The study of literary style among Syriac writers is hardly a well-trodden subject, but this volume by Haefeli (his “Habilitationsschrift”) provides a model for such an investigation of an individual author. Drawing on the more progressed fields of Greek and Roman and Arabic rhetoric, he presents Aphrahat’s writing style in terms of a large number of stylistic categories, such as word order, sentence structure, repetition, synonyms, the careful placing of biblical citations, irony, sarcasm, oxymoron, hyperbole, tropes, imagery, and others. Naturally, the work is brimming with examples from Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, both in Syriac and in German. The end of the work includes a useful list of Greek and Persian loanwords in Aphrahat. This volume will repay close study for readers interested in the “how” of early Syriac writing and in the way early Syriac Christianity was presented.

• Series Foreword (page 5)