On June 30, 1715, Yūsuf ibn Shim’ūn as-Sim’ānī, a Maronite priest, left Rome to set out on a lengthy and perilous journey.Footnote ¹ It was far from the first he had undertaken in the course of his young life. Not yet ten years old, as-Sim’ānī – or Josephus Simonius Assemani, as the Western world would come to remember him – had been dispatched from his native Lebanon to Italy, to study at Rome’s Maronite College. In doing so, he had followed in the footsteps of older members of his prominent ecclesiastical family and had paved the way for others who would come after him. Upon his graduation as doctor of philosophy and theology in 1710, he was pressed by Pope Clement XI into service in the Vatican Library as scriptor for Syriac and Arabic. Five years later, the same pope sent him on a mission to scour the libraries of the Near East for witnesses to Christianity’s earliest history and to bring the fruits of his labors back with him to the Vatican.

For the next two years, Assemani visited churches and monastic communities from Jerusalem to Aleppo, and from Alexandria to the Monastery of Our Lady of the Syrians in Nitria, in search of manuscript treasure. In this, too, others had gone before him. His cousin, Elia Assemani, had suffered shipwreck on the Nile a decade prior during his own papally commissioned journey. Later accounts describe his distress at witnessing his traveling companion perish in the waves – and at watching a number of recently obtained codices bobbing in the water.Footnote ² What Clement’s scavengers carried with them upon their return to Rome was nevertheless priceless. They included the raw materials from which Josephus Simonius Assemani would go on to craft the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana, a monumental effort to introduce Western readers to the Syriac Christian tradition. They also contained the seeds for yet another of Assemani’s contributions to the study of Syriac Christianity: the great “Roman” edition of the writings of Ephrem, arguably the tradition’s most accomplished and, thanks in part to Assemani’s efforts, most famous poet.

The edition encompassed six volumes: three on Ephrem’s Greek writings, edited and translated into Latin by Assemani himself; and three containing his Syriac corpus, edited by Assemani’s collaborator, the Maronite priest Buṭros Mubārak (“Petrus Benedictus”). These publications were not the first forays of Ephrem’s writings into the West. The Dutch theologian Gerardus Vossius, for example, had already in the sixteenth century published a number of these, mostly in translation from the Greek.Footnote ³ Ephrem’s name and a selection of his work, moreover, had been known to Latin-speaking audiences since at least the fifth century.Footnote ⁴ In both scope and circulation, Assemani’s edition nevertheless served as a gateway to a new era for Ephrem in the West, with his writings becoming the subject of both intense scholarly engagement and popular devotion.Footnote ⁵

Like the rest of Assemani’s publications, his and Mubārak’s edition has drawn decidedly mixed reactions from readers and scholars, ranging from adulation to outright vilification.Footnote ⁶ In recent decades in particular, critiques have centered on what modern scholars have judged to be the editors’ insufficiently critical stance toward their source material. They, in short, seem to have treated their manuscripts’ attributions as reliable: where manuscripts ascribed the same text to different authors, they noted the divergence, albeit without arbitrating between the options presented.Footnote ⁷ This approach, for obvious reasons, has proved unsatisfactory to contemporary scholars of Syriac literature.Footnote ⁸ The “Roman” edition nevertheless quickly became and for several centuries remained the starting point for efforts to engage with Ephrem and with Syriac literature more broadly – not least of all since a number of the texts contained therein have never merited the attentions of another editor.

This is the case for the collection of hymns at the center of this book. It appears in the last Syriac volume of the edition, alongside some of Ephrem’s most famous writings, including the Hymns on Paradise and the Sermons against the Jews. Presented by its editors as Necrosima seu funebres Canones LXXXV, from the Greek term for a funerary hymn (νεκρώσιμον),Footnote ⁹ the work indeed includes, as the title suggests, 85 madrāshê (“hymns”) designed to accompany the burial of Christians in Syriac-speaking communities.Footnote ¹⁰ They emerge from two manuscripts, both preserved at the Monastery of St. Mary in Nitria, and purchased and brought into the West by Assemani’s cousin, the aforementioned Elia: Vat. Syr. 92, stemming from 823 CE, and Vat. Syr. 93, an undated, presumably twelfth-century manuscript, covering much of the same material. Taken together, these hymns constitute the oldest and most extensive collection of funerary poetry in Syriac literature – a compilation remarkable for its diversity in both form and choice of subjects.

The poems included therein accordingly differ from one another in syllabic meter as well as in length, with the shortest of them occupying less than half a column in Assemani’s edition, and the longest filling hundreds of lines. In a similar vein, they include chants designed to address the deaths of individuals of all ages, genders, socioeconomic status, and ecclesiastical identities, with parts of the collection dedicated to the commemoration of bishops, clergy, and ascetics of various stripes, householders and women, youths and children, victims of natural disaster, and those who had died as migrants, remote from their families and communities. From them emerge visions not only of the deaths but of the lives of the deceased and their loved ones: the father anxious for the well-being of his children, now orphaned; the Church, personified as a widow, fretting over the death of her episcopal “spouse”; the mother, grieved both by abandoning her family and by the choices that have led her to be part of that family in the first place; the community of “sisters” eager to have their departed member intercede on their behalf; the survivors of plague, fearful of following their diseased neighbors into the pit; the clergyman, deprived in death of both voice and song, yet eager to recover both in the resurrection.

