George Kiraz and Andreas Juckel, eds. The Syriac Peshiṭta with English Translation / !1:5. 04 =%'<6 =97. *& :@   ?<',1 . Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012ff. Individual volumes at various prices.

J. F. COAKLEY, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY ‘The Antioch Bible’ is the name of convenience for this series of volumes, the aim of which is, according to its editors, twofold: to give scholars a fully vocalized Syriac text, and to provide an English translation for use in churches of the Syriac tradition. It is a large project involving many scholars, and its progress can be followed on the website of the Gorgias Press: to date, twenty-two volumes have appeared out of a projected thirty-five. This reviewer has had two of the earlier volumes (2012) from each Testament (Isaiah, Twelve Prophets, Matthew, and Mark). The text of the two volumes was prepared by George Kiraz and Joseph Bali and the translation by Gillian Greenberg and Donald M. Walter. The text of the two Gospel volumes was prepared by Kiraz and the translation by Jeff W. Childers. To take the editors’ two stated aims one at a time. The Syriac text is handsomely and comfortably presented. To be sure, some of the comforts seem intended not so much for scholars as for read- ers in the church community, and perhaps it leans a little far in this direction. Do readers, even beginners, really require the linea occultans on silent letters in such forms as !,%8 ? (And for consistency, we would expect (but fortunately do not get) *&,    4 , and =1 2',%8.) Some readers may also be annoyed by the form > always used instead of + and calligraphic affectations like A (final lomad and initial olaph) and B (semkath-ṭeth). Nor does the text claim to be a critical edition in the strict sense. There is no apparatus criticus at the foot of the page; there are no diacritical points as in old manuscripts; and sentence-punctuation is simply taken over from the printed editions that are the basis of the text. These are its limitations; but on the other hand, great trouble and care have gone into the making of a correct and consistent West Syriac text in spelling, vocalization, and pointing with qushshaya and rukkaka (Q and R). In the New Testament, the establishment of the text was somewhat straightforward (if still demanding, for the sake of accuracy) since the text is taken from

333 334 Book Reviews the British and Foreign Bible Society edition of 1920, which is in West Syriac dress already. In the Old Testament, it was harder since the choice of base text was the vocalized East Syriac Mosul edition of 1887–8. Not that ‘Western’ readings had to be substituted for ‘Eastern’—there hardly is a difference in the text between the two classes of manuscripts1—but spelling and vocalization rules in particular are different. The editor’s prefaces to each volume explain the way the text was made to conform to West Syriac conventions. (These remarks, incidentally, make a useful introduction to the differences between Eastern and Western spelling.) Western spellings and vowels, and Q and R, being the distinctive features of the edition, it may be excusable to stop over them here. Like all ‘global’ changes imposed on a text, spellings sometimes give trouble. One of the grammatical forms that re- quired westernizing, even from the BFBS edition, is 3rd feminine plural perfect verbs, thus changing -%8 to (,%8 ; and just occasi- onnally the form -%8 could be ambiguous. A possible example is Zechariah 9.2 where the form was left alone, 0)" $ &    : if the translation is indeed ‘and Tyre and Sidon, which have become very wise’ then I think the verb needs to be spelled (/)" . Another spelling rule followed was to supply yod in the syllable rish; so we get ?<&C for the Eastern ?;C in Isa 3.17 etc.; but here something  that has escaped is the name , which is 0,;   (and I think   by an oversight 0,;  in the two Old Testament volumes). Finally, there is the curious pointing of 3rd feminine singular verbs with     two points, above and below the final taw, e.g. =1 ?3    Matt 9.22 and innumerable other places. The lower point might be rukkaka, but what is the upper one? In fact, the double point is one of a set of diacritics,2 and there is no reason to have it in an edition which otherwise dispenses with such points. No one will envy George Kiraz in his task of applying Q or R to every bgdkpt letter in the Bible. He explains that a computer program identified the letters not already provided with one or the other in the base text: these were again mostly in the Old Testa- ment; but the decisions of the BFBS editors in the New Testament

1 M. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1999), 306–7. 2 Th. Nöldeke, Compendious Syriac Grammar (Eng. tr. 1904), §7. Book Reviews 335 were revisited too. Dictionaries, grammars, Masoretic manuscripts, and George Kiraz’s own monograph on spirantization3 were con- sulted. Reading the Antioch Bible text with Q and R in mind (something few readers will do!) can give an education in the subject. The present reviewer learned, for example, that the West Syriac rule about spirantizing initial consonants when the previous  word ends in a vowel (e.g. 9 &   .   Matt 23.35), does not apply when the last letter of the previous word is he even though there is no consonantal sound (thus -'    .   in the same verse). Even so, some of the editor’s choices must have been almost arbitrary, where for example Masoretic manuscripts differed or were silent, and it would be easy to make a long list of words on which the R and Q are at least discussable. For example, in Isa 40.29 (   ) /+  ‘and to those who suffer pain’, is the Q on beth a mistake, or has some non-obvious rule been applied? And no doubt very rarely, the choice of R or Q can affect the translation. Isa 29.3 (where the   Hebrew is obscure) reads ()',4 :' 73  *& :; and is translated ‘I will besiege you like a company of soldiers’. But ‘company of sol- diers’ is : ' 73  with Q on the pe. With R, the word could derive instead from σφα ρα and might mean here something like ‘I will encircle you’.4 The editors’ second aim has been to provide an English translation to church readers. This readership is clearly in mind in Jeff Childers’s Matthew and Mark volumes. An introductory sec- tion ‘Translating the Peshiṭta’ explains that his goal was a ‘fair idiomatic translation’ for ‘popular reading’ and ‘liturgy’. One fea- ture of such a translation—now familiar in such versions as the NRSV, but perhaps new in the Syriac world—is the adoption of gender-neutral expressions such as ‘brothers and sisters’ for " (likewise ‘he or she’ for the proselyte in Matt 23.15; but can a proselyte be female?). The quality of Childers’s translation is high and I would point out only a couple of less happy decisions. One of these is to translate √-%8 (pe. and pa.) as ‘murder’ (as in Matt 23.31 ‘You are the children of those who murdered the prophets’). This must be deliberate, but surely the Syriac verb is no stronger than the Greek ποκτε νω underlying English ‘kill’. (And we do not

