Placing Ancient Texts

The Ritual and Rhetorical Use

of Space

edited by
Mika Ahuvia and
Alexander Kocar

Mohr Siebeck
E-offprint of the author with publisher’s permission.
Mika Ahuvia, born 1983; BA from Rollins College; MA from the University of Michigan; PhD
from Princeton University; the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and
Assistant Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University
of Washington, Seattle.
orcid.org/0000-0002-3836-5465
Alexander Kocar, born 1984; BA from the Univesity of Minnesota; MA from the University
of Washington; PhD from Princeton University; Lecturer in the department of Religion at
Princeton University.

ISBN 978-3-16-156376-8 / eISBN 978-3-16-156377-5

DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-156377-5
ISSN 0721-8753 (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism)
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E-offprint of the author with publisher’s permission.

 Table of Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI

Mika Ahuvia and Alexander Kocar

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part I: Constructing Spaces and Places

Eshbal Ratzon
Placing Eden in Second Temple Judaism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Gil P. Klein
Sabbath as City: Rabbinic Urbanism and Imperial Territoriality
in Roman Palestine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Ophir Münz-Manor
In situ: Liturgical Poetry and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Part II: Placing People

Alexander Kocar
A Hierarchy of Salvation in the Book of Revelation: Different Peoples,
Dwellings, and Tasks in the End Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Rachel R. Neis
Directing the Heart: Corporeal Language and the Anatomy
of Ritual Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Derek Krueger
Beyond Eden: Placing Adam, Eve, and Humanity in Byzantine Hymns . . . 167

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VIII Table of Contents

Part III: Re-Placing Ritual Texts

David Frankfurter
‘It is Esrmpe who appeals!’: Place, Object, and Performance
in a Quest for Pregnancy in Roman Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

AnneMarie Luijendijk
‘If you order that I wash my feet, then bring me this ticket’:
Encountering Saint Colluthus at Antinoë . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

Mika Ahuvia
The Spatial and Social Dynamics of Jewish Babylonian Incantation Bowls 227

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

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 Beyond Eden
Placing Adam, Eve, and Humanity in Byzantine Hymns

Derek Krueger

An anonymous late fifth-century Christian hymn entitled On Adam’s Lament em-

ploys the ancient rhetorical technique of ethopoeia, composing a speech-in-char-
acter for Adam that explores his emotional response to his expulsion from Eden.1
After a brief prelude, the poet places Adam in the scene and describes his actions.
Then Adam sat and wept opposite (ἀπέναντι)
The delight of Paradise beating his eyes with his hands
And he said:
  O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen. (1)

In situating Adam opposite Paradise, the poet follows the Septuagint text of
Gen 3:23–24: “And the Lord God sent him [Adam] forth from the Paradise
of delight to till the earth from which he was taken. And he drove Adam out
and caused him to dwell opposite the Paradise of delight, and he stationed the
cherubim and the flaming sword that turns, to guard the way of the tree of life.”
The Masoretic Hebrew text of Gen 3:24, which places the cherubim [and not
Adam] “at the east (‫ )מקדמ‬of the Garden of Eden,” does not specify where Adam
resided. On the Greek verses that place Adam opposite the garden, so close that
he might see it, John Chrysostom had commented a century earlier, “It was that
[Adam] might in this work have a constant reminder of his humiliation, and

1 On Adam’s Lament, ed. Paul Maas, Frühbyzantinische Kirchenpoesie: I. Anonyme Hymnen

des V.–VI. Jahrhunderts, 2nd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931), 16–20. I have used the fine English
translation of this kontakion by Ephrem Lash available online at http://www.anastasis.org.uk/
adam’s_lament.htm. For discussion see Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual,
Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 10–11. For early prose treatments of the theme, Gary A. Anderson,
The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, KY.:
Westminster John Knox, 2001). For Eve, also Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Encountering Eve in the
Syriac Liturgy,” in Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium,
Duke University, June 26–29, 2011, ed. Maria Doerfler et al., Eastern Christian Studies 20 (Leu-
ven: Peeters, 2015); Nonna Verna Harrison, “Eve in Greek Patristic and Byzantine Theology,”
in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 3: Liturgy and Life, ed. Geoffrey Dunn and
Lawrence Cross (Strathfield, NSW: St. Pauls Publications, 2003), 293–314.

