TO THE READER.

...and it seems inevitable. It is no wonder if those unskilled in the Syriac tongue, who judge the matter only from Greek or Latin versions, are not convinced; for how few are there who possess the art of translation so exactly that they can express the Author's meaning—which is usually not difficult—without changing his style? Just as this is not easy in itself, I say it is most difficult, and not even to be hoped for, by those translating the writings of the most eloquent authors. Whether the translators of Saint Ephrem have failed in this regard or not, the Syrians know best, whom Photius Photius (c. 810–893) was the Patriarch of Constantinople and a prodigious scholar whose Bibliotheca reviews hundreds of books from antiquity. calls as witnesses or judges in this matter. In the Library, chapter 196. Finally, there is a constant agreement with the customs and history of his own century. If this consistency were absent, or if a disagreement appeared anywhere, this alone would refute the book’s title and argue it a manifest forgery. Meanwhile, let us hear Ephrem himself as a witness to his own work.

"Although," he says in the preface of his commentary on the first book of the Pentateuch, "I had decided to forgo an explanation of Genesis, lest I should repeat to no purpose what I had already treated in my sermons and questions, I nevertheless yielded to the requests of friends," etc.

How well these words apply to Saint Ephrem is evidenced by sixteen long sermons in which the Holy Doctor covered the entire history of the Patriarchs; it is also evidenced by various other questions of his, which we have added to the Holy Doctor's explanation on page 116, selected from the collections of Severus the Monk. Severus of Antioch, whose "catenae" (chains of commentary) preserved many fragments of earlier church fathers.

Again on page 23, he writes:

"There are four rivers: the Pishon, which is also the Danube; the Gihon, which is also the Nile; the Tigris; and the Euphrates, between which we dwell." In the 4th century, biblical geography was often harmonized with known major rivers; here the Pishon and Gihon are identified with the Danube and the Nile.

The Author indicates that his homeland was Syria, which the Tigris and Euphrates wash; for this reason, the Greeks, Syrians, and Arabs call Mesopotamia "The Island" original: "Insulam" (The Island). In Arabic, the region is called Al-Jazira.; this same region was Saint Ephrem’s birthplace; for born in Nisibis, he lived and ended his days in Edessa.

Furthermore, with what great effort does the Author of these explanations rise up against the Jews whenever the occasion arises, inserting frequent and—given his purpose—quite long digressions? He was writing, no doubt, in Mesopotamia, where many Jews had migrated after the general destruction of their nation due to the affinity of the location and the language. By Ephrem’s time, they had already grown into such a multitude that Josephus—who was much older than Ephrem—writes that a third part of the province was occupied by them. Antiquities, book 18. Moreover, they possessed very famous schools there and much leisure for cultivating letters, as is taught everywhere by the words and deeds of those who emerged from those academies: the Hebrew teachers contemporary with Ephrem found in Bartolocci's Rabbinic Library, and the Babylonian Talmudists of great name who followed Ephrem.

Therefore, from that acquaintance with the Jews and the frequent debates about religion that naturally occur, I conjecture that the Holy Doctor learned the Hebrew language and sprinkled his commentaries in more than one place with Hebrew traditions. In both of these respects, Jacob of Edessa A prominent Syrian scholar and bishop (c. 640–708) known for his linguistic expertise. later imitated him, since he also wrote in Mesopotamia.

On page 161, concerning those words of God to Abraham, Take for yourself a three-year-old heifer, etc., where he explains the passage of a lamp of miraculous appearance through the divided carcasses of the slain animals, he teaches that this ceremony was taken from the rites of the Chaldeans. He explains that God, dealing with Abraham—who was a Chaldean man—wished to use his ancestral custom even outside his homeland. Customs of his own century clearly suggested such an observation to Ephrem; for the Acts of the Martyrs who suffered in Chaldea and Persia show that such a sacred law flourished among the Chaldeans and Persians at that same time.

On page 496, where he describes the sacrifice of Elijah, he praises the translators who write: that the priests of Baal constructed their altar in the manner of a chamber, and placed a man inside who, at a signal, would set fire to the pile of wood and the victim placed upon the altar from below. He adds: "We have found that this is still done today by certain impostors." John Chrysostom, a contemporary of Ephrem, recounts that the same thing was practiced in his own time in his sermon on Peter and Elijah. According to Metaphrastes.

"I myself saw," he says, "what I am telling you: in the altars of the idols there are certain holes; in the lower part of the altar there is a certain dark pit. The craftsmen of error descend into that pit and, from the holes we mentioned, they blow fire to complete the sacrifice." John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) was the Archbishop of Constantinople and a contemporary of Ephrem; he often spoke against the perceived deceits of pagan temple rituals.

Otherwise, the Blessed Ephrem took up that subject matter for writing which he saw was most consistent with his profession, and also extremely useful for Monks and plainly necessary for the entire Church. Having professed the Monastic life, he wrote many things for himself and his brothers concerning their common way of life, such that no one else wrote more abundantly or more sweetly. Indeed, almost all the treatises found in either the Vossian or Oxford editions pertain to Monks. He himself hints—and it is clearly gathered from his recorded life—that he worked on commentaries for all the books of Divine Scripture for their sake as well. Other works, which either celebrate the deeds of the Saints or refute the errors of the Gentiles and Heretics, were dictated to Ephrem by the calamitous state of the Church in his time. The man, by his own sharp genius and incited by divine instinct, could not bear, nor did he bear, the wicked [plans] of the sectarians, however...