poems 39 to 48 and bears the melody “Take comfort in the promises.”27
BEHOLDING THE FLESH: MF 7
Poem 7 begins with a flurry of rhetorical questions, all of which underscore the inability of Ephrem’s audience to investigate God:
Who has strayed from himself,
Ignorant of his own thought,
So that he declares the nature of the Firstborn?
Who can investigate the Lord of natures,
In whose hand natures exist?
The one who investigates him
Cannot [even] investigate his own nature.
Thus, by his very self he is rebuked.
For, without comprehending himself,
How could he comprehend his Lord?
The madrasha proceeds, beginning in stanza 3, as a presentation of the transfigured Christ, focalized through a series of New Testament characters who look upon him. Before Ephrem depicts the incarnate Christ, he first insists that God is utterly transcendent (stanza 1), yet his appearance in the flesh has significantly ameliorated his divine glory (stanzas 2 and 3). This tension between Christ’s full glory and Christ’s glory covered in flesh sits at the heart of the poem. Ephrem shifts between two perspectives on this problem of divine embodiment. From the perspective of the New Testament characters, Christ’s clothed glory enables the biblical characters to sustain a vision of him but also allows certain characters—for example, the scribes, Herod, and the wicked thief—to dismiss him. Ephrem’s audience, however, views Christ with dramatic irony. They know what the biblical characters themselves do not. Because Christ’s glory is more fully revealed to them than it was to the biblical characters, they see a Christ more obviously deserving of worship but also more terrifying to behold.28
The poem reconstructs the Gospel text as a series of visions of Christ and asks its audience to behold Christ through the gaze of these New Testament characters. As the audience looks through the eyes of the biblical characters, Ephrem builds for them a mosaic unified by a continuous argument a minore ad maius, which depends both upon their distance from the world of the New Testament text, as well as their ability to enter into it.
Stanza 3 articulates the poem’s central image:
He bent down and covered his gaze (ḥzāyeh)
Behind a veil of flesh.29
By the dawning of his light
All the Jordan was illumined.
When he shone even a little on the mountain,
Those that the Apostle considered
The three pillars30
Trembled and swayed in terror.
According to the measure of their power,
He offered them a glimpse
Of his hidden glory.
This single image, fusing the biblical scenes of Christ’s baptism and transfiguration, and drawing as well on language from Galatians, presents a Christ whose glory is held back—barely—by the flesh with which he has covered himself. In the eight stanzas that follow, Ephrem incorporates four more scenes from Christ’s life: his walking on water (MF 7:4), his birth (MF 7:5–6), his meeting of the children (MF 7:7), and his crucifixion (MF 7:10–11)—and brings together a range of characters to behold these Gospel scenes.
We can divide the characters that populate this poem into three groups. Christ, who is looked upon, functions as the central figure. The poems heroes (both human and nonhuman) look upon Christ and express awe-filled devotion: the sea (MF 7:4), the disciples in the boat on the sea (MF 7:4), the Magi (MF 7:5–6), the good thief (MF 7:7), the children (MF 7:7), the star at Christ’s birth (MF 7:8), the Spirit (MF 7:7), and the Centurion whose faith Christ praised (MF 7:10–11). The poem’s villains are those who look upon Christ and respond by debating: the other thief (MF 7:7), Herod (MF 7:7), Satan (MF 7:7), the scribes and Pharisees (MF 7:7), and, ironically, the apostle Thomas (7:11).31
The Audience in the Text
We can think of MF 7 as composed of a series of rewritten biblical scenes onto which Ephrem maps his audience primarily as viewers. At the center stands a Christ whom Ephrem composes by drawing primarily on four scenes from the Gospels. On either side, devotees and detractors flank this Christ. Ephrem brings his audience into this text first by depicting its world as an object to be viewed with awe. In MF 7:3, Ephrem says that the apostles who witness Christ transfigured “tremble and shake with terror.” He extends this emotional reaction to the natural world in the stanza that follows. The sea, seeing Christ walking upon it, shakes and offers itself to him. Ephrem says that those who witnessed this were “astonished” by Christ. In MF 7:10, the Centurion is said to have “marveled.” Ephrem uses this language to construct the world of the text as one before which his audience must stand in awe.
He also instructs his audience to find themselves within this terrifying world. In poems 7:3 and 4, Ephrem emphasizes Christ transfigured and focalizes the transfigured Christ through characters who beheld him with awe, through whose eyes the audience must also look. In MF 7:5, Ephrem shifts his focus from Christ transfigured to the behavior of the characters beholding him. He then, for the first time, addresses his audience directly: “Come and marvel at [the Magi], / who saw the king humbled / and neither debated nor discussed!” It is with these words that Ephrem introduces his audience to the Magi and directs them to connect themselves with these characters:
You, too, seek the Firstborn.
When you have found him on high,
instead of convoluted discussion,
open your treasures before him,
and offer to him your works.
Ephrem constructs his audience’s behavior as imitative of the Magi. Within the Gospel narrative, they are to locate themselves in the narrative of the Magi.