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168 Derek Krueger

be in a position to know that his substance derived from that source.”2 Adam’s
placement compounded the punishment, as Chrysostom observed: “There was
also the location opposite the garden so that he might have unending anguish in
recollecting from what heights he had fallen and cast himself into such depths.”
Nevertheless, “the constant sight proved to be an encouragement for this griev-
ing man to carefulness in the future lest he fall into the same sin again” (Hom.
Gen. 18.10). And it is precisely the convergence of the emotional and instructive
impact of Adam’s placement opposite Eden that the anonymous hymnographer
explores. In describing how Adam sat (ἐκάθισεν) and wept (ἔκλαυσεν), the poet
invokes another exile, the exile from the Land of Israel, by echoing the language
of Ps 137:1 (LXX 136): “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept” (ἐπὶ τῶν
ποταμῶν Βαβυλῶνος ἐκεῖ ἐκαθίσαμεν καὶ ἐκλαύσαμεν). Adam’s posture and
affect thus depend on broader conceptions of human displacement and misery.
But in the hymn’s refrain and in the subsequent stanzas, the first created human
bewails his fate in a proximate exile, laboring within sight of his first homeland.
Late antiquity witnessed a flowering of sacred song among Jews and Chris-
tians, as poets and composers adorned the rites of synagogues and churches
with hymns, many keyed to emerging lectionary cycles.3 Hymnography was
not merely exegetical, interpreting scripture, but also performative. Liturgy had
the power to place. A survey of four Byzantine Christian hymns about the fall
of Adam and Eve illustrates the role of situating and scene setting in the place-
ment of humanity. Composed between the fifth and ninth century, these hymns
were performed by cantors and choirs and heard by congregations both lay and
monastic. They enlivened the liturgy with heightened affect, both modeling and
cuing appropriate reactions to the sacred narrative.

The Anonymous Hymn On Adam’s Lament

The earliest of these hymns, On Adam’s Lament, inserts the singer and the con-
gregation into the world of the Bible, and, significantly, into its topography.
Singing and hearing the hymn simultaneously places the assembled worshippers
in the biblical narrative and in the place opposite Eden. The hymn’s form, later
termed a kontakion, alternates stanzas sung by a psaltēs, or cantor, with a refrain
chanted by a choir or an entire congregation. By joining in the common response,
“O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen,” those congregated within the

2 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis (PG 53:21–385; 54:385–580) 18.9; trans. Robert

C. Hill, John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 18–45, FC 82 (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 1990), 9.
3 For an overview see Ophir Münz-Manor, “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East:

A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1 (2010): 336–61.

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 Beyond Eden 169

church join their voice to Adam’s calling for mercy on his behalf. By singing the
substance of Adam’s cry for mercy over the course of eighteen stanzas they both
identify with their common ancestor and re-experience his misfortune. They join
their voices with his. They too come to be placed opposite Paradise, lamenting
their displacement from its delights.
Later tradition assigned the hymn to Cheesefare Sunday, the last Sunday before
Lent.4 Indeed, the composer may have intended the hymn for such a placement
in liturgical time, as part of a cycle of readings and reflections on Old Testament
figures over the course of the season of penance and fasting. In later hymnals, the
poem frames Lent as a period of exile, even as the location of Paradise remains
in sight. Returning to the hymn allows us to consider other aspects of its work
of situating the congregation, whose witnessing of the closing of Eden prompts
the plaintive refrain.
As Adam saw the Angel pushing and shutting
The door of God’s garden he groaned aloud
And said:
  O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen. (2)