In their original context, many of these writings would have accompanied the burial processions of the deceased. In the context of the “Roman” edition, by contrast, they became part of Ephrem’s poetic patrimony, offered up to the Latin-speaking West with the imprimatur of then-pope Benedict XIV as a testimony to the deep roots of the Church and those roots’ wholesale coherence with the Catholic faith. In the decades following their publication, the necrosima enjoyed a handful of moments in the sun; the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by contrast, have visited largely neglect upon these sources. It is the aim of this book to examine, frequently for the first time, both the particularities of some of the most striking writings included therein, and to consider them as part of a larger whole – both that of Syriac literature of the first millennium and of the cultural context to which they witness. Before setting out the project in greater detail, however, we must attend to two interlocking strata that will set the scene for such a reconsideration: the person, work, and legacy of Ephrem the Syrian, the ascriptional author of these writings, on the one hand; and the necrosima’s reception history in Western scholarship since the eighteenth century, on the other.

Ephrem and His Legacy

Little is known with confidence about the life and times of Ephrem the Syrian – a fate he shares with many, if not most, of the literary greats of late antiquity.Footnote ¹¹ Even the alleged year of his birth, 306 ce, emerges from no more reliable a source than the Vita S. Ephraemi, a text postdating Ephrem’s own lifetime by more than a century, and more invested in constructing a hagiographically appealing than a historically grounded biography.Footnote ¹² Similarly obscure are the date and circumstances of his baptism: Born to a Christian mother and raised in the faith,Footnote ¹³ Ephrem’s discussion of baptism merely suggests that he, like his contemporaries, was old enough to invoke the trinitarian formula.Footnote ¹⁴

His ecclesiastical career places readers on somewhat surer ground, owing in large part to his exposition in the Carmina Nisibena 13–21, which narrate the history of Nisibis’ Christian community during the first half of the fourth century.Footnote ¹⁵ Ephrem depicts himself as entering the church of Nisibis under the leadership of Jacob, the city’s bishop from circa 308 to 338 CE – a period during which, the Hymns suggest, Christianity was still young and orthodoxy far from established in the city.Footnote ¹⁶ He continued his service as a herdsman () of God – an assistant shepherd guided by the city’s chief shepherds – under the next three bishops, across a period of roughly forty years.Footnote ¹⁷

Given Nisibis’ location at the border between two empires, that of Rome and that of the Sassanids, the longest-lasting ruling dynasty of the Persian Empire, the city’s life and Ephrem’s ministry unfolded in contested territory. In 363 ce, Nisibis accordingly changed hands from Roman to Persian control, in the wake of the Emperor Julian’s defeat and his short-lived successor’s costly peace accord with the Sassanids. Ephrem, along with much of Nisibis’ Christian population, fled to Edessa. There he remained – and was ordained to the deaconate – during the final decade of his life, dying on June 9, 373 ce, according to the Chronicle of Edessa.Footnote ¹⁸

The particulars of Ephrem’s ecclesiastical service are nevertheless more opaque than modern scholars would prefer. Most biographical sources make much of his late-in-life ordination, hinting at a sense of embarrassment that a luminary of Ephrem’s caliber had not risen further in the Church’s ranks.Footnote ¹⁹ His own writings suggest an affinity for and leadership among the so-called Covenanters, an ascetic office unique to Syriac Christianity, with ties to the local churches. What is clear, however, is the fact that Ephrem’s primary ministry throughout his life was that of the hymnographer and homiletician. Among his metrical discourses the reader encounters writings celebrating festal days,Footnote ²⁰ confronting threats to the life of the Church,Footnote ²¹ extolling heroes of the faith,Footnote ²² elucidating Christian practices,Footnote ²³ and expounding theological discourses – all ready to educate, challenge, encourage, and inspire his audience.

Ephrem’s prodigious literary output – according to the fifth-century historiographer Sozomen, he was said to have written 300,000 verses – won him fame well beyond the Syriac-speaking realm.Footnote ²⁴ Both Greek and Latin writers count him among their “outstanding men” and express amazement at his gifts.Footnote ²⁵ Sozomen reports that already during Ephrem’s lifetime his works were being translated into Greek – and Jerome indeed claims to have read one of Ephrem’s books in that language.Footnote ²⁶ Where the appreciation of his Greek contemporaries did not burst forth sua sponte, hagiographers strove to create it instead: A number of Syriac sources, for example, attest to a (wholly apocryphal) meeting between Ephrem and Basil of Caesarea, each tradition’s master-preacher extolling the other’s virtues. Vitae focused on Ephrem’s own achievements flourished alongside these works, each laboring to mold him in ways congenial to their aims. The image of the historical Ephrem thus recedes against the visions of Ephrem the quasi-anchorite, as depicted in the Syriac vita, and Ephrem the chorister (and champion of women choirs), in Jacob of Serugh’s sixth-century Mēmrā on Holy Mar Ephrem.