In MF 7:10–11, the Centurion provides a second lens through which the audience is to see itself. Like the Magi, he functions as an outsider within the Gospel text. A representative of the Roman government, he approaches Christ and asks for the healing of his daughter (Matt. 8:5–13). Christ agrees to accompany him to heal her, but the Centurion refuses him and tells him that if he merely speaks, she will be healed. Ephrem briefly recounts this narrative and then exhorts his audience: “Since in our day we cannot impede / his physical entrance, / impede…his investigation!” In MF 7:11, he asks them to compare the Centurion to Thomas, whom he holds up as a negative example of investigation. “The Lord praised [the Centurion]” Ephrem tells the audience, but “rebuked” Thomas. Thomas serves as an ambiguous hero. He is undoubtedly virtuous in the eyes of Ephrem’s audience, but demonstrates the frailty of virtue and the danger of investigation. In this poem, it is the marginal characters—those who act with devotion and occupy minimal roles within the biblical text—who provide refuge for Ephrem’s audience.
In poem 7, Ephrem constructs a scene for his audience to look upon and asks them to locate themselves in only two of the characters—the Magi and the Centurion. There is significance here even in the characters that Ephrem does not invite his audience to emulate. Consistently, he never encourages them to emulate the Gospel’s obvious heroes—certainly not Christ, but not the apostles either. There is an assumption that the audience operates at a distance from them. Likewise, he rarely maps them onto obvious villains. The latter operate as static others, serving to exemplify clearly illicit boundaries. Ephrem consistently locates his audience between these overt heroes and villains.
THE INVISIBLE SCENE OF INVESTIGATION: MF 8
If we think of the Madrashe on Faith as instances of ekphrasis, in which Ephrem depicts biblical scenes in visual terms, poem 8 functions as something of a failed ekphrasis—a poem that repeatedly calls its audience to look upon what it, in fact, cannot see. The tension between visibility and invisibility is introduced in the poem’s very first lines, in which Ephrem asks his audience to look upon the figure of Moses, while emphasizing their inability to do just that:
Oh the appearance (zîwâ) of Moses
Upon which no one could look!
The spectators were unable
to look upon mortals.
Who will presume to look upon
the awesome life-giver of all?
If the splendor of a servant
possessed this strength,
Who will gaze upon his Lord?
Mount Sinai, when it saw him,
Smoked and burned before him!
As Andrew Hayes has noted, while the scene of Moses’s transfiguration (Exod. 34) recurred throughout Ephrem’s corpus, it functioned uniquely within the Madrashe on Faith and Memre on Faith.32 In this poem, Moses, frozen in the scene of his veiling at the foot of Mount Sinai, is taken as an image of Christ in his ineffability.33
Poem 8 unfolds in three distinct scenes. In each, Ephrem interacts with his biblical source material in different ways. In scene one (stanzas 1–6), Ephrem constructs Moses as a type of divine invisibility, one understood not as the absence of physical form but as an appearance too powerful for humans to behold. The central image—that of Moses’s transfigured, yet veiled, face—comes from Exodus 34. Ephrem buttresses this narrative with other scenes from Exodus—Moses’s ascent to Mount Sinai (Exod. 19), his entry into the tent of meeting (Exod. 33:10), and his stuttering (Exod. 4:10). Compositionally, Ephrem’s construction of Moses is similar to his construction of Christ in poem 7, in that he builds a picture of a single character by drawing together different moments in that figure’s textual biography.
Scene two, stanzas 7–12, draws upon five distinct Old Testament passages, from which it culls five distinct scenes—that of Korah and his rebel band, who were destroyed for trying to usurp the Aaronic priesthood (stanza 8, drawing upon Num. 16); the sons of Aaron, who offered “strange fire” (stanza 9, drawing upon Lev. 10); Uzzah, who was struck down by the ark (stanza 10, drawing upon 2 Sam. 6:1–10); Uzziah, who was punished for burning incense unlawfully (stanza 11, drawing upon 2 Chron. 26); and the Philistine god Dagon, who was dismembered solely by proximity to the ark (stanza 12, drawing upon 1 Sam. 5 and 6).34 Ephrem places these narratives on a broad typological spectrum, which assumes that illicit speech about God is the reality of which Old Testament ritual transgression was but a shadow. Though these characters are all drawn from different places in the Bible, their stories are united by shared themes (ritual transgression and divine punishment) and vocabulary (e.g., fire, censer, and ark). All the stories involve characters who encounter the ark, or the holy of holies in which it is contained, and face destruction as a result.35
In scene three (stanzas 13–16), the poem shifts back to the theme of vision but now offers examples of virtuous seeing. Ephrem first sets before his audience’s eyes the Jordan River, which “saw / the ark and was divided.”36 Then, in stanzas 14–16, Ephrem creates a composite portrait of Daniel, drawn from three different scenes in the Bible—Daniel’s vision of the four beasts (stanza 14, drawing upon Dan. 7), the appearance of an angel following that vision (stanza 15, drawing upon Dan. 8), and Daniel’s conversation with Gabriel, following the last vision (Dan. 11–12). In these three stanzas, Ephrem retells these stories to offer a portrait of Daniel in which his virtue lies in his refusal to investigate hidden things.37
The Audience in the Text
On a surface level, poem 8 concerns itself with the inability to look upon holy things and the inability to enter certain spaces on account of their contact with what is holy. These narratives of visual and physical trespass stand as metaphors for the trespasses of theological speech that Ephrem repeatedly demands that his audience monitor. Speaking to that audience, and alluding to the curtain that marked the boundary of the holy of holies, Ephrem equates vision and speech explicitly in poem 8:2: “Let quiet and silence be for you a curtain, so that you do not glare at [God’s] splendor” (8:2).38 Here, speech, vision, and space are intermingled in Ephrem’s direct address to the audience. By reading speech, vision, and space together, Ephrem can present Old Testament narratives involving vision and the trespassing of sacred boundaries as warnings against the speech of his audience. His Bible thus becomes a particularly anti-subordinationist book.