The boundary itself – the definition of Eden’s closed topography – prompts lam-
entation. Notably, the poet emphasizes the division of space with the image of
the closing door, absent in Genesis.
Moreover, the poet contrasts the delights of Eden with conditions in the world
beyond. Following the details enumerated in Genesis, Adam complains, “[R]ep-
tiles and wild beasts, whom I subjected by fear, / Now make me tremble” (8; see
Gen 3:15). “No longer do the flowers offer me pleasure, / But thorns and thistles
the earth raises for me, / not produce” (9; Gen 3:18). The beneficent natural world
once entrusted to Adam for stewardship now imperils him. “A table without toil I
overthrew by my own will; / And now in the sweat of my brow I eat / My bread”
(10; Gen 3:20). The lament thus constructs the human condition as a condition
of place – place beyond Paradise. “How have I fallen?” asks Adam, “Where have
I arrived?” (Πως ἔπεσα; που ἔφθασα; [12]).
Imagining the possibility of a sympathy of place, the singer even calls on Eden
to join in both the distress and the petition.
Share in the pain, O Paradise, of your beggared master
And with the sound of your leaves implore the creator
Not to shut you:
  O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen.

4
 For the history and elaboration of Lent in Byzantium, see Krueger, Liturgical Subjects,
168–72. The best survey of the early evidence is Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The
Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
2011), 89–113.

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170 Derek Krueger

Bend down your trees like living beings and fall before
Him who holds the key, that thus you may remain open
For one who cries:
  O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen. (3–4)

In this conceit, the hymn personifies Paradise, encouraging its trees to join the
entreaty in mournful rustling and the performance of prostrations. The poem
coaxes Eden to adopt the proper words and postures of repentance, in this case
a substitutionary penance on Adam’s behalf. But who is speaking here? Is this
Adam’s voice or does the cantor sing in his own voice? Elsewhere in the poem, the
cantor will certainly sing in Adam’s voice, describing in the first person how he
delighted in the sweet scent of Eden’s flowers (5). In these stanzas, however, the
voice’s identity is unclear. Has Adam become such an effective type for humanity
that the cantor has not only assumed his persona, but adopted the first-created
human’s condition as his own? And what of the congregation, which has joined
Adam’s lament by singing his call for mercy, a call now offered to Paradise itself
as the proper script to follow?
Modeling an appropriate Christian recognition of sin, Adam declares, “Now
I have learnt what I suffered, now I have understood what God / Said to me in
Paradise.” Learning and suffering (ἔμαθον καὶ ἔπαθον) offer the possibility of
moral growth. Beyond the borders of Eden lies the territory not only of grief but
also of self-recognition. And it is from this vantage, which Adam shares with all
humanity, that the hymn calls for Paradise itself to join the congregation’s prayers
on its behalf. Later in the hymn, Eden becomes the object of the threnody:
Paradise, all virtue, all holiness, all happiness,
Planted because of Adam, shut because of Eve,
How shall I lament for you? (7)

Because the stanza names Adam in the third person, together with Eve, this
seems to be in the narrator’s voice. If so, the singer claims the grief over the loss
of Eden as his own. He claims it as his own homesickness. Adam and all Chris-
tians thus share the same affect with respect to place. It was in Eden that Satan
“stripped [Adam] of glory” (13); while beyond its boundaries, God takes pity and
clothes him (14–15) in a foreshadowing of the incarnation:
The clothing signifies for me the state that is to come,
For the one who has now clothed me in a little while wears me
And saves me. (15)

When God finally speaks, he declares his compassion and his intention to fulfill
Adam’s hope. “I do not wish nor do I will the death of the one I fashioned … The
one who cries: / O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen” (17). The final
stanza underscores the typological relationship with Adam when, returning to
the narrative frame, the singer prays, “Now therefore, Savior, save me also.”

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 Beyond Eden 171

Meanwhile, Eve remains notably decentered. Adam’s taking of Eve as his wife
seems already to prefigure his separation from God. God himself says, perhaps
jilted, “In taking Eve / you steal away from me” (ὅτι Εὔαν λαμβάνων / λανθάνει με
[6]). She figures primarily as a reason that Paradise has been shut. The treatment
of Eden as place – as a place from which one is displaced – thus contributes to
the hymn’s work of identifying humanity with Adam.