The confluence of these two interrelated facets of Ephrem’s legacy – his widespread celebration as holy man and the equally widespread recognition of his literary productivity – also shaped his reception. For centuries to come, authors from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds wrote in Ephrem’s name or, nolens volens, had their works transmitted as part of his ever-growing oeuvre. Most famous among these and commanding the most expansive literary corpus is the composite figure of “Ephrem Graecus,” the Greek Ephrem. The latter’s body of works, composed chiefly of metrical homilies and hymns, ranks second only to John Chrysostom’s in the number of pages it commands in the Clavis Patrum Graecorum. No other language group produced so extensive a corpus. The manuscript record, however, also reflects Latin, Slavonic, Arabic, Armenian, and Coptic versions of Ephrem.

While some of these are the product of translations of Ephrem’s writings, by far the greater part of these corpora includes texts that, as early as the sixth century, bear no traces of a Syriac original. Nor, for that matter, are Syriac writings transmitted under Ephrem’s name necessarily traceable to his own pen – a fact that, more than the proliferation of Ephrem in other languages, has troubled and challenged readers. As one scholar of Ephrem recently noted, the corpus attributed to him is “littered with texts of questionable and dubious authenticity.”Footnote ²⁷ As a result, one of the most important pursuits of Syriac studies in the twentieth century has been the quest for the “historical Ephrem” and his “genuine writings.” Scholarly lists of Ephrem’s works from this period tend to categorize them as either “authentic,” “contested,” or “falsely attributed,” with each grouping subdivided further in keeping with each author’s aims and interests.Footnote ²⁸

The content of these categories, however, quite naturally depends on the criteria applied for arriving at the corresponding judgements. While different authors have followed and indeed continue to follow different models, over the course of the twentieth century three figures have emerged as paradigmatic: F. C. Burkitt; Arthur Vööbus; and Edmund Beck.Footnote ²⁹ By far the earliest of these three, Burkitt’s interest did not rest primarily with determining which of Ephrem’s works ought to be considered “authentic.” Indeed, as he notes with perhaps a measure of asperity, “[t]he only reason that these questions of authorship have not been settled long ago is that very few people trouble themselves whether a certain metrical Homily be the work of Ephraim of Edessa or of some other Syriac writer whose name is even more unfamiliar.”Footnote ³⁰ His quest for genuinely Ephremic works rather thrived on the desire to establish the version of the gospels used therein, and, by extension, to determine the date of the New Testament Peshitta, the “Syriac Vulgate.”Footnote ³¹

In arbitrating between Ephrem’s real and misattributed writings, Burkitt used two interlocking criteria: the age of the manuscripts by which a particular text was attested, and the version of the New Testament used. He thus began by excluding all witnesses dating to the period after the rise of Islam;Footnote ³² and, upon establishing to his satisfaction that the Peshitta postdated Ephrem, granted his seal of approval exclusively to those writings that made use of the Diatesseron, the older Syriac gospel-harmony.Footnote ³³ Burkitt’s approach proved prescient: Manuscript date and version used continued to shape conversations about Ephrem’s “genuine writings” throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Arthur Vööbus, writing more than half a century after Burkitt, by contrast, was less successful, if no less influential, in his approach. Like Burkitt, authenticity was merely a secondary goal – if that – for Vööbus, whose aim was to mine the Ephremic corpus for witnesses to early Syriac asceticism. Vööbus’s commitment to finding both anchoritic and coenobitic manifestations thereof in fourth-century Syria shaped his editorial choices; his criteria for selecting “authentic” texts are accordingly rather fuzzier than Burkitt’s, although he, too, relied on age and volume of attestation, as well as the fit a particular piece or passage made with what he took to be genuinely Ephremic.Footnote ³⁴ The resulting selection of texts has been rejected almost unanimously by later scholars; Vööbus’s focus on an Ephremic gestalt in the writings he examined nevertheless also resonates with the method of our third and, for purposes of Syriac scholarship, climactic voice: that of Edmund Beck.

The latter, unlike his notable predecessors, dedicated much of his life to the study of Ephrem-qua-Ephrem. His critical editions of the Syriac corpus, each accompanied by a careful translation into German, continue to form the basis for scholarship in the field.Footnote ³⁵ Strikingly, Beck’s editions include as many – or indeed more! – “inauthentic” works as those he judged to be genuine. Each translation accordingly includes a meticulous discussion of the merits of the pieces selected, resulting in by far the most critical assessment and briefest list of “authentic” writings.Footnote ³⁶ Beck’s transparency notwithstanding, he nowhere produces a list of his criteria – owing in part, no doubt, to the evolution of his approach across the more than twenty-five years of his editorial activity. Manuscript attestation no later than the seventh century; coherence with known aspects of Ephrem’s biography; theological stances; exegetical choices; and attestation by early and reliable witnesses, including Philoxenus of Mabbug, nevertheless loom large.Footnote ³⁷

It is to Beck’s credit that, to the present day, scholars have largely accepted his judgements and those interested in “rehabilitating” the authenticity of a work judged to be among the dubia or spuria have had to do so within the confines of the arguments laid out by him. Further forays into the quest for the authentic Ephrem in recent decades have instead sought to redefine the scope of the texts under consideration, either by examining potential interpolations into otherwise genuine writings, or by disaggregating the hymn cycles that have traditionally structured assessments of his work.Footnote ³⁸

These efforts, much like those of Beck and his predecessors, are of vital importance to the study of Ephrem and the field of Syriac Studies more broadly. First, as Sebastian P. Brock has recently argued, they create the conditions for understanding Ephrem – as an author, hymnographer, and theologian – in his own right, unadulterated by the flotsam and jetsam of his later reception and emulation.Footnote ³⁹ Ephrem’s literary corpus, though diminished by decades of critical engagement, moreover constitutes by far the most expansive textual resource for understanding Western Syriac Christian history and identity in the fourth century. Clarity concerning the differences between Ephrem and “Ephrem” thus provides readers with reliable glimpses into the life of Christian communities in Nisibis and Edessa; the shape of asceticism during these decades and its relationship to the churches; and the tradition’s relationship with its Western – and Eastern – neighbors, to name only a few salient topoi.

