Dorushe Conference 2007: April 14-15, 2007
Jeanne-Nicole
Saint-Laurent
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2007
Vol. 10, No. 2
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv10n2crsaintlaurent
Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent
Dorushe Conference 2007: April 14-15, 2007
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol10/HV10N2CRSaintLaurent.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 10
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Conference
Dorushe
File created by XSLT transformation of original HTML encoded article.
[1] The
success of Beth Mardutho’s second annual Dorushe
conference demonstrated the continued growth of Syriac studies
in graduate programs both in North America and Europe.
Princeton University hosted the conference this year. Support
for the conference was provided by Princeton University’s
Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Group for the Study of
Late Antiquity, the Center for the Study of Religion, the
Program in Hellenic Studies, the History Department, the
Program in the Ancient World, and the Dean of the Graduate
School. With stimulating papers and responses, feedback from
senior scholars, and enjoyable meals and even dancing, this
year’s conference provided an excellent opportunity for
intellectual exchange and professional development for the next
generation of Syriac scholars. David Michelson, Ph.D. candidate
in Princeton’s Department of History, organized the event
with assistance from a Dorushe committee of students.
[2] Students
from nine universities and three countries presented papers on
a wide variety of stimulating topics ranging from historical
and literary studies to theological and philological
investigations.
[3] The
conference began on Saturday, April 14, 2007. Dr. Emmanuel
Papoutsakis of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at
Princeton University and David Michelson welcomed the group. We
heard excellent papers from students on Saturday afternoon and
Sunday morning. Outside observers from several universities
attended, and Gorgias Press set up an outstanding book
display.
[4] Saturday
evening, after a lovely reception, conference participants
celebrated together at a dinner hosted by Princeton. Prof.
David Taylor of Oxford delivered an outstanding after-dinner
talk. He spoke about changes in the field of Syriac studies in
the last twenty-five years. He discussed how graduate students
from both sides of the Atlantic can benefit and learn from the
methodologies and approaches of one another and offered
suggestions of topics in the field needing further research. On
Sunday morning, after students presented their last papers,
both Prof. Taylor and Dr. Papoutsakis offered closing remarks
and conclusions for the group.
[5]
Following is a brief summary of the papers presented. On behalf
of the Dorushe conference committee, I express our thanks to
Princeton University and to the students who contributed to the
success of the weekend. Students who wish to join Dorushe are
urged to contact dorushe@bethmardutho.org. Tentatively, next
year’s conference is planned for April 2008 at the
University of Notre Dame.
[6]
Elitzur Avraham Bar-Asher (Harvard University):
“Syriac as an Eastern Aramaic Dialect: a Reassessment of
the Evidence.” Elitzur Bar-Asher's paper reviewed the
main scholarly positions on the topic of Syriac as an Eastern
Aramaic dialect. This paper brings these discussions up to date
by contributing new information and evaluating previous
scholarship using methodologies from historical linguistics.
This study also raised methodological problems concerning the
study of Syriac. On account of inner evidence and comparison
with phenomena in other eastern dialects, Bar-Asher suggested
that Syriac be seen as an "Eastern literary language."
[7]
Kevin Casey: (University of Toronto): “The Use
and Interpretation of Scripture Amongst Muslim and Christian
Exegetes of the 7th through 10th
Centuries.” This paper discussed biblical interpretation
in Syriac mystical literature: the recognition of levels of
meaning in the scriptural text and the intersection of
spiritual experience, religious practice and hermeneutics. This
paper situated these principles of mystical hermeneutics within
the larger debate concerning the interpretation and meaning of
scripture which raged in the Late Antique Near East. The
discussion pointed to some areas where, perhaps, these
principles and this debate were absorbed and manifested in
Islam. The Syriac author Dadišoʿ
Qatraya, for example, expands upon
Antiochene theories of exegesis that reigned in the East Syrian
Church in his discussion of the several senses
(sūkāle) of meaning in the word of
Scripture: historical interpretation
(pūšāqā
taš‛itānāyā), homiletic
interpretation (mtargmānāyā), and
spiritual interpretation (pūšāqā
ruhānāyā). Spiritual
interpretation, for him, is a practice appropriate only for the
solitaries and holy men. Early mystical commentary on the
Qur’an took the form of short utterances and glosses of
inspired speech that resulted from listening to and reciting
the text of the Qur’an. Both Muslim and Christian mystics
from the early Islamic period also single out the heart, not
the mind, as the locus of the spiritual understanding of
scripture. There are obvious similarities between the spiritual
exegesis practiced by the monks of the Church of the East and
the spiritual reading of the Qur’an found among the
mystics of the first centuries of Islam.
