The epistemology of the mid-fourth-century Christian scholar in Persia, Aphrahat, presumes that the human mind and the task of biblical interpretation are caught up in a dynamic experience of Christian spiritual transformation. In short, for the Persian Sage, good Bible interpretation requires nothing less than the total person—inner and outer, in community and before God. In Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, we encounter a scholar who not only presents this remarkably integrated set of ideals but is also an impressive practitioner of them.

Recognized as a saint by both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians alike, Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) produced many narrative poems that have rarely been translated into English. Of his reported 760 metrical homilies, only about half survive. Part of a series of fascicles containing the bilingual Syriac-English editions of Saint Jacob of Sarug’s homilies, this volume contains two of his homilies on Jacob. The Syriac text is fully vocalized, and the translation is annotated with a commentary and biblical references. The volume is one of the fascicles of Gorgias Press’s Complete Homilies of Saint Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain all of Jacob’s surviving sermons.