To celebrate the ongoing study and delineation of the “authentic” Ephrem does not, however, diminish the value of attending to other aspects of the Syriac Christian patrimony, including those that were, however falsely, transmitted as part of his oeuvre. It is the aim of this book to draw attention to one such group of texts, aforementioned necrosima – a collection whose history of scholarship (and lack thereof) is bound up with the quest for Ephrem’s genuine writings. The following section provides an introduction to the origins of the corpus, its reception, and, in general terms, its contents, before turning to a preliminary defense of its value for students of early Christianity in general and the Syriac tradition in particular.

The Necrosima

The opening of this chapter introduced Josephus Simonius Assemani as the force majeure behind the Roman edition, and by extension behind the necrosima’s publication. This portrayal, while not wholly misleading, nevertheless obscures the complexities of the progress. Assemani had indeed had charge of the three Greek/Latin volumes of the Roman edition. Their Syriac/Latin counterparts, moreover, had been originally the province of his collaborator, the Maronite priest Butros Mubārak, known as “Petrus Benedictus.” The latter, however, more than twenty years Assemani’s senior, died in 1742, before the Syriac trilogy could be completed. The final volume, and with it the necrosima, accordingly fell under the purview of Assemani’s nephew, Istifān ‘Awād.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘Awād had arrived in Rome in 1720 and had taken the Assemani name – a somewhat incongruous choice, given his own patronym, albeit one that attested both to the familial tie between the scholars and to the senior Assemani’s reputation in Rome’s Maronite circles. He had embarked on a course of scholarship largely reminiscent of his uncle’s. Trained at the Maronite College, Stephanus Evodius Assemani joined the Vatican Library in 1731, replacing his uncle as scriptor for Arabic and Syriac, and in the process allowing the elder Assemani to assume the post of the library’s Second Custodian. The following year witnessed the publication of the edition’s first, Greek volume, followed in short succession by the first two Syriac ones. The third Syriac volume followed in 1943: “post obitum Petri Benedicti,” as its frontispiece informs the reader, Stephanus Evodius had undertaken the completion of both the edition and its translation into Latin.Footnote ⁴¹

The younger Assemani’s ascent through the hierarchies of Rome was less rapid than his uncle’s. Toward the end of his life, his continued scholarly activity would nevertheless lead him, as had been the case for Josephus Simonius, to the position of First Custodian of the Vatican Library. The writings of Ephrem which the “Roman” edition had launched into the Latin-speaking world, by contrast, went on to enjoy swift and frequently enthusiastic attention. The poems Assemani had called “necrosima” were no exception. Assemani had commended them to his readers as the fruit of Ephrem’s grief as well as his orthodoxy. The great Syrian had been spurred to write these hymns – evidently all eighty-five of them! – both by the deaths of his friends and in recollection of the Last Judgement.Footnote ⁴² In particular, Assemani suggested, it was the heresy of Aerius, allegedly a disciple of Eusthatius’, and his rejection of funerary tributes that had stirred Ephrem to hymnic action.Footnote ⁴³ Even in these most intimate writings, Ephrem, in the judgement of his later custodians, retained his anti-heresiological credentials to the very last.Footnote ⁴⁴

Later commentators and translations occasionally reiterated Assemani’s claims.Footnote ⁴⁵ Throughout the nineteenth century, however, most of the considerable amount of attention directed at the necrosima focused chiefly on extolling its poetic virtues. The text enjoyed its first re-edition in 1833, as part of Marie-Nicolas-Silvestre Guillon and Armand Benjamin Caillau’s “Collectio selecta S. Ecclesiae Patrum.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The latter, an ambitious program brought to premature conclusion by the planned publication of Migne’s Patrologia, ranked Ephrem among the “most tenacious theorists of the faith and most chaste interpreters of the gospel,” including five volumes of his writings alongside those of other fourth-century writers like Basil of Caesarea, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Ambrose of Milan.Footnote ⁴⁷ Strikingly, Ephrem was the only Syriac author included – and this evidently owing to Assemani’s Latin translation. The edition, including its rendering of the necrosima, appearing here in sub-part six of Ephrem’s work, titled “De Morte,” reproduces the Roman edition verbatim, in block-text, without Syriac counterparts or footnotes.Footnote ⁴⁸