3 G. Kiraz, Introduction to Syriac Spirantization (Rukkōkhô and Quššōyô) (Bar Hebraeus Verlag, 1995). 4 Cf. R. Payne Smith, Thesaurus Syriacus, vol. 1, 314b. 336 Book Reviews need Matthew to be read as more anti-Jewish than he is!) Another one is to render #'<. always as ‘Messiah’. Overwhelmingly in the Greek New Testament, Christos is a proper name; that is how the Peshiṭta translators met it; and any other English translation than ‘Christ’ needs to be justified. Perhaps ‘the Messiah’ can be de- fended some of the time in Matthew and Mark, but hardly in Mk 1.1 ‘the gospel of Jesus Christ’ or 9.41 ‘your belonging to Christ’. At least there should be footnotes in these places. For his lay audience too, Childers provides a polite but firm dismissal of the theory of ‘ primacy’ that lies behind the other English translation of the New Testament in popular use, by George M. Lamsa5 (Mark, XVIII–XIX). There is also a section on ‘noteworthy readings’, which are miscellaneous, illustrating the ‘varied interest attaching itself to the Syriac text’ (Matthew, XXIII). In the Old Testament volumes, a different state of affairs is addressed, and the church readership is not so much in view. Here, at least in the poetical books of Isaiah and the Twelve Prophets, the problem is often knowing how to understand the Peshiṭta text at all. Greenberg and Walter rightly emphasize the benefit of having a nearly word-for-word translation (Isaiah, XVI). This translation, which seems to me admirable and generally very accu- rate, shows what the Peshiṭta translators had to do in difficult passages. They aimed at a ‘balance between fidelity and intelligibil- ity’,6 most often having to sacrifice some of each. An example is Nahum 1.12: ‘Concerning the sources of many waters, which ran and passed on: though I answered you, I will not answer you again.’ This is just about meaningful, but to arrive at even this low level of intelligibility, the Peshiṭta translators departed from the Hebrew in two places. The issues in this verse and similar ones are well docu- mented in the technical ‘Addenda’ to the Introduction, and these Addenda, analysing ‘passages where the meaning of MT [the Hebrew] is not precisely rendered in P [the Peshiṭta]’, running to 26 pages for the Twelve Prophets and 6 for Isaiah, will be among the most valuable features of the Old Testament volumes. Perhaps the aims of the Antioch Bible should not be understood too narrowly after all. The text is not only for scholars; the translation is not only for Christian readers; and added value

5 The New Testament According to the Eastern Text (1940). 6 Weitzman, Syriac Version, 205. Book Reviews 337 can be found in the introductory matter that considers the place of the Peshita text in relation to Greek, Hebrew, and even ‘Aramaic’. The most various of readers can benefit from having a Syriac refer- ence Bible of first recourse, and the Antioch Bible stands to meet this want.

Françoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debié, eds., Manuscripta Syriaca. Des sources de première main, Cahiers d’études syriaques 4 (Paris: Geuthner, 2015). Pp. 448; €50.

ADAM H. BECKER, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY With some exceptions, such as William Hatch’s 1946 Album of Syriac Dated Manuscripts, it is easy to be involved in Syriac Studies and get by without hitting upon much codicology, and Hatch’s book is primarily concerned with paleography. Jules Leroy’s Les manuscrits syriaques à peintures conservés dans les bibliothèques d’Europe et d’Orient (1964) is often cited but its focus is on manuscript illustra- tion, less the material medium of manuscripts themselves. Fur- thermore, Syriac scholars have enough critical editions and Syriac Studies enjoys sufficient connections to early Christianity and Late Antiquity, among other fields, that in the US and Canada one can work in Syriac Studies without engagement with the materiality of our textual sources. This fact is understandably a likely outrage for our European colleagues, who have done the bulk of text critical work, and perhaps even a shock to hear put in such a matter-of- fact way. I was intrigued by the idea of reviewing Manuscripta Syriaca not because I am an expert in the area it covers, but because sometimes there are topics about which we are curious and in the process of writing a review we hope to learn something about them. My own knowledge of manuscripts is one acquired by inference and schol- arly osmosis, as it is for many others in Syriac Studies, especially in North America. I am therefore grateful because this volume pro- vides an excellent introduction to where the field is, while individual contributions make specific interventions concerning a number of specialized questions pertaining to the study of Syriac manuscripts. The papers in the volume derive from a session organized at the Eleventh Symposium Syriacum held on Malta, July 16–18, 2012. The volume’s focus on the materiality of manuscripts reflects the contributors’ ongoing work cataloging several collections (the Rahmani collection at the Syrian-Catholic patriarchate at Charfet, the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bib- lioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, and the Meryemana collection in Diyarbakır). Most of the contributors are experienced scholars of manuscripts and several form the core group of the

338 Book Reviews 339

Société d’études syriaques in Paris (who also produce the important Études syriaques series published by Geuthner). The volume begins with a brief essay integrating a basic summary of its contents. The editors note that the Latin of the book’s title and its section headings is a gesture to the international language commonly used in many catalogs and critical editions. This is significant of the volume’s purpose: it aims to bring the field of Syriac manuscripts up to date with the broader field of manuscript studies. The table of contents of the volume can be found online1 and so I will not repeat it. The volume is divided into four sections, with some chapters in English but most in French. The first section, “Manuscripta descripta: collections et cata- logage,” provides updates on recent efforts in cataloging, with contributions running from shorter, more informal notes to Kristian Heal’s examination of the history of Alphonse Mingana’s method of acquiring and organizing the Birmingham collection and Grigory Kessel’s thorough investigative account of the relatively unknown yet significant collection of manuscripts in Diyarbakır. Catalogs are becoming more systematic with improved, more transparent systems of manuscript description. As the material in- terest in manuscripts themselves develops, catalog entries offer greater detail, moving beyond simple lists of the works contained in a given manuscript and a few possible notes on the colophon (although of course some older catalogs provide significant detail, for example, William Wright’s magisterial catalog of the British Library collections [1870–2]). Furthermore, new websites such as that of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) are providing not only descriptions of manuscripts but also access to them. The organization that digital technology facilitates, combined with the ease of communication it offers, creates new tools for dealing with the messiness of the past and the present. Current work is not only clarifying the distant past but also clearing up the confusion caused by the chaos of WWI and the genocide. The disruptions of the present make this work all the more significant and poignant. Columba Stewart’s account of HMML’s work in the Middle East, in particular in those areas affected by ISIS, is moving, while Najeeb Michaeel gives a brief, harrowing account of