Romanos the Melodist

Eve plays a much more prominent role and Eden incorporates additional di-
mensions in the work of the great sixth-century hymnographer, Romanos the
Melodist.5 Romanos did not compose a kontakion on the theme of Adam’s fall, or
at least one does not survive among the sixty extant works in his corpus. Perhaps
this is because the earlier anonymous On Adam’s Lament had already become
canonical and no additional kontakion on this theme was needed to round out
a cycle of hymns on Old Testament themes to be chanted at the night vigils pro-
ceeding the Sundays during Lent. However, Romanos treated the placement of
Paradise elsewhere. In a hymn on the Nativity, the Magi and the congregation
discover Mary and the infant Christ in a different paradise, a “Paradise within
the cave” (1.1) where Christ was born. In another hymn on the Nativity, and in a
creative and thoughtful vein, Romanos situated Adam and Eve – apparently still
alive at least for liturgical purposes – near enough to Bethlehem that Eve can
overhear Mary singing to the baby Jesus.6
Mary, as she sang praises to him she had borne,
caressing the infant she conceived on her own,
was heard by her who bore children
in pain. Rejoicing, Eve cries out to Adam,
“Who has sounded in my ears what I had hoped for?” (2.3.1–5)

Close enough for eavesdropping, Romanos has repositioned the place of the first
humans’ exile within the sacred topography of the holy land. Lectionary practice
may have prompted the link between the place opposite Paradise and the cave

5
 Text: Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, eds., Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1963).
6
 Romanos the Melodist, On the Nativity II, ed. Maas and Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi
Cantica, 9–16, trans. Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 416–29, modified. There is also a serviceable translation
in Marjorie Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, 2 vols. (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1970–1973), 1:13–21. For other aspects of the hymn, see Thomas Arentzen,
The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 123–137; for Romanos’ treatment of Christmas in sixth-century
context, see Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 76–81; Alexiou, After Antiquity, 59–62.

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172 Derek Krueger

near Bethlehem. Georgian lectionary manuscripts attest that Gen 1–3 featured
as the first reading for the Christmas Vigil, at least in late antique Jerusalem.7
Eve may be enthusiastic, but Adam is slow to rouse, being in “a deathlike sleep”
(ἰσοθάνατον ὕπνον [2.4.2]). Eventually he shakes off “the weight of his eyelids, /
lifting his head” (2.5.2–3) to engage in a misogyny surely ironic in context:
I hear a sweet warbling, tones of delight
but now the sound of the singer no longer enchants me.
It is a woman, and I fear her voice,
for I have known and shrink from the feminine sex.
The sound draws me, it is clear,
but the instrument fills me with dread, lest as of old she lead me astray,
bringing travail. (2.5.5–11)

Romanos’s Adam is a bit of a fool. But Eve assures him of the coming of spring-
time, evoked with language that fixes both time and place:
Sniff this moisture and at once come forth
like an ear of wheat erect, spring has reached you! (2.6.5–6)

Breathed upon by the sweet breeze of Christ’s own breath, Adam both senses and
becomes one with the vernal landscape, experiencing a reawakening. Thus he
both inhabits a rejuvenated place, no longer in the “severe scorching” of hellish
exile (2.6.8), and is called to resurrection. Inhaling and visualizing Eden, and
mixing memory and hope, he gains awareness of divine grace:
I recognize spring, wife, and I sense the delights
we fell from of old; yes, I see Paradise
anew, another: the virgin
bearing at her bosom (κόλποις) this tree of life once held
aloft by cherubim in sanctity to stop me touching it. (2.7.1–5)