It was not until nearly twenty years later that another author would set out both to critique Guillon and Caillau’s efforts and to attempt to improve upon Assemani’s own. In 1851, the Italian Semiticist Angelo (né Mordecai) Paggi and his student, Fausto Lasinio, produced the first modern-language translation of the text.Footnote ⁴⁹ The study of Ephrem’s writings – a corpus that held first place “among the most precious monuments which remain from the sacred literature of the Syrians” – had been regrettably neglected among their Italian contemporaries, they intimated.Footnote ⁵⁰ To remedy this omission, Paggi and Lasinio proposed to translate “those among the works of the Saint that are best suited to give an example of his astounding style of writing and worthy of sensible imitation” – that is to say: the necrosima.Footnote ⁵¹ The latter had thus far benefited only from a Latin translation – “which ought to be more suitably called a paraphrase” – in the context of Assemani’s edition. Guillon, too, had merely followed that defective rendering, the translators lamented, “instead of the truth of the Syriac witness.”Footnote ⁵² Their goal, by contrast, was to publish a faithful, even literal, rendering of the latter, in the hopes, their introduction suggests, that the hymns would contribute to the public tenor of the intellectual and spiritual discourse of their age.Footnote ⁵³

Their efforts received a less than glowing review by the great Semiticist Pius Zingerle.Footnote ⁵⁴ His judgement, however, did not discourage others from following into Paggi and Lasinio’s footsteps. Just two years later, Henry Burgess, a British clergyman with a passion for poetry and patristics – he would go on to translate Athanasius’ festal letters for the Oxford Library of the Fathers – would produce what is still the only, albeit partial English version of the necrosima.Footnote ⁵⁵ Burgess’s work falls into two parts: a sizable introduction, in which he listed and provided examples for the various syllabic meters he had discerned in Ephrem’s writings; and a section of translations, including thirty-five “metrical hymns” and nine “metrical homilies.” Among the former, the necrosima is quite dramatically overrepresented, furnishing twenty-three of Burgess’s texts, for reasons that Burgess frankly admitted involved pandering to his audience. The poems “will be most interesting to the mass of readers, on account of their hold on human sympathies, and their easy and natural exhibition of the mode of thinking on practical religious matters in the days of Ephraem.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Economy of space also factored into Burgess’s choices: While some of these hymns were concededly lengthy, “there are very many as brief as those we have translated, and quite as interesting.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Concise, theologically palatable, and appealing to his British audience, the necrosima furnished an ideal showcase for the poetic pluriformity Burgess thought to have recognized in Ephrem.

Burgess, like Paggi, had studied the Bibliotheca Orientalis alongside the Roman edition, treating the necrosima as having been crafted by Ephrem for Syriac liturgical use, and judging the collection equally suited to the needs of their respective constituencies.Footnote ⁵⁸ The first year of the twentieth century furnished one further, final translation project. A Russian version of the necrosima, titled “Prayers at the Grave” or “Funerary Homilies” (надгробные песнопения), appears in the fourth (of eight) volumes of Ephrem’s works published by the Moscow Theological Academy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thereafter, neither the twentieth nor the twenty-first century witness to additional attempts to render the hymns accessible to modern audiences. Other efforts at celebrating the collection fall silent as well. As late as 1877, Camille Ferry had published a sustained analysis of the collection, including a French translation of excerpts from the hymns,Footnote ⁶⁰ marveling at its diversity in the face of the uniformity of his subject, death: “The artist who does not change his tone can transform his chords, nuance the inflections of his voice, vary in some way even monotony itself. Ephrem had this gift. His funerary poetics are all in the elegiac tone, but within that, what rich variety of chords and of nuances!”Footnote ⁶¹ By contrast, with few exceptions, scholars of the past century have had little to say about these hymns – and this despite sustained interest in Ephrem and in Syriac literature more broadly.Footnote ⁶²

This neglect, perhaps unsurprisingly, coincides with the quest for the “historical Ephrem,” already discussed in the preceding section, and the concomitant increase in scrutiny for works ascribed to him. The necrosima, long celebrated for its beauty and even paradigmatically Ephremic character, fared poorly in this context. Already Burkitt in 1901 dismissed the hymns from his study of Ephrem’s corpus: “I have not tried to trace out the MS sources of these Funeral Hymns. Many of those that are genuine are excerpts arranged for liturgical use … They contain no quotations which imply the use of the Peshitta.”Footnote ⁶³ Barsoum, in keeping with his general reluctance to exclude traditionally attributed writings, still ranks them among Ephrem’s “known mēmrē”; two years later, by contrast, Ortiz de Urbina included them among the “Opera Dubia,”Footnote ⁶⁴ while Melki roundly assigned them to the category of “Oeuvres Apocryphes.”Footnote ⁶⁵

These judgements – as well as Beck’s failure to include them among his editions – proved damning. The necrosima disappeared from discussions of Ephrem’s writings, including those invested in “rehabilitating” aspects of his corpus.Footnote ⁶⁶ Recent publications make no mention of them, and even experts on the Syriac Ephrem at times confess to, at best, hazy awareness of their existence. Such omissions are wholly intelligible in light of the emphasis placed on Ephrem’s “genuine writings” over the past century. The hymns, by and large, lack the traits favored by Beck & Co. to separate the wheat from the chaff: Neither of the manuscripts on which Assemani based his edition predate the rise of Islam; Philoxenus’ excerpts make no mention of them; the vocabulary and, arguably, aspects of their theological vision harken to a distinctively post-Ephremic era;Footnote ⁶⁷ and their liturgical character, while treated as a mark of distinction in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings, often renders texts suspect to contemporary historians.

