What was Joseph’s reaction when he arrived home to find that Mary was pregnant? How did Mary manage to persuade him that her child was none other than the Son of God? An answer, in the form of an imaginative and lively re-presentation of their encounter, is offered in the second of five dialogue poems in which Mary is one of the two speakers.

Dialogue poems (sughyotho) constitute a distinctive genre in Syriac literature whose roots can be traced back to Ancient Mesopotamia. The present collection provides the Syriac texts with facing English translations, accompanied by an introduction and explanatory notes. An Appendix lists all the dialogue poems so far known, with references to translations, where available. Besides being delightful in their own right, these dialogue poems have considerable potential for use in religious education.

Sebastian P. Brock was born in 1938 and studied Classics (Greek and Latin) and Oriental Studies (Hebrew and Aramaic) at Cambridge University before doing a DPhil. at Oxford University on the text of the Septuagint. He has taught at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, and (from 1974 until his retirement in 2003) Oxford, where he was Reader in Syriac Studies. He has published extensively in the field of Syriac and has edited a number of new texts.