Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem's Hymns on Faith by Jeffrey Wickes

Author:Jeffrey Wickes [Wickes, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Ancient, History, General, Biblical Studies, History & Culture, Poetry, Ancient & Classical
ISBN: 9780520302860
Google: ATSsDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2019-09-17T21:00:32+00:00

Who has reached out to that which is greater than him,

Without wing for his weak soul,

To come to the great height of the Humble One?

He bowed down to Zacchaeus. The short one, in the height

Of a tree dwelt. And the High One, by his grace,

Walked beneath him.

In the Lukan narrative, Zacchaeus’s short stature is read pragmatically. It merely prohibits him from seeing Christ and necessitates that he climb a tree to do so. The fact that Christ walks beneath him also bears no particular importance: it results simply from the fact that he is walking on the ground, while Zacchaeus is resting in a tree. Yet Ephrem’s reading of this narrative is filtered through his own presentation of the Bible as a record of God’s “bowing down” (rken), a condescension seen in the words of the Bible but culminating especially in Christ’s taking of a body. Much of Ephrem’s reading of the scenes of Christ in the New Testament fit this pattern. He reads and represents these scenes as momentary yet dramatic pictures of divine condescension, and in so doing draws upon consistent exegetical strategies. For example, the Zacchaeus narrative is stripped down to, and frozen on, the single moment when Christ walks by Zacchaeus, while the latter is perched in a tree. All the other narrative action—both internal (the deeds of Zacchaeus’s past and his curiosity about this miracle worker) and external (Christ’s entry into Jericho and his and Zacchaeus’s movement through the crowd)—is ignored. This single moment is then represented within the madrasha as a momentary picture of Christ’s cosmic condescension. By rewriting the Zacchaeus narrative in this way, Ephrem removes the complexities of the Gospel’s presentation of the life of Christ. The latter becomes, instead, a series of scenes that attest to Christ’s divinity.

Alongside Ephrem’s typical emphasis on the Bible as a picture of God’s “bowing down,” and his representation of biblical passages so that they depict this condescension, he more commonly represents the scenes of Christ’s life so that they become narrative demonstrations of Christ’s true name (that is, “Son”). While we see this especially in his reading of the baptismal and transfiguration scenes, poem 60:8 draws on another episode from Christ’s life:

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