As Adam becomes like an ear of wheat, the produce of the tilled land overtaken
by the new season, Mary has also become a place, the garden opposite. Adam
stands vertically, while Mary seems to lie recumbent. Christ fills out the topogra-
phy, becoming the tree at the center of the garden, suckling at her breast. Through
sight, smell, and sound, Adam and Eve, and thus the whole congregation become
attentive to the proximity of salvation. Indeed, Romanos places Christians as
Adam and Eve at the scene of God’s nativity, proximate to Bethlehem, taking
7 Michel Tarchnischvili, ed., Le grand lectionnaire de l’église de Jérusalem (Ve–VIIIe siécle), 4

vols., CSCO 188, 189, 204, 204, Scriptores Iberici 9, 10, 3, 14 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CSCO,
1959–1960), at lection 13. The witness to the fifth-century Armenian lectionary for Jerusalem
indicates Gen 1:28–3:20 for the vigil of the Feast of the Nativity / ​Ephiphany on January 6, after
Luke 2:8–20: Athanase Renoux, Le codex arménien Jérusalem 121, 2 vols., PO 163, 168 (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 1969–1971), 2:72–73. However, Gen 3 was not read at the Christmas Vigil in
tenth-century Constantinople: Juan Mateos, ed., Le typicon de la Grande Église, 2 vols., Orienta-
lia Christiana Analecta 165, 166 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1962–
1963), 1:148–55. Thus it is unclear what practices were followed in the capital in Romanos’s day.

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 Beyond Eden 173

the good news in corporeally through sound, smell, and sight, their landscape
transformed by their sensation. Mary then intercedes with Christ on their behalf
and reports back:
Mary went straightway to Adam
and bearing glad tidings she says to Eve,
“Be patient for yet a short while.
You have heard from him what he must endure
for your sake, who cry out to me
 ‘Full of Grace.’” (2.18.6–11)

Joining with Eve and Adam in the refrain that hails Mary, the congregation
learns of its own need for patience and expectation. Salvation, like the Paradise
of Mary, is near.

Andrew of Crete

In contrast to the kontakion, which enlivened vigils in lay urban parishes, the
hymn form known as the kanon originated in the monastic office of Morning
Prayer in the later seventh century, where it gradually replaced a cycle of nine
biblical odes, or canticles, that were chanted along with a selection of psalms.
Not long thereafter, Andrew of Crete brought this new form to lay congregations.
In his Great Kanon, a massive penitential hymn probably composed for a single
service during Lent, Andrew examined the whole of biblical history for lessons
about individual sinfulness and the need for repentance.8 He treated Adam and
Eve briefly in the first and second odes, emphasizing themes of placement, ex-
pulsion, and self-recognition. The poem’s speaker confesses:
I rivaled in transgression Adam first created,
and knew myself naked of God, of the
everlasting kingdom, and of the delight,
because of my sins. (1.3)

The speaker admits that “Adam was justly banished from Eden,” and thus won-
ders what suffering is in store for him, who himself is “ever thrusting aside” God’s
words of life (1.6). Through an imaginative exercise, the speaker returns to the
scene of the crime and sees himself recapitulating the narrative of the fall in Gen-
esis. In his own voice he declares, “I saw the ripe beauty of the tree, and my mind /
was seduced, and so I lie naked and ashamed” (2.9). The original performance
practice for the Great Kanon is uncertain. Usually each ode followed a pre-ex-

8
 Andrew of Crete, Great Kanon (PG 97:1329–85), trans. Mother Katherine and Mother
Thecla, The Great Canon of St. Andrew and the Life of St. Mary of Egypt (Toronto: Peregrina,
1997), here modified. For discussion of the poem’s first person self and penitential character,
see Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 129–63.

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174 Derek Krueger

istent melody and accent pattern. The tune would be familiar, even as the words
were new. It is unclear whether in Andrew’s day this hymn would have been
chanted by a single cantor or by a group. However, by the end of the eighth cen-
tury, evidence suggests that kanons were performed chorally, with a kanonarch
or precentor pronouncing each verse before it was sung by the choir of monks.9
In these settings, each singer would assume the speaker’s voice, performing the
‘I’ of the poem. This practice informed the subjectivity of the singer and situat-
ed him – or her in the case of a nun – in the stead of the first person. In such a
performance, each singer becomes not Adam, but a sinful Christian comparing
him or herself to Adam, imagining crimes and punishments parallel to Adam’s.
If the singer embodies Adam, he also reenacts Eve, seeing, touching, and tast-
ing the forbidden fruit.
Alas to me, wretched soul,
How like you are to the first Eve!
Evil you saw and were grievously wounded,
and the tree you touched
and recklessly tasted the food of folly.
Instead of Eve of the flesh, I have Eve of the mind
in thoughts of sensual passion
seemingly sweet, but ever tasting
of the bitter gulping down. (1.4–5)