Assemani’s treatment of his sources has done further disservice to the collection. The paraphrastic character of the Latin translation has long been noted. The edition itself, however, is not without obvious flaws, combining under the label of “madrāshê” a range of different literary formats, including mēmrē (verse homilies), qōlê (chants), and ṣelūtê (prayers), and presenting a far more coherent and well-structured format – including the assignation of titles to otherwise untitled hymns and their arrangement according to Assemani’s sense of hierarchy – than the manuscript record sustains. It is not my aim to harshly criticize either of the Assemanis: Much ink has been spilled on this topic already, even as the field of Syriac studies continues to acknowledge its debt to their labors. Nor is the necrosima wholly devoid of traits that might commend it to those committed to the study of Ephrem-qua-historical Ephrem. The classification of Ephrem’s hymns by tone in ms. Sinai syr. 10, for example, includes references to Ephrem’s authorship of a “book of the dead” – even if its inclusion of a second book “of Confessors and of the dead” somewhat confuses the matter.Footnote ⁶⁸ A small number of the hymns included in the necrosima, moreover, are of demonstrably Ephremic vintage, albeit truncated to fit the collection’s liturgical format.Footnote ⁶⁹

This book nevertheless does not aspire to the rehabilitation of the necrosima as the product of Ephrem’s pen. It proceeds, rather, from the premise that, false attribution notwithstanding, works transmitted in his name are worthy of study under aspects other than their witness to the great Syrian himself. This modest proposal calls for a principled defense;Footnote ⁷⁰ the particularities of the necrosima, however, suggest a number of motives in their own right.

I here note only four interlocking reasons supporting such a study, in the expectation that this book will do justice to them only in piecemeal fashion, and in the hopes that others will rise to fill the inevitable lacunae.

First and foremost, the hymns collected in the necrosima attest to the earliest extant stratum of burial practice in Syriac Christian sources. That is not to say that the manuscripts on which the collection is based are themselves the most ancient witnesses. MK III 45, an eighth- or ninth-century service book (“Penqita”) discovered at Turfan and recently edited and translated by Erica C. D. Hunter and Jeff F. Coakley, likely predates even Vat. Syr. 92, the older of the two manuscripts that formed the basis of the necrosima.Footnote ⁷¹ The latter nevertheless, in Hunter and Coakley’s words, provides readers with “a glimpse into the pre-history of the service,” inasmuch as the two manuscripts depend on a common source.Footnote ⁷² The funerary qale preserved in MK III 45 in particular retain the numbering of qale extant in Vat. Syr. 92 – and thus in the necrosima. Qale 1–18 – most of which appear in Assemani’s editionFootnote ⁷³ – thus correspond in both content and numbering to qale 1–18 in MK III 45.Footnote ⁷⁴ In a similar vein, one of the mēmrē preserved in the necrosima, numbered madrāshâ 10 in Assemani, also appears in MK III 45, with two additional ones appearing in Vat. Syr. 92 as well.

The scribe responsible for the creation of the Turfan Penqita appears to have undertaken considerable editorial liberties vis-à-vis his Vorlage: The hymns include different verses, culled or transposed stanzas, and, especially in the case of the mēmrē, severe truncation vis-à-vis the text extant in the necrosima. These differences point to the manifest fluidity of liturgical texts rather than the superior antiquity of one or the other of these versions in their own right. Yet the necrosima’s nature as a repository of hymns without further structure suggests it, as Hunter and Coakley have observed, as “the relic of a time before there was a fixed order for the service specifying particular hymns and readings.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In the process of the Penqita’s creation, the ascription of different hymns to Ephrem – or indeed other authors – disappeared.Footnote ⁷⁶ The necrosima nevertheless witnesses to a vibrant period of literary and ritual activity, whose fruits would go on to provide the basis for the liturgical structures surrounding death and burial in later centuries.

In this vein, second, the necrosima also provides readers with a glimpse into the public lives of the sources that have justifiably preoccupied scholars’ engagement with Syriac literature. The hymns, in other words, digest the writings of the literary greats of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, re-presenting them to their audiences in bite-sized, but no less impactful portions.Footnote ⁷⁷ At times, this takes the form of a hymn’s appropriating excerpts from an author’s known and celebrated work. Madrāshâ 58, for example, famously combines selections from three of Ephrem’s Carmina Nisibena, weaving them into a narrative about Death’s and Satan’s battling alongside one another, in a terrible – but ultimately doomed – effort to imperil humanity’s salvation. In a similar vein, Madrāshâ 51 reflects an excerpt from Narsai’s homily on the ten virgins, trimmed and curated for liturgical use.Footnote ⁷⁸

Other parts of the necrosima are less transparent about their sources, while nevertheless drawing on key theological ideas and exegetical motifs reflected in other Syriac sources. Rare is the reader of Ephrem’s hymn cycles or Jacob’s mēmrē who has not wondered on occasion – perhaps spurred by their students’ incredulity – about late antique audiences’ ability to follow the intricately woven arguments or to attend to what must have been lengthy and demanding performances. The pervasive echoes of these writings discernible in the necrosima suggest additional avenues along which Christians encountered their traditions’ literary and doctrinal patrimony – an aspect of “reception history” both uniquely efficacious and commonly neglected in scholarship.