1http://www.orient-mediterranee.com/IMG/pdf/Manuscripta_ TDM.pdf 340 Book Reviews work under what are truly the worst conditions for digitizing manuscripts. The next two sections, “Manuscripti materia: le livre comme objet” and “Scribere manuscripta: le travail du copiste,” are part of an effort by those working within Syriac Studies to catch up with scholars in related fields. The former section concerns the material production of manuscripts, including the shift from parchment to paper, the production and use of different inks, and the composi- tion of bindings. Syriac Studies lags behind the study of other man- uscript traditions in these areas, even though in other ways Syriac Studies is far more advanced than, for example, Armenian Studies. This is due to the specific and local histories of each field and the nature of the sources. In the first chapter of this section, Françoise Briquel Chatonnet provides a survey of Syriac writing material from ostraca to parchment and paper. Paper spread earlier among the Syrian Orthodox and apparently had a faster development in Egypt (149). She points to the ostensible oddity of the six centuries of overlap between the two media (152) and yet her circumspect approach leaves her wary of drawing broad conclusions about the shift be- tween the two. However, she does note how a better sense of the long-term changes helps us to recognize what look like attempts to traditionalize in manuscript production (153, 156). Alain Desreumaux’s discussion of inks, specifically polychromy and its function, and then his setting of the composition of inks by Syriac scribes within the larger history of ink production, serve as an introduction to the chapters that follow, the one treating the recipes for ink (which includes an index of relevant Syriac and Garshuni terms) and the other offering a lexicon of the vegetables, animals, and minerals employed in ink recipes. As Philippe Boutrolle and Jimmy Daccache note, some of the ingredients were common, whereas others must have derived from commerce (268). The material detail of these chapters was intriguing but at the same time it would be difficult for me to assess the technical work in them. This section ends with a comparative study of bindings and their decoration: Syriac manuscripts tend to be less decorative in general, probably because they were primarily functional, in con- trast to Byzantine Greek and Armenian ones (270, 293). (This more developed decoration may have in fact contributed to the greater interest the latter have long drawn among art historians.) Book Reviews 341

The next section, “Scribere manuscripta: le travail du copiste,” consists of chapters on the contents of manuscripts: Offering a précis of her 2008 doctoral thesis written for the Catholic University in Louvain, Ayda Kaplan describes her approach to paleography, which employs greater technical specification for analyzing scripts than previous approaches. She also lays out a schematic of her system of script categorization, which attempts to break out of the blunt tripartite typology of Estrangelo, Serto, and Nestorian. Whereas the older categorization relies too heavily on denomina- tional boundaries, hers adds nuance and helps us to understand better the transition between scripts, in particular the shift to Serto. Ewa Balicka-Witakowska’s piece on the decoration and illumin- ation of Syriac manuscripts is exemplary of many of the articles in sections two and three: She sets Syriac manuscript production next to other cultures of manuscript production and then is able to articulate the distinctive features of Syriac ornamentation (339). This is important because often Syriac manuscripts are treated as uninteresting and even derivative. The last chapter in this section, Lucas Van Rompay’s examination and edition of the colophons— broadly defined—of manuscripts from Deir as-Surian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, contributes to the ongoing study of the monastery where most early Syriac manuscripts were preserved. The last section of the book, “Textus et manuscripta: contenants et contenus,” is in a sense a step on the way back to Syriac litera- ture, the focus of most scholars in the field. Each chapter gives an example of a more codicologically aware approach to the retrieval of Syriac literature, whether a lost piece of the Syro-Hexapla in a manuscript binding or the systematic survey of manuscripts for future critical editions. The volume itself is well organized and produced. Aside from a few infelicities in the English, I did not come across many errors in it, but I was not reading the technical parts closely enough to find mistakes in citation. Such a large collection, especially one with so much detail, inevitably will have a few minor errors (e.g., Isaac of Antioch, not Isaac of Nineveh, is the author in BL Add. 14591 [163]), but I did not find many. What I certainly did find, at least for myself, is a new appreciation for the material construction of manuscripts and in turn I acquired a new optimism about an important trend in our field.

Paul S. Stevenson, Stanzaic Syntax in the Madrashe of Ephrem the Syrian, Monographs of the Institute 22 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Pp. xv + 260; €99.

J. EDWARD WALTERS, ROCHESTER COLLEGE Anyone who has taken up the task of translating the poetic writings of Ephrem the Syrian is all too familiar with the difficulty of dis- entangling the rhetorical and grammatical webs that he weaves from word to word, line to line, and stanza to stanza. Beyond the difficulty of translating the elegance and brilliance of Ephrem’s wordplays, translators face numerous challenges on the micro level, from linking antecedents to proforms to representing thought and sentence breaks with punctuation. It is precisely these latter, micro- level challenges that Paul Stevenson addresses in this monograph. Through detailed grammatical and rhetorical analysis, Stevenson elucidates linguistic strategies that Ephrem employs in his madrashe, providing, in a way, a cipher that may help translators unlock the mysteries of Ephrem’s intricate poetic style. The bulk of Stevenson’s book (Chapters 2–3) is an in-depth analysis of two hymns: madrashe V and VI from the Hymns on Paradise cycle. Stevenson breaks down each hymn stanza by stanza, and then further dissects each stanza by demonstrating the various grammatical techniques that Ephrem employs. The purpose of such a close examination is, as Stevenson states in the Introduction, “to understand something of the linguistic inner workings of Ephrem’s most beloved poetic compositions, his madrāšê ” (22). That is, Stevenson’s goal is not merely a detailed description of grammatical and syntactical features that Ephrem uses, but rather the discovery of Ephrem’s method of composition through such description. Stevenson premises this study upon the assertion that through a careful and comprehensive examination of grammatical features in Ephrem’s madrashe, “it is possible to begin to understand the nature of the varied tools Ephrem used as he composed” (22). Indeed, based on his analysis of madrasha V and VI, Stevenson goes so far as to conclude that Ephrem “consciously used a set of syn- tactic patterns or templates as the framework for his verses” (192). Thus, this study, while narrow in focus, is ambitious in its aim. In the introductory chapter, Stevenson briefly surveys both ancient literature that reflects on the composition of Syriac poetry and modern studies of Semitic poetry more broadly. Following this

342 Book Reviews 343 brief survey, Stevenson discusses his primary method of analysis: discourse perspective. In Stevenson’s methodology, the application of discourse perspective/analysis provides the framework for ana- lyzing individual stanzas as text units and for breaking those stanzas down into smaller and smaller grammatical and syntactical units which—Stevenson argues—Ephrem has arranged with great care. Throughout Chapters 2 and 3, Stevenson applies his methodology with painstaking attention to detail. For each stanza, Stevenson provides: the Syriac text (with eastern pointing), an intentionally “wooden” translation (i.e., aiming for replicating the word order and grammar, not for smooth reading), a visual repre- sentation of the “map” of syntactical and grammatical features employed in the stanza (employing a series of symbols that Stevenson explains in Chapter 1), and then a detailed analysis of each section of the stanza (a “section” represents a distinct syntac- tical element that links a series of words, not complete thoughts or sentences). Frequently these detailed analyses also involve intricate layouts of the Syriac text intended to help the reader visualize par- ticular syntactical features (p. 58 for example). Then, in the fourth and final chapter, Stevenson collects and analyzes this grammatical data from madrashe V and VI and analyzes the relative frequency with which Ephrem employs various grammatical and syntactical features. The volume also includes three helpful appendices: a cat- alog of syntactic devices and two concordances of Syriac words, one for Chapter 2 (madrasha V) and one for Chapter 3 (madrasha VI). On the whole, Stevenson’s analysis of these Paradise madrashe is engaging and informative. Stevenson writes clearly, and he is able to explain relatively difficult grammatical concepts in an accessible manner. The creative use of various visual tools to illustrate the points that Stevenson wishes to make is particularly helpful. Both he and the publisher (Brill) should be commended for what was— in all likelihood—a difficult typesetting job. These visual aids sig- nificantly improve the quality of the work because the reader does not constantly have to refer back to the Syriac text to understand Stevenson’s complex arguments. The primary audience for this work is likely to be Syriac philologists (or comparative Semitic philologists more broadly). Indeed, Stevenson’s careful analysis has much to offer with respect to identifying and labeling syntactical

