"Christ has subjected us to the harsh yoke of the Arabs": the Syriac exegesis of Jacob of Edessa in the new world order

Jacob, bishop of Edessa, was the most prominent monophysite scholar of the early medieval period. His work covers a remarkable range, from biblical exegesis, to the codification and transmission of philosophy and Greek scientific knowledge, the development of ecclesiatical law, and historiography. All these areas of his output are interlinked in various ways. Thismakesit difficult for the modern scholar to isolate any particular aspect of his oeuvre. Jacob was born near Antioch sometime in the 630s CE. Therefore his early years would have coincided with the death of the Prophet Muhammed and the subsequent captures of Damascus (634 CE), Antioch (636) and Edessa (638). However, inhis earlierworks and in the scant biographical information about him there is no overt sign of what we would regard as epic changes taking place in his vicinity. Perhaps this is because, for Christians in the Middle East, disruption had become the norm, particularly since the Persian invasions in the earlier part of the seventh century and the deepening schisms within the Christian Church. Apart from a brief period as bishop of Edessa during the 680s, a post from which he in fact resigned, Jacob spent most of his life studying and teaching in some of the great monasteries of Syria, namelyQenneshrin, Kaysum, Eusebona, and Tell‘Ada. He wrote in Syriac but was thoroughly conversant in Greek. Many of his works still survive. They are at once conservative, preserving the best of what had preceded him from both Christian tradition and pagan Greek culture, and also cutting-edge, such as his Chronicon, his Hexaemeron (a series of treatises on the Six Days of Creation), and his own “version”of the Old Testament.