In rewriting these scenes, Ephrem brings the biblical world before his audience in dramatic terms. The audience watches as Mount Sinai sees the Lord and “smokes and burns before him” (MF 8:2). Ephrem reminds his audience of the fear with which Old Testament characters approached the holy—the fear with which priests entered the holy of holies, and the sheer terror provoked by the burning of the sons of Aaron (MF 8:6, 7). He reminds his audience that the Jordan River, when it saw the ark, was so overcome with awe and fear that it fled backward (MF 8:13, 15). He tells them that when Daniel saw “one of the watchers,” he was too terrified even to speak (8:15). Ephrem reconstructs these Old Testament scenes of encounter with the holy as sites of terror. By representing the biblical text as one that inspires awe, Ephrem tacitly reconstructs his audience’s own relationship to the text and strives to create in them a sense of awe as they look upon its narratives.
Unlike poem 7, in which Ephrem located his audience alongside the Magi and the Centurion, poem 8 puts forth no biblical characters for its audience to imitate. Ephrem speaks directly to his audience in this poem four times (stanzas 2, 6, 7, and 11), and all take the form of negative commands. In 8:2, he warns his audience to protect themselves with “quiet and silence,” lest they try to “glare at [the Lord’s] splendor.” In 8:6, 7, and 11, he voices similar warnings to his audience—“Let there be no investigation among us!” Nor do the poems function mimetically. Poem 8 begins with a reflection upon Moses, whom the audience cannot even behold, much less imitate, and it closes with a three-stanza presentation of Daniel, whose behavior is depicted as virtuous but whom Ephrem never strictly commands his audience to emulate. Unlike poem 7, into which the audience enters through the Magi and the Centurion, here they stand on the outside looking in.
Yet, there is some subtlety here. Three of the five scenes of villainy present characters whom Ephrem sees as unambiguously evil—Korah and his rebel band (8:8), the sons of Aaron with their “strange fire” (8:9), and the Philistines with their god Dagon (8:12). Within the biblical text the other two villains, Uzziah and Uzzah, err simply out of overzealousness. Ephrem’s presentation suggests that they occupy a more ambiguous space for him, too. In the case of the first two outright villains—Korah and the sons of Aaron—Ephrem gives no command but simply asks rhetorical questions.39 But with Uzziah and Uzzah, Ephrem specifically tells his audience not to act as had they. Though subtle, this move displays Ephrem’s construction of a place for his audience between heroism and villainy. Uzziah and Uzzah, in that they fail out of misplaced zeal, provide a type that he connects to his audience.
HIDDEN QUESTIONS: MF 9
Poems 7 and 8 build scenes of transgression and worship by compiling a range of biblical characters and linking them through shared vocabulary, emotional language, and a consistent argument a minore ad maius. In both of these poems, the theme of investigation lingers at the margins. In poem 9, Ephrem gives it his full attention. He concluded poem 8 by asking his audience, “Who is fit to investigate [the Firstborn]?” MF 9 picks up this theme in its first two lines: “Investigation was upright, / but it has changed in our generation.” In the poem that follows, Ephrem collects biblical characters who model a stance toward investigation that is either appropriate (the Jordan River, Noah’s sons, Ezekiel, and the prophet Zechariah), inappropriate (Ham and Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist), or ambiguous (Job).
Ephrem’s argument in this poem is clear. Nevertheless, MF 9 is loosely structured and the characters he brings into the poem are less obviously connected to one another than those he referenced in poems 7 and 8. All the characters in poem 7 derived from the Gospel. The characters of poem 8 derived from throughout the Old Testament but were connected within the Bible, even if some of these connections were more overt than others.40 Poem 9 incorporates Old Testament and New Testament characters; oscillates freely between heroes, villains, and ambiguous characters; and concludes with four stanzas that contain no biblical characters at all. Ephrem skips from Noah’s sons (Gen. 9), to Job (Job 38–42), to Ezekiel (Ezek. 37), to Zechariah the prophet (Zech. 4), to Zechariah the father of John the Baptist (Luke 1:18–20). Each character comes from a different book of the Bible, and none is linked narratively to it. Nevertheless, Ephrem finds within these diverse stories a commonality that connects them to one another and to the rhetoric of his poem. With the exception of the narratives invoked in the first stanza, all provide the poet with scenes in which humans encounter God or a divine representative and are asked a question that they cannot answer.