344 Book Reviews features and characterizing the relationships between them. In par- ticular, Syriac linguists may be interested in Stevenson’s discussion of close-knit verbs (51–52) and his treatment of the hypotactic function of the dalath prefix (149–151). Beyond philologists, the next most likely audience for this work is those who are not linguists by training, but rather historians or theologians interested in reading and translating Ephrem. Stevenson’s treatment has much to offer to this audience, though the fruits of his research may not be as accessible to this audience, given the highly technical nature of Stevenson’s arguments. For example, Stevenson provides an intentionally wooden translation to accompany his analysis, but there is rarely an explicit discussion of how the grammatical features under examination should affect the task of translation. Indeed, the volume would be significantly more practical if Stevenson had included his own fluid, polished transla- tions of madrashe V and VI that demonstrate the ways that his analysis affects translation technique. In his discussion of madrasha VI.14, section 2 (pp. 149–151), Stevenson compares the trans- lations of , Edmund Beck, René Lavenant, and Andrew Palmer to provide a concrete example of how a particular syntactic element should appear in modern translations. More examples of this nature would have increased the accessibility of Stevenson’s work for a broader audience. As a final note, although I think Stevenson’s analysis of these madrashe is exemplary, I am hesitant about the overarching thesis that we can use micro-analysis of Ephrem’s hymns to postulate a macro-theory about the composition of these hymns. More specifi- cally, I remain skeptical that an analysis of two hymns can be used as proof that Ephrem used “syntactic patterns or templates.” And, somewhat oddly, despite stating this thesis explicitly at the begin- ning of the concluding chapter, it appears that Stevenson backs away from this conclusion at the end of the same chapter: “While I am sure [Ephrem] paused from time to time as he wrote, to con- sider a turn of phrase or the mot juste for a particular concept or construction, on the whole it seems clear that the words generally just flowed from his pen.” It seems difficult to reconcile the two pictures of Ephrem presented here, the one who employs tem- plates with the one whose brilliance flows naturally. More importantly, though, a sample size of two madrashe is difficult to Book Reviews 345 accept as the basis for the conclusion that Ephrem consciously employed patterns or templates. Despite the two drawbacks I have noted above, Stevenson’s work in this volume is enriching and engaging. There is much to commend here for both Semitic philologists and readers of Ephrem. Stevenson has provided a significant contribution to the study of the grammar and linguistic art of Syriac poetry, which re- mains a woefully understudied topic despite the richness of the available material. I share Stevenson’s hope that this study “will provide a new path for understanding and appreciating [Ephrem’s] skill as a composer of verses” (221), and I hope that all future translations of Ephrem will be improved through engagement with Stevenson’s work.

Thomas Koonammakkal, The Theology of Divine Names in the Genuine Works of Ephrem. Mōrān Ethō 40 (Baker Hill, Kottayam, Kerala, India: St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 2015). Pp. 348.

LUCAS VAN ROMPAY (EMERITUS, DUKE UNIVERSITY), ’S-HERTOGENBOSCH, THE NETHERLANDS This is a beautifully written study by an author who has lived with Ephrem for many years. The centrality of names for Ephrem (“without names there is no knowledge”: Sermons on Faith 2, 651) allows this study to develop into a wonderful overview of the very rich thought world of the fourth-century poet and theologian. Originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the in 1991, the present publication, due to circumstances, could not be fully updated or revised (see p. 48). But even after twenty-five years the work has retained much of its original vigor and significance. In a thoughtfully written new foreword (pp. 20–27) Mary Hansbury highlights the book’s implications for present-day theological studies and interreligious dialogue. Following a general introduction, the study is divided in two parts and consists of six chapters. Part One (pp. 51–104) first in- troduces the reader to the concept of the “ontological chasm” (peḥtā) between the Creator and the created world, which underlies Ephrem’s entire theology, before detailing, in chapter 2 (pp. 73– 103), its implications for humanity’s search for God. Through nature, Scripture, and the Incarnation, God reveals himself to us across the ontological chasm. Humans stand at the receiving end of this revelation. Ever mindful of this ontological divide, they ought to refrain from investigating and scrutinizing what has not been re- vealed. Making use primarily of the Hymns and Sermons on Faith, the author explains the reasons for Ephrem’s fight against all kinds of wrong methods of searching God, including those of (Neo-)Arians. Part Two deals with Ephrem’s theology of the divine names more specifically, in four thematic chapters. In chapter 3, “God’s descent into our language” (pp. 113–152), the author discusses among other things Adam’s name-giving of the animals (partly based on the Commentary on Genesis) and introduces the im- portant distinction between proper, or “exact” names (šmāhē ḥattitē) and “borrowed” names (šmāhē šʾilē). While the different lists show some variation among each other, the proper names include “Being” (ityā), “Creator,” “Good,” “Just,” “Father”—all Scripture-

346 Book Reviews 347 based names belonging to God properly—while the borrowed names, covering a number of biblical anthropomorphisms, are names that properly belong to us, humans, and that God adopts (“borrows”) for our benefit in the process of his self-revelation. While God borrows human names, He allows us to borrow names from him. This “exchange of names” (p. 260) is part of “God’s incarnation in human language” (p. 202). This chapter also discusses the “reality behind the name” (p. 143) as well as the power that names possess for “self-interpretation of meaning” (pp. 151–152). Continuing the discussion of the names “Father” and “Son” in chapter 3, chapter 4, “From his names, we learn about Him” (pp. 153–206), has an even stronger Trinitarian focus. Ephrem does not always list the name “Father” among God’s proper names and as for the name “Son,” its status as proper name is primarily based on its being implied in “Father”. That both the names “Father” and “Son” are “trustworthy and true” (pp. 143 and 145; Hymns of Faith 46,4: mhayman…w-šarrir) is testified by God himself at Jesus’s baptism. The topic of the name and its truth first appears in chapter 3, but it recurs throughout the book and leads to important reflections on the relationship between the name, on the one hand, and the pair of kyānā and qnomā, on the other—the latter term, qnomā, being particularly difficult to grasp and to translate (a whole range of translations has been proposed, from Beck’s “Ding,” “Dinglichkeit,” or “Da-sein” to “unique and concrete identity”). Chapter 5 deals with the “Manifestation of Kasyātā in and through Galyātā” (pp. 207–266). The author brings to light insights from G. Noujaim’s unpublished 1980 dissertation (Anthropologie et économie de salut chez saint Éphrem autour des notions de «Ghalyata», «Kasyata» et «Kasya», Gregorian University, Rome), and places the theology of names in the larger context of Ephrem’s thought and reflections on the notions of “hidden” and “revealed.” These poly- valent terms, both paradoxical and complementary, are always deeply intertwined. Chapter 6, “Imprint of the Living Name on us” (pp. 267–306), explores the image of flock and sheep (elsewhere, on p. 206, the author argues that in his use of the term qenyānē “possessions” for God’s creatures Ephrem is aware of its etymo- logical meaning “flock”). Ephrem applies this image to the True Church, in contrast to heretical groups which in their ignorance of the uniqueness of God’s ityā and itutā and in their disregard of the

