Poetry as exegesis: Ephrem the Syrian's method of scriptural interpretation especially as seen in his 'Hymns on Paradise' and 'Hymns on Unleavened Bread'

Ephrem's liturgical poems, the madrase, rarely have been studied as an exegetical genre. This study presents an analysis of his scriptural interpretation in two sets of madrase , or hymns: Hymns on Paradise, and Hymns on Unleavened Bread. Scholars tend to isolate Ephrem's individual hymns from the sets to which they belong. This study treats them as parts of whole literary units.;Ephrem's method of scriptural interpretation in these hymn-sets is to create a reciprocal hermeneutic between the biblical text and his own context. He achieves this by creating several narratives from select biblical pericopes and from the stories of his context. He unites these narratives through a central symbol shared by each, and by character typologies drawn from one narrative to another. The result is a new scriptural-contextual narrative.;Ephrem's context is not often considered as integral to his scriptural interpretation. Here, both his immediate literary and liturgical contexts are reconstructed as far as possible, posing the questions: what was Ephrem's "Bible"? How might the madrase have been performed?;This study argues that the reciprocal hermeneutic between text and context Ephrem creates was fully realized in the performance of the madrase in the liturgical setting. Through the address of his performed poetry, his congregation would have received a rescripted narrative identity.;Part one of this study provides an interpretive overview of the broader scholarly literature on early Christian exegesis and shows that the sharp contrast between Antiochene and Alexandrian schools of exegesis traditionally upheld is not always helpful, especially when considering Ephrem's poetry as exegesis. Ephrem employs interpretive strategies shared by both schools and common in Greco-Roman education. Part two sets forth Ephrem's narrative constructions in the chosen hymn-sets, and demonstrates the reciprocal hermeneutic he creates. The approach taken is literary and textual, while drawing on performance criticism and the metaphor of the theatre.