[8]
Miriam Goldstein: (Hebrew University):
“Tafsīr al Tawrāt: Jewish and Christian
Exegetes in the Muslim Empire.” Following the initial
Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean and the Near East, a
second, linguistic, conquest proved to be the most crucial
transformation of the region. This was the conquest in which
the Arabic language, which had taken root among the populations
of the region even prior to the spread of Islam, replaced
Aramaic. This provided a medium of discourse that encouraged
the flow of ideas between groups that had formerly held one
another at a distrustful distance. Most studies of
interconfessional scholarly ties in the Muslim Empire till now
have focused on Jewish–Muslim interaction, including the
areas of law, theology, philosophy and literature.
Jewish-Christian ties have been a striking omission. The study
of biblical interpretation provides a natural point of entry to
such research, for Jews and Christians held a common text, the
Hebrew Bible, to be sacred. It is clear from numerous sources
that scholars of the two groups were not only aware of each
others’ interpretations; at times they actively sought
the aid of each other in solving difficult exegetical problems.
This paper sketched possible ties among exegetes of both
religious traditions writing in Syriac/Aramaic and
Arabic/Judeo-Arabic, both regarding interpretations of
particular Scriptural verses as well as methodology.
[9]
Henryk Jaronowski: (Leopold-Wenger-Institut für
Rechtsgeschichte: University of Munich) “The Place of the
Syro-Roman Law Book in Syrian legal Traditions.” The
Syro-Roman Law Book (SRLB) presents scholars with a set of
tantalizing and difficult questions. This paper addressed the
question of the SRLB’s place in the Syrian legal
traditions. Although the SRLB was continuously available and
even translated into Arabic, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian,
citations of it are scarce. In the West Syrian tradition, only
Bar Hebraeus (†1286) cites the SRLB. Although five East
Syrian works cite it between the 8th and
13th centuries, the SRLB does not seem to be an
essential part of the East Syrian legal consciousness. There
are certain passages of the SRLB, specifically on inheritance
law, family law, the arrha, and measurements, which
are cited by multiple authors. This paper connected the
citations to their source manuscripts and discussed how the
repeated citations differ between authors, showing how the
contents of the SRLB were used and adapted over time. The SRLB
also appears in divergent West and East Syrian manuscript
families, with different numbering and variations in text and
content. Although Kaufhold and Selb’s 2002 critical
edition of the SRLB edits, translates, and proposes a stemma
for these various manuscripts, it does not treat the textual
differences among them in detail. This paper characterized the
differences in content between the two manuscript families and
between the manuscripts in each family, evaluating how much and
to what end the text was reworked.
[10]
Vitalijs Permjakovs: (University of Notre Dame)
“Two Spring Festivals in the Syriac Liturgical Calendar
– Traces of an Archaic Calendar System?” This paper
discussed two liturgical celebrations in the calendar used by
the Syriac churches, both of West and East Syriac traditions.
The first usually appears in the calendar under the title
dominica nova (had-b-sabâhadthâ): the first Sunday after Easter. The
second feast comes in the middle of May. Often this is
designated with the title “the Feast of the Theotokos
over the ears of corn/grain.” They appear to be parts of
two different calendrical cycles – one, the
Easter-Pentecost cycle, another – the cycle of fixed
Dominical/Marian feasts. However, these two
liturgio-calendrical units represent elements of one, more
archaic calendrical system that may be linked to Jewish
calendars of the Temple period (Jubilees, Dead Sea Scrolls) and
possibly to early Judeo-Christian communities. Across Christian
traditions, including Syriac, the celebration of the first
Sunday after Easter (dominica, dominica in
albis, kainê kyriakê,
antipascha) is marked as a solemn and festive
occasion. The significance of this day may derive from its
connection to particular calendrical traditions that can be
traced to the ancient 364-day calendars. This paper examined
whether liturgical data from the Syriac tradition gives any
evidence for the dominica nova being a part of this
proposed ancient “calendar system:” the
‘beginning’ of the archaic Pentecost season.
[11]
Robert Riggs: (University of Pennsylvania): “Ibn
Qutayba’s Usage of Arabic Biblical Referents: A Place for
Syriac Informants?” Even a cursory examination of the
works of the famed Arabic litterateur Ibn Qutayba (d. 889 C.E.)
reveals a plethora of Biblical or pseudo-Biblical references in
a variety of his writings. While it is not unusual to find
early Muslim authors referring to the Tawra (Torah), Injil
(Gospel), and Zabur (Psalms) in their Qur’anic context,
the lucidity and accuracy with which Ibn Qutayba uses
references to the earlier revealed literature leads the reader
to question his oral and textual informants. Unlike many of his
Muslim contemporaries, who seemed to attribute authoritative
status to a wide variety of apocryphal stories taken in part
from the growing corpus of folk tales and myths, the qissas al-anbiya’,
orally circulating during the milieu of the seventh to ninth
centuries, Ibn Qutayba seems to draw from early textual sources
which reflect a striking similarity to early Syriac and Hebrew
manuscripts. This paper contrasted the use of Biblical
references by early Muslim historians ‘Ali Rabban
al-Tabari, Abu Ja‘far al-Tabari, and al-Ya‘qubi
with the works of Ibn Qutayba to present a clearer view of the
parallel usages and availability of Biblical texts in the ninth
century.
