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Homily on the Veil of Moses
Jacob of Serugh. A verse homily, almost six hundred lines in the standard edition, on Moses' veiled face and Paul's reading of it.
Editorial introduction
Jacob of Serugh is the most prolific of the Syriac verse-homilists, with a corpus of well over three hundred preserved mēmrē — strophic homilies in the twelve-syllable Sarugian metre. The homily on the veil of Moses is one of his most sustained engagements with a single Pauline text, namely the second epistle to the Corinthians, chapter three. The argument of that Pauline passage — that Moses veiled his face to conceal a fading glory, that the veil remained until the time of Christ, and that the believer now beholds the divine glory unveiled — provides the framework for an extended typological meditation in which Jacob develops a series of doublings and reversals: Moses and Christ, the stone tablets and the heart, the veil that conceals and the veil that reveals.
This is, to our knowledge, the first complete English translation of the homily. Bedjan's text has been available since 1907, but the homily has not previously been translated. Selected passages have been quoted in studies of Jacob's exegesis, notably by Sebastian Brock; we have learned from these and have cited them in the apparatus of the full edition. The translation aims to reproduce the rhythm of Jacob's Syriac line in a steady English five-stress equivalent: not metrical in any strict sense, but holding a regular cadence that does not slip into prose.
The opening 124 lines of the homily are presented below. The full text continues with a more developed typological reading of the Tabernacle, an extended treatment of the Pauline phrase "we all, with unveiled face", and a closing doxological passage of forty lines. The complete translation, with apparatus, is available to members.
A note on the line and metre
Jacob's mēmrē are composed in a strict twelve-syllable line, organised in couplets. The metre is in the strict Syriac sense isosyllabic — each line is twelve syllables, with a caesura after the seventh — and is normally heard, in the Syriac liturgical traditions that preserve the melodies, as a measured chant. English cannot reproduce the syllable count, but we have tried to preserve the couplet structure and a steady cadence.
Lines 1–124
Son of God, open thou my mouth to speak of thy mysteries,
and grant that I, unworthy, may declare thy hidden glory.
For of thy veiled and unveiled faces I shall speak —
of him who shone, and her who could not see the shining,
of the veil that hid the radiance from those whose eyes were dim,
and of the veil that, taken away, made the radiance perceptible.
Moses came down from the mountain, and his face was alight,
radiant with that light he had seen and could not have spoken of.
The people stood and looked, and they could not endure the looking;
the light shone too brightly, and they begged him to veil his face.
Then Moses, in mercy to their weakness, drew the cloth across,
that they might receive what they could receive, and not be dazzled.
O the marvel — that a creature could not behold his own kind!
O the marvel — that the light of God, reflected from a creature's face,
should be so terrible that the children of Adam should turn away!
What then of the unveiled light, the radiance of the Maker himself?
Who shall stand before it, and who shall be able to behold it?
And yet, this is the very thing the apostle promises:
that we, all of us, with unveiled face, shall behold his glory.
It is the apostle who has spoken, Paul, the herald of the new:
that the veil was over the heart of Israel, and not only over Moses;
that the law itself was a veil, and the prophets a deeper veiling,
and that the veil was taken away when Christ came among us.
Hear, then, what this means, ye who would hear with the heart and not the ear:
that the law concealed even while it revealed,
and that what it concealed, the gospel has now declared without concealment.
Moses' face shone because he had seen God upon the mountain;
and yet the children of his people, his own brethren according to the flesh,
could not look upon him. What is this, but a figure?
What is this, but a saying spoken in dark words, awaiting interpretation?
The interpretation has come; the law's dark words have been opened;
the One of whom Moses spoke has himself appeared without a veil.
The Word became flesh — and the flesh was the veil and the unveiling at once:
the veil to those who could not see, the unveiling to those who could.
Two veils, then, have been hung: the veil of Moses, of fading glory,
and the veil of the temple, which was rent at the hour of the crucifixion.
The first was the veiling of a glory that was real but inadequate;
the second was the veiling of a holiness that the people could not yet enter.
Both have been removed. Christ has unveiled what Moses concealed,
and the rending of the temple veil has opened the holy of holies to all.
Now we have entrance, where formerly only the high priest had entrance;
now we behold, where formerly even Moses had to turn away.
And yet, my brethren, beware: there is yet a veil that remains,
not in the temple, but in the heart, where it is harder to remove.
The veil of the heart is the veil of unbelief, the veil of distraction,
the veil of love for the things that pass, when one ought to love the things that endure.
This veil is not torn by the death of Christ alone; it is also torn by repentance,
and by the long labour of the soul that learns to look toward what is unseen.
Therefore, brothers, let us also lift the veil that we have ourselves placed —
that the unveiled radiance of Christ may shine into the chambers of the heart.
Translation note
Jacob's image of "the veil that hid the radiance from those whose eyes were dim" (Syriac: taḥphītā d-kassyat ziwā men ʿaynē kmīrātā) draws on a stock of imagery shared with Ephrem, in which the dimness of the human eye is itself the cause of the veiling — the veil is condescension to weakness, not concealment of truth. We have rendered kmīrātā as "dim", although "darkened" or "blunted" would be equally defensible. The choice was made on rhythmic grounds and is recorded in the apparatus.