Jacob of Serugh

Jacob was born about 451 at Kurtam, a village on the Euphrates in the region of Serugh, in what is now southeastern Turkey. His father was a priest. He studied at the famous school of Edessa, the great Syriac-speaking center of biblical learning, and by tradition began writing verse homilies while still a young student.

For most of his life he was not a bishop but a country clergyman, a periodeutes, a visiting priest responsible for the villages of a rural district around Serugh. He held that post for decades. Only in 519, when he was about sixty-eight, was he made bishop of Batnan, the chief town of the district. He held the office roughly two years and died in November 521.

His life spanned the hardest years his region had seen. In 502 and 503 the Persian king Kavadh invaded, and the city of Amida fell after a long siege with terrible slaughter. Jacob wrote to the frightened Christians of Amida to steady them, and later wrote letters of comfort to towns waiting their turn. He also lived through the aftermath of Chalcedon, and his own position in that dispute has been argued over ever since: his letters read as opposed to the two-natures language of the council, and the churches that rejected Chalcedon honor him as their own, while his poems themselves stay close to Scripture and rarely fight the technical battle at all.

The work is enormous. Ancient accounts say he wrote seven hundred and sixty-three metrical homilies, dictated to a team of scribes; something over four hundred survive. They are written in a twelve-syllable line so identified with him that Syriac writers simply call it 'the meter of Mar Jacob.' He also left letters, hymns, and liturgical pieces.

What the homilies do is retell the Bible. He takes a scene, the creation, Abraham on the mountain, the veil of Moses, the woman at the well, Thomas touching the wounds, the chariot of Ezekiel, and turns it slowly, filling in what the text leaves silent, letting the characters speak, holding the Old Testament and the New together so that one keeps explaining the other. He is not arguing; he is preaching, in poetry, to people who would hear it sung.

The Syriac tradition gave him two titles that stuck: the Flute of the Holy Spirit and the Harp of the Believing Church. Both the Syriac Orthodox and the Maronite churches keep his memory, and his verse is still read in their services.

Sources: Jacob of Serugh, Homilies (Homiliae Selectae, ed. Paul Bedjan, 1905–1910); Jacob's Letters (ed. Olinder); Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.