RBL 12/2021 Jeffrey Wickes Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith Christianity in Late Antiquity 5 Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 209. Hardcover. $95.00. ISBN 9780520302860. Robert A. Kitchen Regina, Saskatchewan This monograph is a revision of Jeffrey Wickes’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, built upon the foundation of his translation of St. Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Faith (Fathers of the Church; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015). Ephrem (309–373), the most renowned of Syriac poets and biblical exegetes, composed a large number of metered poems or madrashe, sung or chanted during the liturgy or in other community settings. It is because of their liturgical use that the label “hymn” has generally been applied in translation. Many of these madrashe/hymns were collated into single manuscripts based on common themes (Nativity, Virginity, the Church, Against Heresies, Paradise, Fasting, Carmina Nisibena, On Abraham Kidunaya and Julianus Saba). The Hymns on Faith, the largest of these collations, consists of eighty-seven poems of varying length and with thirteen different syllabic meters. The madrashe do not have individual titles, but each one begins with a melody title, an opening stanza, and then a refrain for the assembly to chant in response. The melodies are no longer identifiable. It is uncertain whether Ephrem himself gathered these poems in these thematic collections or cycles or if this were the later compilations of students. Some madrashe do not fit the cycle’s theme, as in the case of a series of nine short poems on different aspects of the Jonah story inserted in the cycle “On Virginity.” Wickes affirms that this largest cycle, “On Faith,” has strong cohesiveness in its vocabulary and subject matter. This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. It is, however, not intended for a liturgical environment. References to liturgical events occur in only three of the eighty-seven madrashe. Traditional references to faith, moreover, are seldom mentioned. Instead, Ephrem intends these poems for some form of a study group, engaged in discussion and debate, the purpose of which is to counter the anti-Nicene and neo-Arian revival in the 360s. Ironically, Wickes notes, Ephrem does not once mention Nicea throughout all these madrashe, although he definitely seems to have absorbed the Council of 318 deeply in his way of understanding God and the world. A dominant concept, “investigation,” is threaded throughout the full work. The problem is not faith per se but how is one able to know about God. In the post-Nicene assessments of the birth and resurrection of Jesus, Ephrem challenges the investigators who want to divide and separate the natures of Christ, especially when using nonbiblical language. The Bible, Wickes reads Ephrem, provides the appropriate language, illustrative characters, and self-revelations of God. Anything else introduces a human logic that cannot accurately comprehend God’s nature. Instead of investigating and describing/defining God, Ephrem calls us to simply, purely, look in awe and worship. Ephrem reads the Bible and the natural world into these poems, seemingly dividing the personalities as heroes or villains, in Wickes’s expression, those who do not investigate God and those who do investigate. Ephrem’s approach to the Bible is not in the manner of exegesis or commentary; he rarely cites a biblical verse, and when he does the context is not explained. Single words or short enigmatic phrases evoke a particular story, biblical character, or event, storming the reader’s/listener’s mind. The participants in these study groups needed to be thoroughly literate and saturated in the scriptures, although Ephrem’s images and words flash in one’s subconscious, rather than by means of intellectual recognition. Wickes reconstructs Ephrem’s strategies, acknowledging that there can be multiple interpretations. Emphasizing that his monograph is not a formal commentary on the entire corpus of Ephrem’s eighty-seven madrashe, Wickes mentions, but does not otherwise examine, the five madrashe “On the Pearl,” which have received considerable scholarly attention. Wickes directs our attention to the literary world Ephrem has molded of the natural world, the Bible, and his own personality in the context of the anti-Nicene subordinationist controversies. What Wickes accomplishes, however, is perhaps of much more significance than the interpretation of these critical poems. Wickes is able to illustrate in detail how Ephrem thinks and what strategies and purposes he pursues and so pulls back in part the veil on the poet’s personality, “a late antique literary imagination at work.” Wickes follows the path of how Ephrem maneuvers the audience into the text, as participants in the fray or sometimes as outsiders looking in. Instead of extracting or exegeting the meaning out of a biblical text, Wickes understands Ephrem to be inserting the Bible into the world’s activity, a This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. different form of eisegesis, invading its space and that of the audience, pressing them to see a new world. Wickes recalls Sidney Griffith’s observation that Ephrem turned to the scriptures in search of paradigms to place an acceptable Christian construction on the events of his own time, that is, understanding historical phenomena through the Bible’s narratives. As a by-product, Ephrem molds his own poetic self through the words and images of the Bible. Wickes shifts to Ephrem’s artistic methodology, alluding to the mimesis between the audience and the Bible, shown primarily in a series of biblical pastiches into which Ephrem weaves together a range of biblical terms around a single rhetorical argument. Ephrem’s idea of “investigation” developed in opposition to the theological culture, especially that of Eunomius, which believed that through privileged debate and argumentation one could obtain intimate knowledge of God. His mistrust of this theological speculation engineered his antisubordinationist thought. God investigates humans, Ephrem knew, not the other way around. Ephrem spent far more time, Wickes observes, creating dramatic scenes that exposed his opponents’ misreading of the Bible. The naming of Christ via nonbiblical terms, Ephrem sees undermining, even destroying the Bible’s way of speaking about Christ. In this vein, Ephrem views the Bible as a light to carry in the darkness, so that theological discourse without biblical language is a choice not to carry a light in the darkness and not to stick to a marked path in a harsh landscape. By the metaphor of a lyre Ephrem symbolizes his own rootedness in the Bible, seeing himself merely as an instrument before the divinity. His poems are also the gestures of his almsgiving, as he lends the faith through his language and asks the audience to do the same for others. Wickes casts light on Ephrem’s poems in an analysis of hymn 10, which contains twenty-two stanzas of four lines each with varying meter. Three women from the gospels are mentioned: the Canaanite woman, “crumbs for the dogs”; the sinful woman who anointed Jesus’s feet; and the woman hemorrhaging healed by touching Jesus’s garment. Ephrem first identifies himself with the poor Canaanite woman (the pericope is made known by only one word “crumbs”) and pleads with God to be allowed to pick up her crumbs from the floor, mirroring his own humility as a poet and interpreter. But then the poverty of crumbs or scraps is elevated into “a flood of interpretations” for him to employ, an excessive abundance. Ephrem shifts to the sinful woman who anointed Jesus with excessive adoration, perfume, and weeping, then on to the hemorrhaging woman, excessive in her intensity and conviction. These are stories of excess transformed from poverty. Wickes illustrates how Ephrem reads back these last two figures into the Canaanite woman’s tale so that all three become types of one another. Ephrem, through the diffusion of divine power into his poetry, also becomes a type of the three women, poverty transformed into abundance. This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. Wickes tracks through a number of other madrashe that employ similar tactics: minimalistic references to the biblical context, images and characters bound together by subtle connections and traits, and the inducement of the audience to see something they have never noticed, all through a kaleidoscopic series of rhythmic phrases. Wickes borrows again from Sidney Griffith the characterization of Ephrem’s poetry as “iconic theology,” which the audience sees and experiences in the poetry. Ephrem has never been considered easy to translate and interpret, for, while he incorporates the language of countless biblical scenes in his poetry, there appears to be an ambiguity in how one unravels these verbal icons, an ambiguity Wickes believes is intentional, especially in the Hymns on Faith. Wickes has guided the reader securely with a light through the labyrinthine paths and icons of Ephrem’s poetry, revealing the poet’s mind and personality, along with imaginative biblical landscapes and interpretations unparalleled in late antique Christian literature. To complete the journey, Wickes needs to walk through the remaining Hymns on Faith. This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home.