These scenes of divine-human interaction are introduced through the unexpected linking, in stanza 1, of the Jordan River’s fleeing before the ark (drawing on the language of Ps. 114:3) and Noah’s sons response to Noah’s drunkenness (Gen. 9):
Investigation was upright,
but it has changed in our generation.
Call out and investigate who the Child is,
do not investigate “how” [he is].
The Jordan fled and turned back
to honor the ark.
You search and enter in,
so that you dishonor Greatness.
The upright turned backwards
so they would not look upon Noah,
so they would rebuke the rash [one].
Ephrem makes these two narratives unexpected figures of one another, united by their characters’ shared response to the holy. But Ephrem’s presentation of Noah’s drunken body as a sign of the holy takes some exegetical maneuvering. Ephrem betrays no interest in defending Noah’s drunken state but strips him of all narrative details besides his hiddenness—a nameless character that should remain hidden.41 Literarily, Ephrem compresses the narrative of Genesis 9 to focus solely on its semantic components, incorporating into his retelling only character names and basic descriptive actions. Its message is also generalized. In Ephrem’s retelling, the story merely presents an episode in which a person (Ham, whom Ephrem does not name) trespasses a forbidden boundary.
Ephrem retains enough of the particularities of the Genesis 9 story to make it recognizable to his audience, but he also generalizes it enough to make it applicable to that same audience.42 In so doing, he reads against the obvious sense of the biblicat text. Genesis 9 assumes that in spying Noah’s naked body, Ham has trespassed physical and spatial boundaries. Ephrem evokes the notion of trespass, but removes its physical and spatial moorings, rendering it a completely notional trespass. In Ephrem’s retelling, Ham does not represent one who goes where one should not or sees what should remain hidden. Rather, he stands in for the one who speaks of things that should remain unspoken, and reveals, through language, things which should remain (discursively) hidden. Just as in poem 8, Ephrem converts the text’s morality of vision and space to one of speech.
The scene of vocal trespass, crafted through a melding of two otherwise unrelated biblical narratives, introduces the theme that links the characters that appear in stanzas 4–10. Ephrem brings Job, Ezekiel, Zechariah (Old Testament), and Zechariah (New Testament) as testimonies to this argument. Ephrem builds his picture of Job from a scene in which God bombards him with an array of questions about the inner workings of the natural world, and Job admits his own ignorance of the answers God seeks (Job 38–42).43 Unlike in his retelling of Genesis 9, Ephrem does not need to convert the moral of that episode in Job from a physical to an intellectual realm. Yet Ephrem has still removed Job from the confines of the narrative of the Bible and has placed him instead within the rhetorical context of his own poem. The Job of this poem, like Thomas in poem 7, is an ambiguous character—righteous in the eyes of the audience but frozen in the single moment, a failure in Ephrem’s representation of him. The two characters that follow—Ezekiel in 9:6 and Zechariah the prophet in 9:7—underscore this ambiguity. Both are lauded for their refusal to question God, a virtue seen particularly in comparison with Job.44 Though they triumph where Job fails, they are united to Job in their shared settings. All three are paused in Ephrem’s poem in scenes of encounters with the divine. In the Bible, these similarities are only incidental.45 Nevertheless, Ephrem identifies these similarities, draws them out, and places the distinct stories in a mimetic relationship with one another.
Zechariah (9:8–10), the father of John the Baptist, connects phonologically and orthographically to the Zechariah of 9:7, but conceptually offers the poem’s most obvious example of illicit questioning. In Ephrem’s introduction of the character, he emphasizes his investigation: “Zechariah the priest / asked in order to investigate.” However, as with Job, and as with Thomas in poem 7, Ephrem assumes that Zechariah functions in an exemplary role for the audience. Yet, by presenting Zechariah as an investigator—in this case, an investigator who will then repent—Ephrem can underscore his audience’s greater inability to question. And so he tells them:
If the high priest was punished
because he discussed…
the birth and conception of the preacher [i.e., John],
[there is] shaking, fear, and terror,
if someone presumes to investigate
the begetting of the Lord of all!
The Audience in the Text
Poem 9 speaks directly to the audience in the first line, mapping them onto the villainous character of Ham, who looked upon his father’s naked body. Using the second-person plural pronoun, Ephrem exclaims, “You search and enter in, / so that you dishonor Majesty.” In 9:2, Ephrem tells them: “They [i.e., Noah’s other sons] walked backwards / to hide what was revealed. / You turn to investigation to reveal what is hidden.” In poem 7 and, to a slightly lesser degree, poem 8, Ephrem tried to carve out a middle space for his audience between the heroic and the villainous. Here, however, they are unambiguously mapped onto biblical villains. In fact, in MF 9:12, even the villainous “People” (the term with which Ephrem refers to Jews) refuse to investigate where Ephrem’s own audience does. These accusations come to a head in MF 9:13, where Ephrem turns directly to his audience and exclaims: “Though you [were] united, / you have become entirely divided, / for you have come to investigate / the nature that cannot be investigated.”