348 Book Reviews ontological chasm use stolen names or “a name without qnoma” (p. 294). An important appendix (pp. 307–316) is devoted to Ephrem’s Treatise against Bardaisan’s “Of Domnus” (transmitted as part of the so-called “Prose Refutations”), in which names are particularly rel- evant. Ephrem discusses here certain Platonist and Stoic views, as he accuses Bardaisan of misunderstanding them and falsely claiming that “the nature (of things) is like their names” (p. 312). The author situates this treatise in Ephrem’s later, Edessene period and assumes that it was written for teaching in the school, where the students may have been “linguistically better equipped than Ephrem as regards the Greek philosophical world” (p. 314). Since Ephrem’s own insights into names were shaped in the pre- Edessene period, the late articulation of his views in this anti- Bardaisan treatise, in the specific Edessene context, may perhaps be seen as “an apology for his own concept of names” (pp. 307 and 314–315). Throughout his study the author gives precedence to long excerpts from Ephrem’s works, which are presented in his own English translation. These are followed by explanatory narrative sections, which always remain text-focused. It is the author’s aim to uncover Ephrem’s thought on the ontological chasm and on divine names and this is found to be without “any inner inconsistency” (p. 323, comp. p. 157). The author maintains a consistent aware- ness of the liturgical, ecclesiological, and soteriological contexts of the passages under discussion. In the footnotes he provides references to publications that have guided his reading, mostly by Sebastian Brock, Robert Murray, and Edmund Beck—all three of whom, in different capacities, served as his mentors. Among the less frequently quoted scholars Tanios Bou Mansour and Peter Bruns should be singled out. Bou Mansour’s 1988 monograph, La pensée symbolique de saint Éphrem le Syrien, while much broader in its scope, does indeed show similarities and points of contact with the present work. One would have liked to see the author engage the research of Bruns and Bou Mansour to a greater degree. Not only in the appendix but throughout his work the author is eager to downplay Ephrem’s exposure to Greek philosophical tradition or to anything Greek. He emphasizes instead Ephrem’s “Semitic” character—whereby “Semitic” does not mean much more than “non-Greek” or “clearly distinct from Greek” (e.g., pp. Book Reviews 349

92, 109, 131, 137, 157, 166, 172, 184, 297, 299). He criticizes Beck for “imposing” Neoplatonic and Stoic ideas on Ephrem (p. 129, note 55, and 241, note 100), and he is ambivalent about Ute Possekel’s 1999 study, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, which was too late to be fully consid- ered in the original work and is mentioned in a couple of footnotes only (pp. 41, note 32; 48, note 41; and 312, note 18). In view of the ongoing scholarship of the last few decades, however, one wonders whether we would not benefit from abandoning the strict dichot- omy between “Greek” and “Semitic” and widening our horizon so as to allow Ephrem to participate in the larger conversations that went on in the world of Late Antiquity—the world he inhabited as a Christian intellectual and an inspired poet-theologian. As some recent studies have indicated, this shift of focus does not weaken his unique voice, but rather makes it more powerful and more meaningful. Perhaps J. Wickes’ 2015 publication (“Mapping the Literary Landscape of Ephrem’s Theology of Divine Names,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69, 1–13) may be singled out as a promising example of this different approach. This slightly critical note in no way detracts from the author’s impressive achievement. His rich descriptions and analyses, ex- pressed with much clarity and in a lucid style, will inspire his readers in their own study of Ephrem. Even though the reader may occasionally pause when the author slides into the role of a staunch ally of Ephrem in his fight against fourth-century heretics in , his work stands out as a model of engaged reading of our greatest Syriac poet.

Richard E. Payne, A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 56 (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2015). Pp. 301; $34.95, £24.95.

R. TODD GODWIN, INSTITUTE FOR ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN STUDIES, CAMBRIDGE, UK Over the last five or six years Richard Payne, now at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, has been producing cutting-edge work in Syriac studies and on the place of the Syriac Christians within Sasanian Iran (225–651). He has been offering a needed synthesis within a field of study bifurcated between its Zoroastrian and Christian sides. Those of us who have been reading his work have been long awaiting this new monograph and the continued syntheses it might bring. The synthesis offered by the book is found in the notion of mixture referred to in its title. Key here is the Zoroastrian concept of gumēzišn, indicating on one level humanity’s current ontological status as a mixture of good and evil forces and engaged in a strug- gle to tip the balance to the former and away from the latter, but on another level “a cosmological project,” one having an inherent politics and a sociology which tended in the “to organize beneficent humans to accelerate the restoration of the world to the primordial state of perfection that would mark the end of the state of mixture” (10). Making this conception the center of his narrative allows Payne’s book to then be “a study of this under- standing’s interactions with Christians,” and allows the conception to reveal “its (gumēzišn’s) state-making potential, namely its capacity to create networks and to shape imaginaries in the empire’s constituent provinces” (10). Though throughout the book Payne paints a picture of a culturally diverse Sasanian empire, we should note at the outset that he also presents a Sasanian empire with a decidedly centralizing tendency. Sasanian Zoroastrian imperial ideology and its elites shaped Sasanian Christians’ lives, not vice versa. That the remainder of the book will present variations on this theme is indicated in the book’s beginning pages. A vignette is positioned here and drawn from an East Syrian text depicting Catholicos Sabrisho I (r. 596– 604) arriving barefooted and refusing an equine escort to the court during his installation in his new ecclesial seat by Persian emperor

