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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.
Symbols of Church and Kingdom in 1975. This
unassuming volume presents in an accessible form the fruit of nearly four decades of Brock’s groundbreaking work on these texts. It is essential reading for
anyone interested in the reception of the Bible in late antique Syriac Christianity.
The poems on the Old and New Testament included in this collection “take three different forms, lyric, narrative, and dialogue” (p. 13), allowing
for “three very different approaches to the biblical text” (p. 14). In the lyric poetry (hymns) of Ephrem the Syrian, biblical characters can break free of
the fetters of their historical (con)text and become instead contemporary voices, speaking directly to Ephrem and his readers (p. 14). “Narrative poems
provide the opportunity for imaginative retellings” of biblical episodes and stories (p. 15). Because the Bible (as Auerbach puts it) is “mysterious and
‘fraught with background’,” leaving much of what is important unexpressed,
E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 12.
Many of the poems in the latter two genres are based on Brock’s own careful critical editions. These and other specialist publications seem to
have been written with just such a volume as the Note, for example, numerous publications in the “Syriac Studies in the Last Three Decades: Some Reflections,” in Treasure-house of Mysteries in mind. This volume is, in fact, the latest in a long
series of publications that make the riches of Syriac liturgical poetry available to the lay reader and the contemporary SyriacEastern Churches Review, Sobornost
and The Harp. See especially Brock’s publication, in Syriac, of a major collection of dramatic dialogue poems on biblical
themes (Soghyatha mgabbyatha) by the Monastery of St. Ephrem (Glane, Holland, 1982), as well as the 1996 article in
The Harp entitled “Syriac Liturgical Poetry: A Resource for Today.”haute vulgarisation” that he sees as being necessary “if our subject is
to flourish.”
VI Symposium Syriacum, 1992: University of
Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity, 30 August – 2 September 1992, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 247, ed. René Lavenant (Roma: Pontificio Istituto
Orientale, 1994), 13–29, citation from 28–29.
Several major themes emerge in this collection that reflect Brock’s larger Full references can easily be found in Sergey Minov’s “Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity,” found at: http://csc.org.il/ db/db.aspx?db=SB. Brock’s plenary address at the 2007 Oxford Patristics Conference focused on this corpus: “Dramatic Narrative Poems on Biblical
Topics in Syriac,” For example, “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” oeuvre, above all the place of biblical women
in early Syriac liturgical poetry. Beginning in 1974, with the publication of “Sarah and the Akedah” (Le Muséon), Brock has paid
particular attention to the bold and articulate biblical women portrayed in the Syriac poetic tradition, as can be seen from his further work on Sarah (1981,
1984, 1986, 1989, 1992, 2007, 2009), Mary (1976, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1992, 1994, 2006, 2011), the Sinful Woman of Luke 7:36–50 (1988, 1992), the Widow of
Sarepta (1989, 1990), Tamar (2002, 2009), and Potiphar’s Wife (2007).
Studia Patristica 45 (2010), 183–196.Journal of Early Christian
Studies 9 (2001), 105–131; “On Mary’s Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition,” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient
Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. D. B. Martin and P. C. Miller (Durham / London: Duke University Press, 2005), 63–86;
“Impudent Women: Matthew 1:1–16 in Syriac Tradition,” Parole de l’Orient 36 (2010), 65–76; Song and Memory:
Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2010).
For more see, Sebastian P. Brock, Hymns on Faith 32:3) attain a purity of the inner eye of faith that enables them to see the hidden symbols
of the biblical text (p. 24).
The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem
(Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992). Ephrem’s view of salvation history is anthologized in Sebastian P. Brock and George Anton Kiraz, eds.,
Ephrem the Syrian. Select Poems: Vocalized Syriac Text with English Translation, Introduction and Notes, Eastern Christian
Texts 2 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2006).
The volume ends where it should,
in the convergence of Bible and liturgy.
The Syriac tradition is entirely absent from Jean Danielou’s See, for example, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac Tradition,” in
The Bible and the Liturgy (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956).Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Selected Papers of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy,
Eastern Christian Studies 10, ed. Bert Groen, Steven Hawkes-Teeples and Stefanos Alexopoulos (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 47–64.