Not all of MF 9’s characters are villainous. Job eventually admits that he cannot understand the Lord, whereas Ezekiel and Zechariah never claimed to understand. Yet, these heroes offer little hope for Ephrem’s audience. The only possible exception to this appears in stanzas 9–11, where Ephrem portrays the New Testament Zechariah, a character who, in the biblical text, “investigates” but then repents. Yet, Ephrem’s portrait of Zechariah is unflinchingly condemnatory. Ephrem says that Zechariah, in questioning the angel, “testified that he had destroyed / the faith of his heart.” Ephrem connects Zechariah’s destroyed faith to his own audience: “Everyone who / questions in any way / shows by his question / that he had not previously believed.” While there is a subtlety to the way Ephrem connects his audience to the characters of the Bible in MF 7 and 8, that subtlety is absent here.
In its divergence from the tone of poems 7, 8, and 9, Ephrem constructs the biblical text as one that must be viewed as an object inspiring awe and even terror. In this way, all three of these poems construct the Bible similarly for the audience.
SICKNESS UNTO DEATH: MF 28
Ephrem began poem 8 by reflecting on Moses veil (Exod. 34), which he took to represent a boundary between what was hidden (Moses face) and what was revealed (the veil itself). In turn, Moses and his veil stood as a shadowy representation of the Creator (representing that which is hidden) and the created (representing that which is revealed). Rhetorically, Ephrem’s goal was to present theological boundaries as reflective of natural boundaries—both as written into the very fabric of life. Throughout the Madrashe on Faith, this idea of boundaries and their natural appearance form one of the primary ideas that Ephrem impresses upon his audience. He presents the Bible and the world as everywhere manifesting such boundaries, so that he can ultimately underscore the notional boundary between humans and the Father’s begetting of a divine Son.
MF 28 articulates the theme of boundaries and their presence in the Bible and the world by interweaving examples from both, all to the end of convicing the audience of its own inability to understand divine matters. With twisted and even broken syntax, Ephrem weaves these ideas into the very first stanza of the poem:
If watchers, lightning, and rays [of the sun],
as well as earthquakes, storms, and floods
(which, as things made, are akin to one another) are this dreadful
When they act violently against our weakness….
Yet if these servants who serve [God]
fear even Adam, whom they also serve,
Who will presume to look upon
That force in whose power all exists?
The sixteen-stanza poem that follows breaks neatly into two parts. In stanzas 1–7, Ephrem places before his audience a series of natural images that conveys the bounded nature of reality. In stanzas 8–16, he makes this same argument by drawing together a range of biblical scenes. He first references the cherub outside Paradise, which he connects to the signs that marked the boundary of Sinai. (Both appear in stanza 8, and both serve to unite the natural and biblical portions of the poem.) From there, Ephrem portrays the leprosy of Miriam (stanzas 9–11, drawing on Num. 12), the leprosy of Gehazi (stanza 12, drawing on 2 Kings 5:20–27), the ritual transgression of Uzziah (stanza 13, drawing on 2 Chron. 26:16–21), Korah and his band of rebels (stanzas 15 and 16, drawing on Num. 16), and Aaron’s sons (stanza 16, drawing on Lev. 10:1–2). Ephrem weaves these scenes together to produce for his audience a unified biblical scene of boundaries and the punishment that follows their trespassing. While Moses appears only at the margins of poem 28, it is thematically similar to poem 8 in that Moses’s special relationship to God, and the punishment that follows a challenge to this relationship, stands as a central issue.
Miriam occupies three stanzas in this second part of the poem and functions as its central character.46 While stanzas 1–7, with first natural and then biblical examples, argue for the basic idea of the bounded nature of reality, Miriam introduces scenes in which characters fail to observe these boundaries. She thus serves as the entry point for the audience, the primary character at whom they are prompted to look Ephrem bases his portrait of Miriam on Numbers 12, in which Miriam and Aaron (to whom Ephrem alludes but never mentions by name) criticize Moses for marrying a Cushite woman, and then use that specific critique to challenge the singularity of his prophet-hood. The two complain in Numbers 12:2, “Has the Lord only spoken with Moses? He has spoken with us, too!” In response to the challenge, the Lord appears to Miriam and Aaron in a pillar of cloud and explains to them the special relationship he has with Moses. Upon his departure, Miriam finds herself leprous.
Ephrem’s introduction of this narrative in 28:9 is typically terse:
Miriam, because she spoke against the humble one,
her lips wove for her a garment of leprosy.
Numbers 12 provides Ephrem with his base narrative, but he incorporates material from two other biblical scenes to flesh out Miriams character—Exodus 2:4, in which Miriam rescues Moses from the river, and Exodus 2:7, in which she returns him to his mother so she can nurse him:
Her love for the infant overflowed in the waters.
