Jacob of Sarug’s Homily Concerning the Red Heifer and the Crucifixion of our Lord Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 78 Series Editor George Anton Kiraz TeCLA (Texts from Christian Late Antiquity) is a series presenting ancient Christian texts both in their original languages and with accompanying contemporary English translations. Jacob of Sarug’s Homily Concerning the Red Heifer and the Crucifixion of our Lord Edited and Translated by Demetrios Alibertis gp 2022 Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2022 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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Printed in the United States of America TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ......................................................................... v Introduction ................................................................................. 1 Summary ............................................................................ 11 Text and Translation .................................................................. 13 Memra 77: Concerning the Red Heifer which is commanded in the Law to be burnt in place of the sins of the assembly: And concerning the Crucifixion of our Lord ............................................... 14 Bibliography ............................................................................... 55 Ancient Sources .................................................................. 55 Modern Sources .................................................................. 55 Index of Biblical References ....................................................... 57 v INTRODUCTION INFORMATION ON THIS HOMILY Homily Title: Concerning the Red Heifer which is commanded in the Law to be burnt in place of the sins of the assembly: And concerning the Crucifixion of our Lord. Source of Text: Homiliae Selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis, edited by Paul Bedjan (Paris-Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1907, 2nd ed. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006), vol. 3, pp. 242–259. [Homily 77] Lines: 344 In his seventy-seventh mimrō, Jacob of Sarug expounds on one of the most intriguing and puzzling sacrifices commanded in the Hebrew Bible, the red heifer slaughter ritual in Numbers 19. In this rite, the Israelites were instructed to take a perfect, unblem- ished, red heifer, upon which no yoke was ever laid, and to de- liver it to the priest who would remove it from the camp. Out- side of the camp, the heifer was slaughtered before the priest who would, thereafter, take some of the blood and sprinkle it towards the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, seven times. After the sprinkling of the blood, the entire animal, was completely immolated. The priest, as instructed, threw into the great con- flagration which consumed the heifer three items – cedar wood, hyssop and a piece of wool material dyed scarlet. At the end of this process, the ashes of the animal were collected by an indi- vidual who was ritually pure and were stored in a clean place to be used by the Israelites to purify themselves and their dwell- ings from corpse impurity. Jacob examines all aspects of the brief chapter, but focuses especially on the enigma of the ritual; while the ashes of the red heifer were supposed to have a purga- 1 2 HOMILY ON THE RED HEIFER AND THE CRUCIFIXION tive effect and, as such, were to be used to expunge impurity from those who had come into contact with a corpse or grave, all involved in the sacrifice itself were rendered unclean by it for the duration of the day. The officiating priest and all other par- ticipants were permitted to re-enter the camp of the Israelites in the evening, only after having washed their clothing and having bathed themselves. It is on this very puzzling and contradictory situation that Mar Jacob is able to skillfully weave together a typological interpretation of the narrative, portraying every fea- ture of the ritual as being a type (tupsō), or a symbol (rōzō), or a shadow (ṭelōnitō) that depicts (ṣōar) Christ’s passion, blood and death. For Jacob, the entire story is a prefigurement of Christ’s death and its ability to restore and permanently purify all who enter the church through baptism. Jacob’s mimrō ‘On the Red Heifer’ consists of 172 stanzas written in dodecasyllabic meter and was divided into ten sec- tions by Bedjan in his critical edition.1 In section 1 (lines 1–36), Jacob begins with a rhetorical preamble in which he declares his inability to approach the subject matter. He begins by stating how he is approaching the treasury of God’s mysteries to make trade with it (lmettagōru). Jacob requests that God give him the ability to understand the many symbols of the narrative and he, in turn, will reveal the mysteries to his audience. There are three interconnected elements in this introductory section which are notable. First, Jacob claims that that the Son of God is allud- ed to many times in Moses’ writings, and how the mystery of the crucifixion and the image of Christ’s death are portrayed through the medium of the various sufferings portrayed in Scrip- ture (15–16; 