Visualizing the sequence of actions in the garden offers an opportunity to re-en-

vision the self. Staging him or herself in Eden, the self rehearses similar deeds
in the same place. As the poem progresses, Andrew shifts the subject’s position,
situating the penitent Christian beyond Eden, taking on aspects of Adam and Eve
after the fall, made more dire by the clarity of the self-accusation. In a complex
image recalling earlier exegetical and hymnographic traditions of the first hu-
man’s clothing and stripping, the speaker has destroyed the robe of glory given to
him by God at creation: “Now I have rent my first robe, the one which the Maker
wove for me from the beginning and so I like naked” (2.7).10 He has exchanged
 9
 On performance practices for the kanon, see Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 166–67. Typikon
of the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner on Pantelleria 8–10, text: Ivan D. Mansvetov, ed.,
Tserkovnii ustav (tipik) ego obrazovanie i sudba v grečeskoi i russkoi tserkvi (Moscow, 1885)
441–45; trans. by Gianfranco Fiaccadori in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Com-
plete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, ed. John Thomas and Angela
Constantinides Hero, 5 vols. (Washington, D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 1:63–64. On the
kanonarch and related officials, see also Julien Leroy, Studitisches Mönchtum: Spiritualität und
Lebensform (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1969), 60–66; Rosemary Dubowchik, “Singing with the Angels:
Foundation Documents as Evidence for Musical Life in Monasteries of the Byzantine Empire,”
DOP 56 (2002): 285–89.
10
 Sebastian Brock, “Clothing Metaphors as a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac Tra-
dition,” in Typos, Symbol, Allegorie bei den östlichen Vätern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter,
ed. Margot Schmidt and Carl-Friedrich Geyer (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982),11–40; idem, The Lu-
minous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St. Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1990), 85–97.

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 Beyond Eden 175

this precious garment for a less desirable and diabolical one: “I have clothed my-
self in the rent tunic, woven for me by the serpent’s advice, and I am ashamed”
(2.8). The connection to the land also persists: “I have sullied the beauty of the
soul with the sweets of lust, and wholly turned the whole mind to dust” (2.6). He
has returned to dust not just physically but spiritually – to the earth from which
he was created, a topography now alienated from Paradise.

Christopher’s Poem for the Triodion

The final poem in our survey was composed for the Byzantine Orthodox service
book known as the Triodion.11 The Triodion was first conceived in the early ninth
century at the Stoudios Monastery in Constantinople by Theodore the Stoudite
(759–826) and his brother Joseph (762–832). The kanon On the Transgression
of Adam is attributed in the earliest manuscript, Sinai graecus 734 of the tenth
century, to a certain Christopher, his identity otherwise uncertain. This hymn
was composed for Morning Prayer on Cheesefare Sunday, the last Sunday be-
fore Lent. The poet clearly knows the earlier kontakion On Adam’s Lament, and
indeed, the Sinai Triodion assigns ten verses of the earlier hymn to the same
service, presumably to be inserted in the midst of Christopher’s hymn, between
the sixth and seventh odes, as became the standard practice for intercalating a
shortened kontakion in the midst of the kanon hymn.12
From the outset it is unclear whether the singers are singing in their own per-
sona or adopt the character of Adam.
Come today, my wretched soul; weep over your deeds,
remembering how once (πρίν) you were stripped naked in Eden
and cast out from delight and unending joy. (1.1)

Paradise figures once again as a place from which the speaker has been exiled,
but now that traumatic event lies in the past, a place of memory. “Long ago the
crafty serpent envied my honor / and whispered deceit in the ear of Eve” (2.1)