On dry ground she flooded the heart of Pharaoh’s daughter,
So that the child [i.e., Moses] who floated…
nourished even his mother. (MF 28:9:5–8)
These two narratives clearly emphasize Miriams goodness, and Ephrem builds the case further. He reminds his audience that she was a prophetess and pulls in Leviticus 19:32 to make the point that, since Miriam was his elder, Moses should have respected her. As with Thomas in MF 7 and Job in 9, Ephrem constructs Miriam as a virtuous character but only to underscore the gravity of her misdeed. The composite portrait conveys a simple message to the audience. They are not as virtuous as Miriam, and yet the one whom they aim to investigate transcends even Moses.
The portrait of Miriam occupies three stanzas (MF 28:9–11). In 28:12, Ephrem adds to this initial portrait by introducing a second narrative to underscore the themes of authority, investigation, and divine punishment. This character, Gehazi, offers another case of leprosy:
Gehazi, too, mocked and was mocked.
He deceived the heart of his master, and was exposed.
Ephrem moves from this character as quickly as he announces him and obscures the rationale for Gehazi’s inclusion (that is, the leprosy that he comes to share with Miriam). The biblical narrative (2 Kings 5) suggests a way to understand Ephrem’s reasoning. In the narrative, Elisha heals a leper—Na‘aman—who in return offers Elisha a gift, which the prophet refuses. As Na‘aman leaves, Gehazi—Elishas servant—follows him and takes the refused gift. When Gehazi returns, his deed is revealed, and Elisha curses him with the very leprosy from which Na’aman has been cleansed. All of this backstory in Ephrem’s retelling; he alludes to none of it save the name “Gehazi.”47
Gehazi introduces several characters we have already encountered: Korah, the sons of Aaron, and Uzziah (MF 28:13–16), who appeared in a similar form in MF 8. Their inclusion here suggests that they may have formed a set “ritual transgression” piece in Ephrem’s mind. Yet the characters also connect organically to the scene Ephrem builds in this poem. Uzziah, like Miriam and Gehazi, suffered leprosy because of his ritual trespass, but in a particular spatial context—that of the Temple. This shared setting unites Gehazi to the characters that follow, that is, Korah and Aaron’s sons. With their introduction, however, Ephrem’s poem moves from leprosy to the death that both Korah and Aaron’s sons suffered:
The two hundred that presumed to become priests,48
Against them fire…burned.
It [also] consumed the sons of Aaron,
Who brought in strange fire like a harlot.
Ephrem concludes the poem on a somber note, linking the strange fire that consumed Aaron’s sons with “true knowledge,” which, he warns his audience, “has been aroused by abominable investigation.”
The Audience in the Text
Ephrem’s construction of this poem sets a clear scene before his audience, and it is one outside of which they stand looking in. The biblical scenes are crafted poetically, subtly weaving together a range of characters who are distinct in the text but united in Ephrem’s presentation of them. Ephrem connects his audience to the characters using consistently emotional and visual language. Poem 28 manifests more direct appeals to the audience than any of the other poems with which we have dealt. As is typically the case, Ephrem begins the poem with a rhetorical question that binds together vision, knowledge, and theological speech:
Who will presume to look upon
that force in whose power all exists?
Ephrem repeats similar questions in stanzas 2, 3, and 4. The poem also repeatedly commands its audience to “look!”: the particle hâ opens stanzas 4–10, and 14. In stanza 6, moreover, Ephrem leans into a repeated string of hâ commands, beginning four of the stanza’s lines with the same exhortation. At 28:6, he commands his audience to “look… at [God] alone,” even as he problematizes this very gaze.
Ephrem introduces the narrative of Miriam with another command to “look!” As he fixates on the intensity of her suffering, made all the more poignant because of her manifest goodness, he exclaims, “Look! Wonder, marvel, terror!” Ephrem never invites his audience to compare themselves to Miriam. Instead, she forms an example that they can only behold with awe as they contemplate their own lesser state. Ephrem reminds them of this in stanza 11:
If the Exalted One…punished
[Moses’] sister…
Who will examine the Child of that Greatness
The Son of whose womb is a consuming fire,
By whom lightning and tongues are ignited?
It is only in stanza 13, when Ephrem approaches the narrative of Uzziah, that he connects his audience to a specific character, and he does so in the form of a negative command: “Do not touch what belongs to [God] lest you perish!”49
For the most part, however, the audience stands outside the drama of the text. The biblical scenes are vividly depicted for them to behold with awe rather than scenes in which they can participate. This poem functions very differently than one such as MF 7, in which Ephrem clearly locates his audience in the characters of the Magi and the Roman Centurion, but similarly to MF 9. In this poem, the audience finds no heroes onto whom they can map their behavior, only negative exempla that they are to avoid. The villains are given as a warning, a gruesome scene on which the audience looks. At the same time, the scenes of biblical villainy are always connected to the audience through the repeated condemnation of “investigation,” an activity which, Ephrem warns his audience, always sits too close at hand. There is thus a dark irony in his distancing of the audience from these biblical villains. Though he never accuses them of acting like Korah or the sons of Aaron, he repeatedly casts investigation as far worse than what these Old Testament villains effected. In a sense, then, the poem carries a very real threat that errant theological speech—whatever it might look like in reality—will bring with it a punishment worse than leprosy, worse even than death.