19–30). Second, Jacob claims that it is only through divine revelation that one can comprehend the meaning 1 Bedjan based his edition on two manuscripts: (a) London, British Li- brary, Add. 14,725, f. 29aff; (b) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Cat. 135 (= Pococke 404), f. 379aff. See Paulus Bedjan, ed., Homiliae Selectae Mar- Jacobi Sarugensis, (vol. 3; Paris-Leipzig 1905; 2nd ed. Piscataway: Gor- gias Press, 2006), V-XIV. INTRODUCTION 3 of Scriptures (3–6; 9–14; 17–18). Finally, the element of the Eu- charist is brought into the introduction and is portrayed, albeit somewhat cryptically at this point, as being the true source of understanding (5–8; 17–18). It is only later in the mimrō that a typological association will be made between the ritual and the Eucharist. Section 2 (lines 37–66) begins by depicting Moses as an art- ist who used choice pigments of prophecy (gawne gbayō danbiutō) to depict Christ throughout the Scriptures (37–38). Jacob claims that the blood sacrifices of the Hebrew Bible pre- pared the road of the crucifixion and honored the great slaugh- ter of Christ that was to tread on the same path (39–42). Jacob sees the cross of Jesus and the crucifixion prefigured (metnaṣar) in all the sin-offerings involving blood in Scripture, especially as the blood of the animal, such as that of the heifer, had the abil- ity to atone one from sin and to purify the elect of God (41–48). Jacob finishes the section by warning his audience that if they are attached to worldly possessions and do not approach the story in love, they will neither be able to understand the sym- bols nor see the hidden things therein. One must be fully im- mersed in love for God and lean towards God, in order for them to understand the mysteries depicted (49–64). Section 3 (lines 67–90) is simply a restatement of the bibli- cal narrative as found in the Bible. Section 4 (lines 91–134) commences with a plea to Moses to reveal what the true mean- ing of the narrative and its symbols are. It is from line 99 on- wards where the meaning of the ritual finally begins to be deci- phered. Jacob begins his interpretation with a display of amazement at the external form of the sacrifice. He claims how the color of the heifer alone suffices to proclaim a slaughtering (99–100). Subsequently, Jacob expresses his amazement at how the sacrifice of the heifer, whose purpose is to purify those who are ritually unclean, renders the officiating priest impure (117– 134). He rationalizes that the entire rite must be a symbol of sorts, otherwise this enigma cannot be accounted for. He pro- ceeds to attack the Jewish nation for preferring the symbols of Scripture to the Lord of the symbols. One of the key features of this section is Jacob describing the ritual as being nothing more 4 HOMILY ON THE RED HEIFER AND THE CRUCIFIXION than a shadow, a term he will use six times in total throughout the homily. For Jacob, the efficacy of the rite rested in the fact that it was a shadow of the Son of God (bṭelōniteh dbar alōhō). He plays on a shadow-body analogy and shows himself as being puzzled at how the Jewish people could love the shadow but hate the great body (gušmō rabō) casting the shadow – the Lord Himself (109–114). In section 5 (lines 135–180), Jacob proceeds to question the conundrum of the narrative. He presents a brief, fictional dialogue wherein he asks the priest what the source of his impu- rity is. When the priest replies that the offering he made was the cause of his own defilement, Jacob logically assumes that if this were the case, then the animal itself would have had to been defiled (135–140). He then proceeds to cast the narrative through the lens of Christian typological exegesis, but not before portraying the cross of Jesus as a key through which the hidden things of Scripture are revealed. Beginning with the color of the animal as itself being an indicator that the rite gestures towards its being a portrayal of Christ’s slaughter, Jacob goes on to jux- tapose the themes of life and death. He maintains that the rea- son the heifer was red was so that it would signify both life and death simultaneously: while the animal symbolizes death through its color, yet is it alive and moves towards its death. He interprets the simultaneous presence of life and death in the yet- alive heifer as an image of Christ, in whose death life sprung forth for the world (153–166). Jacob also interprets the color of the animal and its movement towards the place of its slaughter as a symbol of the injured Christ going towards His death (173– 178). He summarizes these points well in the final verses of the section: “He poured forth on it a color which proclaimed heavily the death [of the Son], and he proclaimed it a sacrifice that through it he would purify those who are unclean” (179–180). In section 6 (lines 181–216), Jacob delineates the meaning of the other three materials used in the rite: the hyssop, the scar- let dye, and the cedarwood. According to the homilist, these items were intended to increase the symbolic imagery of the narrative in order to make undisputedly clear that all elements of the rite foreshadowed the crucifixion. As such, the mingling