A third, equally significant reason for studying these sources involves their witness to Syriac Christians’ historical context. Given death’s ubiquity and communities’ evident commitment to commemorating members in their socioeconomic particularity, many of the hymns center persons that are otherwise absent from or, at best, marginal to the literary record. These include, in addition to the well-represented voices of clergy and ascetics, those of women and householders, children and youths, and migrants and victims of natural disaster. The necrosima’s frequent use of eidolopoeia – the rhetorical practice of making the dead speak “in their own right” in these hymns – notwithstanding, we must, of course, resist the temptation of treating these accounts as reflective of the real, lived experiences of the individuals or groups in question. They nevertheless map, for readers’ benefit, common discourses and indicators of the social imagination surrounding such persons.

At times, the resulting data is impressively clear, as in the case of madrāshâ 16’s description of the steps by which a departed member of the clergy would be commemorated and have his corpse conveyed to the grave.Footnote ⁷⁹ Much of the time, however, the information conveyed in these hymns is more suggestive, and more in need of interpretation. How ought we to understand, for example, the role of women in the community, in light of wives’ and mothers’ portrayal as essential to sustaining the household? What are we to make of the agential calculus – the balance of divine and human responsibility – inherent in the hymns’ presentation of pandemic? What might we infer about the clerical structures and forms of asceticism prevalent in the community, considering the plethora of hymns commemorating Covenanters, or about the perceived relationship between such ascetics and the faith community at large? To these questions and others like them, we will attend in the following chapters.

Last but certainly not least, the hymns function as signposts for mapping an “emotional community” – a social group invested in a shared system of feelings – among the churches who used them to commemorate their dead, witnessing to emotions they were prepared to valorize as beneficial or harmful, the affective bonds they recognized among their members, and the modes of emotional expression they considered acceptable or desirable.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the process, the necrosima attests to complex patterns of attachment between members of a monastic community, between parents and children, even between bodies and souls, with the latter grieving over their inevitable if temporary abandonment of their corporeal companions.

Particularly striking, however, are the range and pluriformity of responses to death, including one’s own mortality, that appear as tolerable, even emulable, throughout these writings. The hymns point to a culture of affect that could sustain conflicting emotional reactions and tensive patterns of feelings, at times portraying death as the starting point of an arduous journey, as a well-deserved rest, or a terrifying space in which to meditate on one’s sins. In a similar vein, mourning a loved one’s passing appears at times justified and commendable, at others reflective of a fundamental theological misunderstanding. Different madrāshê present audiences with different models for dying and mourning. Both in the necrosima and in their ritual performance, these nevertheless co-existed with one another, creating layered emotional pedagogies for learning to die and to live amidst bereavement.

It is the aspiration of this monograph to trace all three lineages – that of the necrosima’s relationship with the Syriac literature of the first millennium; that of its witness to social, ritual, and exegetical practices; and that of its role in shaping the emotional landscape of Syriac Christianity. The following, final section of this Introduction provides an overview both of subsequent chapters and of the book’s strategies for addressing the broader interlocking questions that have shaped this project.

Outline and Chapters

Chapter 2 (“Translating Eve: Women and Performance in the Necrosima”) focuses on hymns designed to accompany the burial of wives and mothers, identified by Assemani variously as “In funere mulierum” (On women’s burial, madrāshâ 32) and “In funere matrisfamilias” (On the burial of a female householder, madrāshâ 31). Their collection as part of Assemani’s “family section,” a segment of the necrosima addressing the burial of married men, women, children, and youths, provides insight into the construction of feminine identity at the intersection of social strictures and biblical models. The chapter also reflects an initial foray into the question of the hymns’ function in their original setting as part of funerary processions, including their performance by women’s choirs who voiced both the part of the deceased and that of her community. In these contexts, the hymns could serve as pedagogical performances, remapping the Syrian city with an eye toward both protological and eschatological realities.

While the necrosima boasts only a couple of hymns explicitly addressing the funerals of mothers, madrāshê on children’s and youths’ burials account for, by Assemani’s reckoning, eleven hymns – more than the number allotted to bishops, priests and deacons, or monastics. A closer examination of both the hymns themselves and Assemani’s manuscript source suggests a reduction of that number to a mere five: four for children, and one for youths. The latter, discussed in Chapter 3 (“‘Short Days They Lived on Earth …’: The Death of Children in the Necrosima”), nevertheless comprise an impressive and impressively diverse body of reflections on the death of those who had failed to reach adulthood, narrating the anticipated fate of the departed, the experience of bereavement for families and communities, and suggesting a range of pious postures by which they ought to encounter loss. These hymns also provide a site for examining the intersection between the necrosima and Syriac literature more broadly. The madrāshê accordingly reflect themes prominent in the writings of Syriac’s most celebrated authors, including Jacob of Serugh and Ephrem’s genuine writings, and translate these authors’ theological reflections into concise, personalized hymnic epitomes.

Chapter 4 (“Men and Means: Wealth and Poverty in the Necrosima”) addresses the vestiges of moneyed laymen in the necrosima. The latter are, perhaps not unexpectedly, both ubiquitous and largely invisible in this collection. The necrosima includes one hymn specifically addressing the death of a husband and father: madrāshâ 30 (“In funere patrisfamilias” [On the burial of a male householder]). By contrast, the majority of the necrosima’s forty “generic” hymns contemplates a male lay Christian subject, mourned by his children, anxious about abandoning his family, and plagued by anticipation of the harsh judgement he might receive. These hymns become a site for working out the necrosima’s theology of possessions – a topic that appears explicitly in some of the collection’s most paraenetically focused hymns, including, for example, madrāshâ 28 (“In funere principum, & Divitis cuiusque” [On the burial of a prince or some kind of rich man]), but is a prominent theme in much of the corpus. This chapter accordingly examines anxieties about wealth and poverty, and the ethical pedagogy inherent in the necrosima, including its emphasis on charity.