EDUCATION AND INVESTIGATION: MF 47
All of the poems within the Madrasche on Faith suggest as their context the debates that followed the Council of Nicaea, especially as they came to be reified around Antioch in the 360s. Many of them, as well, suggest their origins in contexts of study. MF 47, however, reflects these concerns in a particular way. Ephrem seems to be concerned with people who are flaunting education as a prerequisite for theological insight. We can combine this general emphasis on the supreme value of education with the use in this poem of the word qaṭṭîn, “subtle” (MF 47:11), the same term Ephrem uses to describe Aetius in MAH 22:4. Indeed, in this poem Ephrem seems to have in mind a particular person as the object of his polemic. He never names this person, but it could be that he speaks of Aetius or someone within his community whom Ephrem takes to be guilty of the same theological style.50
The first five stanzas of MF 47 reflect generally on the limits of human knowledge, drawing primarily on natural metaphors. Beginning in MF 47:6, and continuing through MF 47:11, Ephrem crafts a pastiche of biblical characters in which he emphasizes their acquisition of worldly wisdom, coupled with their ability to know the limits of that wisdom. Unlike all of the poems we have looked at so far, Ephrem does this exclusively by constructing a troika of heroes—Moses (stanza 6, drawing upon no specific biblical narrative), Daniel (stanzas 7 and 8, drawing upon Dan. 1:17–2:9), and Paul (stanza 11, drawing upon Acts 17:17–33). This is the only compilation poem in which Ephrem used no biblical villains.
While this poem is compelling in the way that it speaks to its audience, its compositional and exegetical underpinnings are very straightforward. Ephrem praises Moses, Daniel, and Paul for recognizing human inability to comprehend divine matters, in spite of having acquired learning in the world. Ephrem draws upon no biblical narrative in his portrait of Moses and, instead, refers generally to traditions of Moses’s education in Egypt, which he set aside when he composed the Torah.51 Ephrem anchors his portrait of Daniel in the first two chapters of that book, but in its generality his portrait is similar to that of Moses. Ephrem does not reference any educational background for Paul but, instead, drawing upon Acts 17, highlights his ability to outwit “the presumptuous ones.”52
The Audience in the Text
The use of exclusively biblical heroes in poem 47 is not the only way in which it is unique. It also uses visual language sparingly. Only once, in MF 47:10, does Ephrem command his audience to “look.”53 Yet, the poem is compelling in the way it situates its audience with respect to the biblical text. As with MF 9 and 28, Ephrem again situates his audience outside of the text. In MF 47:3 and 5, he exhorts them to marvel at the baffling nature of the created world, and in response to “worship the Creator.” But then, beginning in MF 47:6, he fixes his attention on a singular “you,” whom he asks sarcastically:
Perhaps the apostles, who did not dispute, were too simple?
Moses will rebuke you for he was educated
yet stripped away…Egyptian wisdom
And composed the truth simply with revealed things.
In this case, the audience is strangely absent. Or rather, they look on as Ephrem constructs a scene in which this unnamed “you” and the biblical heroes meet in competition. Ephrem continues in this mode in stanzas 7 and 8:
Daniel was educated, too, and learned in Babylon
wisdom you cannot glean….
Yet since he knew that he was human
He asked [only] about what was human and glorified Greatness.
In 47:9, Ephrem switches to the third person, as he describes “the presumptuous one” who “has forgotten his nature—that he is human.” In its singular emphasis on a “presumptuous one” who seems distinct from the whole of the audience, this poem forms a unique example. In the poems we have examined so far, Ephrem’s references to the audience have localized it as guilty of investigation, or at least potentially so. But in this poem, he objectifies the person, either through the use of the second-person singular (in stanzas 5 and 6) or through the third-person singular (in stanza 9). This makes it difficult to locate the audience in the poem and with respect to the biblical text. The biblical characters do not function as exempla but instead show the limits of knowledge and rebuke a singular figure who has failed to recognize such limits. In this poem, too, Ephrem situates the audience outside of the text’s drama. Even that move, however, suggests how he constructs his audience. Ephrem uses the text’s characters, and the singular figure whom they rebuke, to lead his audience to imagine their own limited understanding and to craft themselves and their learning in terms of humility.
FINDING THE AUDIENCE IN THE TEXT
This chapter has examined five different madrashe in which Ephrem weaves biblical characters and his audience into a single imagined space. He presents this space using visual language and asks his audience to look upon the biblical scenes he retells. Occasionally Ephrem finds for his audience particular allies in the biblical text—characters onto whom he instructs the audience to map themselves. These characters—the Magi, the Roman Centurion, and the good thief—all operate as marginal figures within the biblical text but nevertheless overcome their marginality to act in heroically virtuous ways. In presenting these characters as analogues to his own audience—characters in whom they can find their place in the biblical text—Ephrem constructs that audience in ways very similar to the ways he constructs his poetic self. Just as Ephrem found characters through whose lives he could present his poetic self in terms of both virtue and humility, so here he fashions his audience in terms of this same dynamic.