[12]
Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent: (Brown University):
“The Acts of Marī and the Rhetoric of Syriac
Missionary Narratives.” Recent scholarship by F. and C.
Jullien and A. Harrak have brought greater attention to the
importance of the late sixth-, early seventh-century text, the
Acts of Mari. This foundation myth narrates the
missionary tour of Mar Mari, the apostle of Babylonia, linked
in East Syriac religious traditions with the Edessan apostle
Addai. The text’s rhetoric distinguished Mari and his
foundations from other apostolic missionaries, like Thomas and
Addai. While the apocryphal text established continuity between
Addai and Mari, it also constructed difference to set Mari
apart and make his story the exclusive treasure of the East
Syrian Dyophysite Church. The text created and reconfigured a
hierarchy for the cities of Persia and Babylonia. The rhetoric
and vocabulary of this text reveal a distinct thought world and
network of East Syriac monasteries in which this story
circulated. As Jullien and Jullien have argued, the Acts of
Mari must be interpreted in light of narratives of
Manichean and Baptizing movements. As in the Acts of
Thomas, women serve to advance the mission of the
patron-apostle. The authors of the Acts of Mari used
literary strategies of distinction to legitimize their origins
as they stitched Mari’s itinerary into the literary
framework of the apocryphal Acts narratives.
[13]
Edward Schoolman: (UCLA): “From Antaura to the
Evil Eye: Early Modern Syriac Magical Charms and their
Pre-Christian Origin.” In 1912, Hermann Gollancz
published a volume entitled The Book of Protection, in
which he edited and translated four collections of Syriac
magical amulets and charms. These collections, compiled in the
17th and 18th century in book form, do
not follow the templates of ancient magical handbooks, but
nevertheless preserve Christian charms and magical elements
that have their antecedents in ancient Greek and Coptic
traditions. This paper discussed a formula found numerous times
in these texts and common to both this early modern Syriac
collection and to ancient phylacteries and magical handbooks.
The main feature of this spell type is an invocation of a
helpful divine figure, which arrives to challenge a demonic
one, with the interaction recorded in dialog, and the divine
figure either turning away or binding the demonic one. A
detailed comparison of this charm formula through pagan,
early-Christian, and late Syriac contexts brings to light the
adaptation of magical traditions across cultural, linguistic,
and social lines.
[14]
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: (Yale University): “The
Problem of Evil in the Syriac Translation of the Book of
Ben-Sira.” This paper suggests that the treatment of evil
in the book of Ben Sira caused the Syriac translator to change
the content of the original text in several places. The
translator found the treatment of the creation of evil in Ben
Sira text problematic, particularly its suggestion of the
possibility of predestined wicked men. In these cases, the
Syriac translation tends to stress human choice and dims the
sections of the text in which Ben Sira suggested divine
determination and God’s creation of Evil. Outlining this
motivation in the Syriac version brings new insights concerning
previous scholarship on this translation, (such as Winter
[1977]) and a rejection of their conclusions.
[15]
Jeff Wickes: (University of Notre Dame): “The
Literary Structure and Historical World Vision of
Pseudo-Ephrem’s Sermon on the End of the World.”
During the course of the later seventh and early eighth
centuries, a number of works were composed in Syriac that
depicted the initial Islamic conquests as harbingers of the
world's end. These works enlisted a cast of characters to act
out this apocalyptic drama: the "Sons of Hagar," or "Sons of
Ishmael," Romans, Persians, and Alexander's Eschatological
People of the North. All the characters that took part in these
later seventh- and early eighth-century Syriac Christian
representations of the end could be mapped onto actual
historical figures, and thus the dramas functioned as
commentaries on the world in which the authors and audiences
lived. Moreover, the placement of these historical characters
within a certain temporal framework—the brink of the end
of time—aimed to alter audiences' perception of the time
in which they lived. One of the relevant themes within
this emergent literature was the concept of time in
Pseudo-Ephrem's “Homily on the End of the World.”
Just as Ps. Ephrem’s presentation of the Islamic invaders
sought to foster a certain perspective towards this, so, too,
his presentation of time sought to alter their perception of
the temporal space and the characters in these events.