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Khosrow II (570–628). For Payne this refusal to embrace the material trappings of imperial power indicates an attendant unwillingness to interfere in the workings of what ultimately con- stituted Sasanian imperial power. It was a synecdoche of sorts: “the virtuoso performance of Sabrisho offers an ideal point of departure for a study of how Zoroastrian authorities located Christians within their social and political order and how Christians created places for themselves in a political culture not of their own making (emphasis mine)” (5). Chapter One, “The Myth of Zoroastrian Intolerance: Violence and the Terms of Christian Inclusion,” is at once an adroit take on the issue of Sasanian Zoroastrian violence toward Sasanian Chris- tians and the question of persecution, and one of the best introductions to the religious foundations of Sasanian political theory (pp. 27–38) found anywhere. It builds on re-reading the third-century inscription from the Zoroastrian priest Kerdir, in which the Middle Persian verb zadan, often understood to mean “to eliminate,” is interpreted as meaning “to strike” (i.e., chastise). This allows the chapter to present Christian and Zoroastrian inter- action in Sasanian society as part of a “hierarchy of better and worse rather than a binary of good vs evil” (26). This was as well part of “the idea of Iran,” a refrain in the book signaling the con- cept of gumēzišn, and suggesting to contemporary readers that they adopt this hermeneutic and see Sasanian society through this version of the Sasanian imperial imaginary. Chapter Two, “Belonging to a Land: Christians and Zoroas- trians in the Iranian Highlands,” centers on the Martyrdom of , a text coming temporally from the late fifth or early sixth century. This text represents the geographical shaping of the Sasanian imaginary by the mountains and valleys of Fars and the highlands of the Zagros Mountains to the west of Mesopotamia. Studies of Sasanian Christianity have tended to look to Khuzestan and Mesopotamia where was spread thinner. But this region, populated by Christian artisans taken captive during the early Sasanian period, fostered a Christian encounter with Zoroas- trianism requiring strategies different from those employed in Mesopotamia and Khuzestan. Not only was the author of this Martyrdom more familiar with Zoroastrian terminology and con- cepts than usual, he engaged them at the level of their grounding in the Iranian landscape and the natural environment of the region.

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The multifaceted concept of xwarrah (NP farr), or “glory,” so important in Persian imperial ideology, comes into play, and is contextualized and analyzed in the Dinwar Valley of Mount Bisutun, which by the early sixth century was not only a locus of Zoroastrian gods but of Christian saints. Chapter Three, “Christian Law Making and Iranian Political Practice: The Reforms of Mar Aba,” has a legal focus. It counters the commonly asserted notion that a separate legal system for Christians was carved out during the Sasanian era. The surviving writings of East Syrian Patriarch Mar (r. 540–552) show the Patriarch attempting to impose certain constraints on Christian elites forming aristocratic houses and entering imperial networks. These “worldly Christians”, when studied, allow us a glimpse into the world of the court and church leadership, which offers balance to the courtly arc of the book’s overall hermeneutic. Chapter Four, “Creating a Christian Aristocracy: Hagiography and Empire in Northern Mesopotamia,” like chapter two, has a spatial orientation. But whereas chapter two focused on the land- scape and Christian engagement with Zoroastrian cosmology’s grounding in the natural environment, this chapter has an urban focus. The chapter is an extension of Joel Walker’s work on the Martyrdom of Mar Qardaugh, bringing in the History of Karka coming from the same environment and inextricably connected to shrine sites of East Syriac martyrs. Payne’s and Walker’s texts and analyses “explicitly segment the Christian communities that gath- ered at the sites into aristocrats and commoners” (128), and thus allow us to see even more deeply in the lives of the Christian elites covered in chapter three focused on Mar Aba I. Chapter Five, “The Christian Symbolics of Power in a Zoroastrian Empire,” takes us into the late Sasanian period, the reign of emperor Husrow II (r. 590–628), and the extension of Sas- anian imperial borders into Roman territory which occurred in his reign. Among the numerous fascinating developments covered here are Husrow II’s relationships with the cult of St. Sergius, and the capture of the True Cross during the Sasanian incursion into Jerusalem, and its subsequent use as a talisman and diplomatic tool by the Sasanians. Though we are presented with a Sasanian court and emperor which could transgress Christian and Zoroastrian boundaries, the Sasanian emperor rendered here would ultimately maintain them. Book Reviews 353

The conclusion to the book is centered partly on the burial of the final Sasanian emperor Yazdegird III in 651. This was a burial performed by an East Syrian bishop rather than by a Zoroastrian Mobed. Payne writes about this perplexing event that “[w]ith the aristocracy having abrogated empire and religion simultaneously, only Christians remained, in this account, to treat the body of the sovereign appropriately” (199). It is important not only to be reminded that the Sasanian Empire was Zoroastrian, but also to be shown how this was so. The Syriac corpus documenting the social and religious life of the Sasanian Empire is far more extensive, accessible, and contem- poraneous than the Middle Persian Zoroastrian corpus (as those having ventured into Middle Persian numismatics and sigillography will attest). With the growth of Syriac studies as a field often outpacing Syriacists’ grounding in Middle Iranian studies, Payne has rendered an extremely valuable service with this book. His repositioning of the Zoroastrian imperial world view to center stage, and the set of analytical tools he has provided us need to be- come part of our current framework. But it is also important to remember that Syriac Christianity possessed a cultural longue durée that Zoroastrianism did not. Sasanian Christians’ connections to the , its religion and culture, gave them agency and mobility which Sasanian Zoroastrians did not have. Connections to Christian communities in Central Asia, China, and India were also held without parallel. Tabari’s account of Yazdegird III’s perplex- ing burial, unlike the Ferdowsi account on which Payne focuses, points to Sasanian royals having built churches and paid debts of the , the Sasanian queen Shirin’s conversion to the Christian faith, and her family’s “beneficence to the Christians.” This merited the body of Yazdegird III being interred in the “garden of the archbishops,” situated in Merv, and his body being transported by church elites in the manner of the church’s martyrs (Tabari, History, vol. 15, [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], p.89). The full story of what happened to Zoroastrianism once it lost its final empire has not yet been fully told. But Syro-Persian Chris- tianity’s connection to the Sasanian Empire can be better understood by looking to the Sasanian court’s survival in Central Asia with Chinese support for a century after Yazdegird III’s burial. This was a period in which the East Syrians’ religion was given by

354 Book Reviews the Tang court the official nomenclature of “The Persian Teaching” (Bo-si jiao) rather than Persian Zoroastrians, and Persian royals were buried in Tang ancestral cemeteries throughout the seventh and eighth century. All of this suggests that the ultimately Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire presented to us by Payne might be painted in overly stark and contrasting tones, and as less of “a state of mixture” than may be warranted, at least in some cases, and that the conversation started by this book deserves to continue.

Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaheen Al-Murikhi, and Haya Al Thani, eds., The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century, Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 38 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014). Pp. ix + 288; $25 (paperback).

Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaheen Al-Murikhi, and Haya Al Thani, eds., An Anthology of Syriac Writers from Qatar in the Seventh Century, Gorgias Eastern Christians Studies 39 (Piscat- away, NJ: Gorgias Press 2015). Pp. xvi + 718; $25 (paperback).

ERIN GALGAY WALSH, DUKE UNIVERSITY Within the field of Syriac studies, the literary and monastic com- munities from the region known in Syriac as Beth Qaṭraye have received little attention. Spanning present-day Qatar, Bahrain and the Eastern coast of Arabia, Beth Qaṭraye was home to Christians from approximately the mid-fourth to the ninth century. This was an area of linguistic diversity, and in addition to evidence for Christians speaking and Persian, literary witnesses attest to the existence of a “language of Beth Qaṭraye.” However, Syriac was the literary and liturgical language for the region’s Christian inhab- itants. Attending to the literary and historical legacy of Syriac writers from Beth Qaṭraye, this two-volume collection of essays and textual editions is the fruit of an international conference, “The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century CE,” which was held at Qatar University in 2014. Although the essays of the first volume cover a wide variety of topics, the editors have selected and organized these complemen- tary works into a coherent and elegant collection. Mario Kozah’s “Introduction” orients the reader to the study of Beth Qaṭraye, providing brief overviews of seminal authors such as Īshōyahb III, Isaac of Nineveh (or Isaac Qaṭraya),  Qaṭraya, Gabriel Qaṭraya bar Lipah the liturgical commentator, Abraham Qaṭraya bar Lipah, Aḥūb Qaṭraya as well as anonymous writers. Concen- trated in the seventh century, these authors represent a formative moment in the exegetical, theological, and philosophical develop- ment of the Church of the East, and the remaining essays in the volume explore the flowering of this moment of intellectual vigor. Haya Al Thani’s survey of the archaeological evidence of Beth Qaṭraye chronicles the material evidence for the presence of

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Christians within the area, paying special attention to the remains of monastic structures. Traces of churches and monasteries once occupied by adherents of the East-Syriac Church are found in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Evidence from places such as Qasr Al Malehat on the east coast of Qatar suggests the existence of complex trade networks linking the region to places far afield. Within the limited space of a single essay, Suleiman A. Mourad covers an impressive amount of material, chronicling the growth and development of Christianity in Arabia from the fourth to ninth century. Although he raises the thorny issues of historical accuracy in Christian as well as Islamic sources, Mourad provides the basic contours of how Christianity arrived and fared in the regions of the Hijaz, Najran, Eastern Arabia, and Beth Qaṭraye. Combining archaeological evidence with textual evidence, he demonstrates that the degree and texture of Christian presence varied throughout the region, and the interaction of Christians of varying Christological viewpoints is suggested as one possible avenue for future research. After these introductory essays, the scope narrows to deeply philological and philosophical examinations. Abdul Rahman Chamseddine ruminates on the Arabic term ḥanif (‘inclination’), a root that appears twelve times in the Quran, in light of Syriac ante- cedents such as ḥanpa (“pagan”). The theme of linguistic penetra- tion and multilingualism is a thread that runs throughout several of the essays, and one that would bear further development. Among the authors hailing from Beth Qaṭraye, Isaac of Nineveh receives significant attention. Grigory Kessel’s “The Man- uscript Heritage of Isaac of Nineveh: A Survey of Syriac Manuscripts” is a rich and elegant study of the manuscript wit- nesses, and Kessel limns the textual transmission of the multiple parts of Isaac’s work. Illuminating the editorial decisions of Paul Bedjan, Kessel shows the complexity of reconstructing a manu- script history due to the subsequent loss of witnesses Bedjan used. Kessel highlights the potential for monastic miscellanies to shed light on the various parts of Isaac’s corpus. His reconstruction takes into account the added complexity of the ecclesiastical affilia- tion of the manuscripts along with their origin, showing how East Syriac, Syriac Orthodox, and Melkite scribes variously preserved and framed the three parts of Isaac’s oeuvre, linking manuscripts to specific monasteries whenever possible. Drawing our attention to Book Reviews 357 the language of remembrance and mindfulness of God (uhdânâ d- alâhâ) as a means of spiritual transformation, Mary Hansbury’s evocative essay places Isaac in conversation with other Christian writers such as Philoxenos and Evagrius and charts pathways of dialogue with Jewish and Islamic texts. Through the concatenation of passages from Isaac’s Third Part (recently edited and published by Sabino Chialà and translated by Hansbury in the companion volume), she begins to draw out the inner logic of Isaac’s use of this term while contextualizing his frequent usage within a larger conversation about theosis and spiritual ascent. The full extent of Isaac’s literary production is the subject of Sabino Chialà’s essay on the ongoing work to discern whether remnants of texts attributed to Isaac in Syriac and Arabic manuscripts (and heretofore omitted from his corpus) represent additional parts of his writings or are spurious attributions. Restricting his attention to two discourses whose critical editions he recently published, Chialà tests the pro- bity of the manuscript ascription of these works to the “fifth part of Mar Isaac, bishop of Nineveh.” After laying out attestations of a “fifth part” of Isaac’s works, most importantly in the Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers by Abdisho Bar Berika, Chialà argues that the theological contents of the text itself hold the key to untangling the mystery. The Catalogue further attests that the theological nature of the text roused opposition from Daniel Bar Tubanita. Citing the texts under question, Chialà argues that they do indeed belong to Isaac since they bear witness to the Syriac author’s familiarity with the concept of apokatastasis that would have inspired the type of heated rebuttal attributed to Daniel. This case is strengthened by the claim of the Muslim author Shahrastani that Isaac held such a view. Shifting to other East Syriac authors of the region, Bas ter Haar Romeny clarifies the identity of the biblical exegete Ahob of Qatar, as well as the knotty issues of the textual transmission of his works. Piecing together testimony from authors such as Abdisho as well as references and quotations in commentaries by Ishodad of Merv, an Anonymous Commentary, and the Commentary of ms. (olim) Diyarbakir 22. Building on Lucas Van Rompay’s study of these last two commentaries, Romeny teases out from these textual fragments a profile of Ahob as a skilled and distinctive biblical interpreter. In Romeny’s hands, Ahob emerges as a vital link in the East Syriac tradition of incorporating the work of Theodore of