Yet, these poems are populated not only by characters onto whom the audience can map themselves but also from whose behavior they should flee. Of the twenty-four biblical characters who appear in these poems, ten function as outright villains.54 There is some flexibility in the way Ephrem situates his audience vis-à-vis these villains. For example, Ephrem does not, for the most part, associate his audience with these characters. Rather, they offer a sort of gruesome spectacle upon which the audience can look but whose behavior remains foreign to their own. Yet, there is some ambiguity here. Ephrem always presents these villains as modeling behaviors against which the audience must be warned, but it is not always clear how the audience relates to them. For example, in poem 8:9 Ephrem first presents the behavior of Aaron’s sons, and then asks his audience:
Who will escape
the great fire
which has entered the church?
Strange investigation!
In the church there
is investigation which discusses revealed things.
There is no investigation of hidden things.
In lines such as these, Ephrem does not accuse his audience of carrying out this “strange investigation,” but he does clearly see its presence in their community broadly In this case, while Ephrem does not immediately map them onto Aaron’s sons, he uses Aaron’s sons to provide a genuine warning for them.
His use of these characters is also ambiguous in that he seems to identify different types of villains. In his presentation of “unambiguous villains”—for example, Ham, Korah, Aaron’s sons, the Pharisees, and scribes—Ephrem never addresses his audience in the second person. These villains always remain spectacle for them. However, in poem 8, when he addresses Uzzah, a character who behaved with good intentions but acted dishonorably nevertheless, Ephrem warns his audience:
Do not honor what is holy
in a way not commanded you.55
In the very fact that he warns his audience not to do what Uzzah has done, Ephrem brings his audience closer to this villain than he does with Korah or Aaron’s sons, who stand as static “other.” If Ham, Korah, Aaron’s Sons, Pharisees, and scribes act as static villainous others, characters such as Uzzah stand closer to the audience, modeling a much subtler, dynmaic behavior.
Ephrem also creates an ambiguous space between the biblical text and his audience in his presentation of what we might call “ironic villains”—Thomas, Job, Zechariah (the father of John the Baptist), and Miriam. With these characters, Ephrem depends upon the audience’s shared recognition of them as heroes, yet he rhetorically freezes them in moments of moral failure. Generally speaking, in Ephrem’s presentation of himself and in his construction of his audience he is always caught in a tension between commanding virtue but evoking humility. These “ironic villains” help him to construct this ambiguous moral space. The audience knows that they are heroes—that ultimately they have been preserved in the community’s memory as such—but by focusing on their moments of moral failure, Ephrem can remind his audience of how far they themselves stand from true virtue. These characters enable him to condemn investigation while reminding his audience how easy it would be for them to engage in such behaviors.
Ultimately, Ephrem uses these “villains”—outright and ironic—to raise the stakes of investigation. In the case of the outright villains, he does this by depicting the terrible punishments that followed from transgressive behavior and by attempting to persuade the audience that their investigation into the divine Son (rather than merely into the shadows that prefigured him) will reap punishments far worse. In the case of the ironic villains, he does this by persuading them of how easy it would be for them to engage in investigation—how near to them it sits.
Within these poems, Ephrem does craft portraits of outright, unambiguous heroes—Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah the Prophet, Paul, and Noah’s good sons.56 Interestingly, however, Ephrem never commands his audience to emulate them. Often he uses these characters to condemn the behavior opposite theirs. For example, after citing Ezekiel as an example of noninvestigation, he asks:
Who will presume to investigate
a question that is concealed from all
and manifest to one alone?
Ephrem relates his audience to these characters first by setting them up as models of noninvestigation and then by reminding the audience of the dangers of investigation. But in these poems he never simply commands the audience to emulate these heroes.57
All of this bespeaks Ephrem’s continued aim to situate his audience before the biblical text in a place of humility. For the most part, Ephrem draws portraits of villains, upon whom his audience can look and contemplate their own nearness to moral failure. Ephrem’s outright heroes offer models of unambiguous virtue, but Ephrem does not map the audience onto them simply. Rather, he uses these occasions of heroism to warn them, yet again, against investigation. Similarly, his portraits of “ironic villains”—heroes whom he freezes in moments of moral failure—remind them of the ease with which one can fall into investigation. It is only the marginal heroes in whom he unambiguously exhorts the audience to find itself.
In all of these cases, Ephrem uses the text to create an imaginative world upon which his audience can look and through which it can contemplate itself. In the cases of these rewritten biblical scenes, Ephrem’s concern is not with the Bible’s meaning in and of itself, but with how the narrative can be used to help the audience contemplate its own moral horizons. As I argued in chapter one, it seems likely that Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith developed in contexts of study. The collected poems make it clear that a goal of Ephrem’s pedagogy was to engage his audience in discussions of theological issues relevant to them but in a way that fostered a deep sense of the limitations of theological discussion. As we have seen in this chapter, Ephrem warns them against investigation by representing biblical scenes as parabolic reenactments of failed investigation. In these portraits Ephrem not only censures investigation, but he also constructs the Bible as a mirror of their own world, upon which he urges them to look with awe. In these poems, in which Ephrem rewrites biblical narratives as dramatic scenes to behold with awe and wonder, we can see him forming his audience in relationship to the text through which they carried out their theological study.