Jacob of Edessa

Jacob was born about 640 at Aindaba, near Antioch, in the first generation of Syrian Christians to live under Arab rule. He studied at the monastery of Qenneshre on the Euphrates, the great school of Greek learning in the Syriac world, and then went on to Alexandria. He came back knowing Greek unusually well, and knowing Hebrew, which almost no Syriac writer of his time did.

About 684 he was made bishop of Edessa. He lasted three or four years. He tried to enforce the church's canons strictly, found that neither his clergy nor his patriarch would back him, and resigned in disgust, burning a copy of the canon law in front of the patriarch's residence to make the point. He then spent about eleven years teaching Greek and the Psalms at the monastery of Kaisum and at Tell 'Ada.

In 708 he was recalled to Edessa. He went back to the monastery to fetch his library, returned to the city with it, and died four months later, on 5 June 708.

His output was enormous and startlingly modern in temper.

He revised the Syriac Old Testament, comparing the standard Peshitta text against the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew, and produced a version that is one of the most careful pieces of textual work anyone did in that millennium. Parts of it survive in manuscripts in London, Paris, and Rome.

He wrote the first grammar of Syriac, and, this is his most-quoted innovation, tried to fix the vowels of the language by inserting small Greek letters into the consonantal text. Syriac writing recorded consonants and left readers to guess the vowels, which for a Bible is a serious problem. His system was too heavy to survive as he designed it, but the idea behind the later Syriac vowel points is his.

He wrote a chronicle continuing Eusebius down to his own day, a Hexaemeron on the six days of creation packed with the natural science of his age, treatises on the calendar, and a long series of letters answering questions from priests: what to do about a Christian who sells wine to Muslims, whether a deacon may marry, how to calculate Easter. Those letters are one of the best sources anywhere for daily Christian life in the early Islamic Middle East.

He also translated Greek works into Syriac, including Severus of Antioch's cathedral homilies, helping to build the chain by which Greek learning reached Arabic, and eventually Latin Europe.

Sources: William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature; Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum; Jacob of Edessa, Hexaemeron and Letters (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium); J. B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City.