11
 Christopher, On the Transgression of Adam, text: Τριῴδιον κατανυκτικόν [Peniten-
tial Triodion], περιέχον ἅπασαν τὴν ἀνήκουσαν αὐτῷ ἀκολουθίαν τῆς ἁγίας καὶ μεγάλης
Τεσσαρακοστῆς (Rome, 1879), 102–7. An anonymous translation is available online at http://
byzantinedominican.blogspot.com/2012/02/cheesefare-sunday.html. On the formation of the
Triodion, see Job Getcha, The Typikon Decoded: An Explanation of Byzantine Liturgical Practice,
trans. Paul Meyendorff (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 35–39, 141–232; Krue-
ger, Liturgical Subjects, 164–65, 168–72, and (with discussion of this hymn) 186–91.
12 José Grosdidier de Matons, “Liturgie et hymnographie: Kontakion et canon,” DOP 34/35

(1980–1981): 31–43. Alexander Lingas, “The Liturgical Place of the Kontakion in Constantino-
ple,” in Liturgy, Architecture, and Art in the Byzantine World: Papers of the XVIII International
Byzantine Congress (Moscow, 8–15 August 1991) and Other Essays Dedicated to the Memory of Fr.
John Meyendorff, ed. Constantine C. Akentiev (St. Petersburg: Publications of the St. Petersburg
Society for Byzantine and Slavic Studies, 1995), 50–57.

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176 Derek Krueger

The customary prayer to the Virgin, or Theotokion, at the end of the first ode
addresses her as “daughter of Adam by descent,” placing the speaker in the
Christian era, after the advent of Christ. Yet he can entreat her, “I am an exile
from Eden: / Call me back again.” (1.5). “Holy Virgin / You alone have covered
fallen Adam’s nakedness” (2.4). “Holy Lady, / you opened to all the faithful the
gates of Paradise / which Adam closed of old through his transgression: / Open
to me the gates of mercy” (4.5). The singer thus oscillates between identification
as Adam and as a typological Adam, a repetition with a similar history, once in
Eden, now long cast out (4.1).
Christopher engages in a call for Paradise’s sympathy, similar to that of the
fifth-century poet, although perhaps not as deftly:
Ranks of angels,
beauty of Paradise and all the glory of the garden:
weep for me, for I was led astray in my misery
and rebelled against God.
Blessed meadow, trees and flowers planted by God,
O sweetness of Paradise:
let your leaves, like eyes, shed tears on my behalf,
for I am naked and a stranger to God’s glory. (4.2–3)

Here the singer calls on Paradise to weep and cry, as in the fifth-century kon-
takion, but not to intercede on the singer’s behalf. That is Mary’s task. The hymn
alternates appeals to her in the first person plural and singular: “We all proclaim
you in faith as the mystical bridal chamber of glory. / Raise me up for I am fall-
en / and make me dwell in the bridal chamber of Paradise” (5.4). Mary is both
bridal chamber and door keeper, place and guardian, furthering the conflation of
persons and places.13 And yet in the last ode, Christopher returns to the theme of
Eden’s proximity, at least in aspiration. The singers bid God, “do not send me far
away from Eden; / but may I see the glory from which I fell” (9.2). They emote,
I weep, I groan, I lament,
as I look upon the cherubim and the sword of flame
set to guard the gate of Eden against all transgressors.
Woe is me! I cannot enter,
unless you grant me freedom to approach, O Savior. (9.3)

In the end, God has opened the gates of Paradise that were “closed of old to
Adam” (9.4). Eden thus becomes a marker of humanity’s distance from God,
even as it functions as a desired goal.
* * *
13
 For Mary’s ambiguity as space and limit, see Derek Krueger, “Mary at the Threshold: The
Mother of God as Guardian in Seventh-Century Palestinian Miracle Accounts,” in The Cult of
the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Mary Cunningham
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 31–38.

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 Beyond Eden 177

Byzantine hymns set voices in places, cast roles in spaces, situating singers and
listeners. Attending to place and placement in Byzantine hymns about the first
created humans demonstrates the power of liturgical performance not only to
interpellate Christians as latter-day Adams or Eves but also to situate them in
imaginative scenes drawn from the biblical narrative. The hymns reinforce Para-
dise as place, and exile as place; and they place Adam, Eve, and humanity within
this landscape.

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