Hymns and Sermons of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Volume 1

These same things, after Ambrose, Fr. Zinus and Gerard Vossius, the interpreters of the Greek works of Ephrem, said about the Syrian doctor, even though at that time neither his commentaries on the Old Testament had seen the light of day, nor his sermons on faith and the Church with which he most sharply attacked the errors then spreading in Mesopotamia, nor his almost innumerable hymns on all the solemnities of Christ and His Mother, on the martyrs and confessors, nor the songs with which a second Jeremiah laments the dead, nor all those poems which Bickell, Zingerle, and Overbeek have more recently edited or which I bring to light. What would they say if they had had all these before their eyes, or could have tasted the sweetness, sublimity, charm, and incomparable artifice of that Syriac poetry? In it, there is nothing profane, nothing counterfeit, but everything breathes sacred doctrine, so that the vision that happened to him as an infant was truly fulfilled, when he seemed in a dream to see a vine growing that filled every region under heaven and produced innumerable leaves and clusters, by which his sermons and hymns were signified.

Commentaries on Sacred Scripture.

While acting as an interpreter of the Scriptures, Ephrem, like John Chrysostom and Theodoret, follows the method of the Antiochene school and is entirely focused on eliciting the literal sense, which he explains in very brief scholia. However, he passes over in silence the allegorical interpretations that the masters of the Alexandrian school, Philo and Origen, pursue everywhere, even if he does not reject every spiritual sense; on the contrary, he explains many things mystically, but only there where some weighty reason persuades him that such a sense is present in the letter. Father Benedict extracted the scholia of Ephrem on the Old Testament from a catena composed in the 9th century by Severus, a monk of Edessa. We intend to edit other things from another codex of the same catena that are missing in the Roman edition.