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Mopsuestia into the fabric of the Church’s intellectual life. Sebastian Brock brings to the fore Gabriel Qaṭraya’s commentary on the Liturgical Offices, a critical witness to East Syriac liturgy before the reforms of Catholicos Ishoyahb III (649–659). Remarkably aware of far-flung liturgical practices among the “Rhomaye” and in Antioch, Gabriel may have travelled widely. Building on his previous research, Brock demonstrates the breadth of literary sources within Gabriel’s work, including Narsai, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Evagrius, as well as classical authors like Aristotle and Pythagoras.1 Gabriel, fully conversant with these texts, provides a window into the intellectual world of the Church of the East including Beth Qaṭraye. This scholarly community, fully animated through translations also shared with the Syriac Orthodox communities in the Late Roman Empire, par- ticipated in sustained reflection and dialogue with these antecedent authors. The question of how writers from Beth Qaṭraye were received in later periods is the subject of Thomas A. Carlson’s essay “The Future of the Past: The Reception of Syriac Qaṭraye Authors in Late Medieval Iraq.” The fifteenth-century poet Isḥaq Shbadnaya, from northern Iraq, provides a valuable test case, given the abun- dance of quotations from earlier authors that appear in his poems. Carlson’s reflections on his own methodology and the challenges of studying medieval transmission history frame his editions and translations of Shbadnaya’s excerpts. His research demonstrates the enduring legacy these authors enjoyed within the East Syriac tradition. In addition to his introduction, Mario Kozah persuasively argues that a Garshuni manuscript attributed to Philoxenos of Mabbug is actually a translation of Dadisho Qaṭraya’s Syriac com- mentary on Enanisho’s Paradise of the Fathers. Like earlier essays in the volume, Kozah draws attention to the complexities of textual transmission. Through obscuring authorial identity, West Syriac scribes preserved East Syriac texts in both Syriac and later

1 Sebastian Brock, “Patristic Quotations in Gabriel Qatraya’s Com- mentary on the Liturgical Offices,” in A. Binggeli, A. Boud’hors, and M. Cassin, eds., Manuscripta Graeca et Orientalia: Mélanges monastiques et pat- ristiques en l’honneur de Paul Géhin, OLA 243 (Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2016), 129–50. Book Reviews 359

Garshuni translations. Taking up the fragments of Dadisho Qaṭraya’s Book of Perfection of Disciplines, David Phillips finds a wealth of references to as well as to other authors like Evagrius, yielding a clearer picture of the author’s intellectual climate. Mining these authors may ultimately result in the expansion of Theodore’s extant corpus through their citation and preservation of the Interpreter. The volume ends with two essays that look outward towards linkages between Beth Qaṭraye and the larger late antique and early medieval world. From the vantage point of translation, Robert A. Kitchen approaches the authors Dadisho Qaṭraya, Isaac of Nine- veh, and John Saba or John of Dalyatha through the Book of Monks, a translation and amalgamation of their writings into Geez for Ethiopian Orthodox novices. Of particular interest for Kitchen is Dadisho Qaṭraya’s Commentary on the Paradise of the Fathers, which became a part of the Book of the Three Monks after the Ethiopian renaissance of the late 13th century. However, the translator ameliorated the issue of Dadisho’s confessional adherence through attributing the texts to “Filekseyus” or Philoxenos, bolstering tex- tual authority through association with solid orthodox miaphysite and anti-Chalcedonian thought. Traveling to the new region as Christian Arabic translations of Syriac, these texts do not obscure the identity of other authors from Beth Qaṭraye such as Isaac of Nineveh or John of Dalyatha. Kitchen also shows how the pres- ence of material from Evagrius and Theodore of Mopsuestia frustrates attempts of modern scholars to impose confessional clarity onto the textual production and transmission of the period. In addition to offering an astute assessment of the text’s context and suggesting resonances with Philoxenos’ genuine corpus as well as the Book of Steps, Kitchen notes the distinctive form of the text is the widely recognized question-and-answer genre, erotapokriseis. The final essay from Saif Shaheen Al-Murikhi provides a historical overview of the regional shift from Persian control to the emergent Islamic rule, paying particular attention to the institutional and social factors that allowed Christianity to weather these developments. First making inroads into the Gulf region in the fourth century, Christianity in the region existed in a religiously pluralistic atmosphere, and Arab tribes in the area used Syriac, especially in religious settings. Unfortunately, as Al-Murikhi notes, historians face a paucity of resources and there are no Arabic

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Christian writings that speak specifically to the region’s religious environment. In conjunction with the volume of essays, the second volume features translations and editions of texts from the authors of Beth Qaṭraye. Prepared by the scholars whose essays appear in the first volume, these pieces range from translated parts of larger texts to critical editions. Short introductions to each text reveal the rationale for their inclusion and significance within the tradition. This volume grants access to previously obscure texts such as the introductory piece of Ahob of Qatar (Aḥūb Qaṭraya)’s Book of the Aims of the Psalms. Mario Kozah, Suleiman Mourad, and Abdul- rahim Abu-Husayn edit and make accessible for readers the Fourth Part of Isaac Qaṭraya’s Ascetic Homilies in Garshuni as well as Dadisho Qaṭraya’s Commentary on the Paradise of the Fathers. One of the most important features of the second volume is the variety of genres represented. The History of Mar Yawnan, translated by Sebastian Brock, contains the eponymous hagiog- raphy of the founder of a monastery within the area of Piroz- Shabur/Anbar along the Euphrates. As Brock notes, the text provides a valuable lens on East Syriac monasticism in the region when placed in conversation with recent archaeological research. Those interested in legal traditions will value Mario Kozah’s trans- lation of an anonymously authored preface to a Syriac translation of Mar Shemon (of Rew-Ardashir)’s Law Book. The Law Book, originally written in Persian, deals with family and hereditary law, and the Syriac translation served as an important precedent for later canonical traditions within the Church of the East. This piece, along with Kozah’s introduction, underscores the potential of this material for scholars of multilingualism and translation technique. This capacious collection of texts will hopefully serve as a catalyst for further translations and manuscript editing. These volumes serve as essential introductory material about this vibrant and under-studied region within the realm of Syriac Christianity. In addition to providing ample bibliography and explanatory footnotes, all the contributors offer insights into future paths of research and point out lacunae in our present knowledge. One desideratum would be a deeper engagement with the theologi- cal views of the various authors presented. Such work may also avoid consequential terms such as “Nestorian,” a label that too often glosses nuanced theological debate. While several essays Book Reviews 361 point to resonances across religious traditions, more research must be done to fully substantiate such connections. The reader is also left with lingering questions about the coexistence of multiple spo- ken languages with Syriac as a literary and liturgical language, and the linguistic profile of the “language of Beth Qaṭraye” deserves more attention. The anthology of texts and translations will be instrumental in achieving these research goals. Several themes arise organically among the essays, such as the Evagrian influence, the enigmatic multilingualism of the region, and the webs of textual exchange and translation between Chris- tians of different Christological commitments. In his introduction, Mario Kozah argues that Beth Qaṭraye offers scholars the oppor- tunity to nuance previous perceptions of “center and periphery” of learning within the region, drawing greater attention to the role of the Arabian peninsula in the production of knowledge. The efforts of the authors and editors of these volumes have made a major step forward in accomplishing that goal.

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