Chapter 5 (“Becoming Patriarchs: Bishops in the Necrosima”) turns from Christian laypersons to the spiritual elites both serving and governing the communities in question. The necrosima opens with an extensive section on clergy, most prominently hymns designed to accompany the burial of a city’s bishop. The latter’s deaths posed particular challenges for communities, inasmuch as episcopal transitions provided openings for intra-Christian conflict, schism, or simply extended leadership vacuums. The hymns thematize these anxieties, frequently featuring an anthropomorphized version of the church mourning on behalf of herself and her children, the Christian community, who had been left orphaned by their bishop’s demise. Strikingly, these hymns also showcase an aspect of the necrosima’s approach to biblical exegesis. While a smattering of texts – the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the “dry bones” of Ezekiel 37, and Jesus’ resurrection of various gospel characters – thus figure prominently in many of the madrāshê, the lives of departed bishops are read through the lens of biblical types, becoming identified in immediate and personal ways with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. This chapter explores the necrosima’s engagement with Scripture to narrate both death and the deceased themselves through a range of exegetical lenses.

Chapter 6 (“Reaching across the Threshold: Covenanters in the Necrosima”) turns to a different, but equally well represented, group of Christian elites: the so-called Sons and Daughters of the Covenant. These communities of male and female ascetics assumed responsibility for the practical and liturgical functioning of the churches, including, most prominently, the task of chanting psalms and hymns at ecclesiastical gatherings, including funerary processions. The necrosima contains a number of madrāshê designated for the burial of male Covenanters – as well as, this chapter suggests, one addressing the death of their female counterparts. The hymns provide readers with an intimate glimpse at the grief and anxiety that attended these community’s loss of one of their members, as well as insight into the strategies by which the bereaved sought to maintain ties “across the threshold.” This chapter accordingly examines the ways in which expectations of mutual prayer – by the bereaved on behalf of the dead, and by the dead on behalf of their surviving brothers and sisters – could serve to construct visions of continuity and hopes for eventual reunion.

Thus far, the texts discussed in these chapters contemplate the deaths of Christians under roughly ordinary circumstances. Yet late antiquity, like all eras of history, also provided much occasion for extra-ordinary deaths, including those precipitated by war and natural disaster. In addition to hymns addressing the deaths and burials of individual members of the community, the necrosima also features a number of poems that address instances of mass death due to pandemic and pestilence. Assemani identifies three such madrāshê (63, 64, and 69, “In tempore pestis” [In time of pestilence]); on text-internal grounds, Chapter 7 (“The Churches Are Empty, the Priests Are Silent: Rewriting Ritual in Pandemic Times”) argues madrāshê 75 should be included in this grouping as well. In both form and context of preservation, these hymns were manifestly part of their communities’ ritual repertoire. At the same time, however, they witness to periods in which ordinary ritual pathways had broken down. In the midst of sickness and bereavement, the hymns suggest, churches stood empty, clergy mourned the loss of their brothers, even burials had ceased in light of death’s relentless onslaught. This chapter examines the madrāshê in question as spaces for reconfiguring communities’ ritual practices. The necrosima’s pandemic hymns and other, roughly contemporaneous liturgical sources thus point to communities’ embrace of lament, petition, and penance as models for engaging the divine.

The book’s conclusion (“Beyond the Threshold”), finally, draws together the hymns and themes addressed in previous chapters to reflect synthetically on the visions of death and the afterlife that emerge from them. It examines their affective, social, and theological resonances in conversation with other early Christian traditions.

Throughout these chapters, the attentive reader may observe a narrative thread winding its way through the book. While, in other words, individual chapters are designed to be read largely independently of one another, they nevertheless address interlocking strata of Syriac funerary liturgies and the ritual, intellectual, and affective discourses surrounding them. For reasons that have already become apparent, it is difficult to speak of the necrosima as a unified corpus – to say nothing of a coherent whole. Nor do the madrāshê examined closely in this book constitute more than a mere sample of the collection’s broader resources. Connected by scribal practice and authorial ascription, these hymns nevertheless represent a lens through which to engage some of the central questions that preoccupy students of Syriac Christianity. Chapters 2 and 7 accordingly address matters of performativity, considering the mechanics of ritual both in the context of ordinary deaths and in that of natural disaster and the concomitant practical and liturgical exigencies. Chapters 3 and 5, by contrast, consider the resources from which these rituals are constructed, including both Scripture and the patrimony of the greater literary tradition. Chapters 4 and 6, finally, consider in depth two of the necrosima’s central pedagogical topoi: the role of worldly good in the lives of Christians – and that of prayer in constituting communities that transcended the present life.

The following pages will, I fear, barely scratch the surface of this complex and fascinating set of texts. The aim of this book is, then, to begin a conversation rather than to arrive at an all-encompassing conclusion, and to invite rather than foreclose further inquiry. To this end, we turn first to the heart of the Christian household: the mother and her biblical analogue – the mother of life and death.