The composed life of the Syriac Menander

Abstract

Two issues recur in Syriac Menander's rather meagre history of scholarship: the question of its composition and the question of its provenance. With regard to the first, Syriac Menander has been seen as a loose collection of gnomic sayings; with regard to the second, doubts have been raised about whether it is actually a Jewish Wisdom text because of the universality of its wisdom and the muted expression it gives to unequivocally Jewish ethics. In this article it is argued that Syriac Menander, though indeed a loose collection of sayings arranged in thematic groups, arranges its constituent materials so as to trace the trajectory of a "life," beginning with birth, terminating in death and singling out important status elevations and life passages occurring along the way. Second, it is argued that Syriac Menander replicates compositional conventions native to Jewish Wisdom texts composed during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, thus indicating that it ought indeed to be classified among Jewish pseudepigrapha.