By Jacob’s time, the West Syrian Church had achieved a degree of institutional distinctiveness in northern Syria and western Mesopotamia, with a hierarchy of bishops parallel to the region’s Chalcedonian one and a network of closely associated monasteries.22 In the late seventh century, Jacob took an interest in consolidating a specifically West Syrian ecclesiastical law that would both tie his church to the early Christian heritage and further define its institutional boundaries. To do so, he translated a variety of Greek pseudo-apostolic canonical works into Syriac. He then brought them together with Syriac versions of other works of canon law, especially ecumenical synods and the epistles of Church Fathers esteemed by miaphysites, into an authoritative collection of ecclesiastical legal texts.23
By and large, the texts in this collection were traditional ecclesiastical ones addressing church affairs. Jacob’s goal was thus to define a West Syrian ecclesiastical canon rather than expand it to newly encompass lay civil matters. In seeking to increase the institutional distinctiveness of the miaphysite church in Syria and focusing on legal canonization, moreover, Jacob was perhaps continuing late Roman trends more than he was responding to immediately postconquest conditions. Importantly, however, canonization was not Jacob’s only concern. He also penned a considerable number of responses to lower clerics on problems related to ritual and social dimensions of lay life.24 These and similar responsa of other bishops in the former Roman east were very much addressed to the particularities of life under Umayyad rule; and they point us toward another central feature, alongside the communal administrative autonomy permitted to subject elites, of the seventh-century caliphate: highly heterogeneous patterns of religious practice and intensive social contacts of individuals across the religious spectrum, which added up to religious identities below the elite level very much at odds with the picture offered by normative, doctrinal texts. Furthermore, the episcopal responsa extant from early Umayyad Syria demonstrate the degree to which the household and marital practice became significant sites for the articulation of communal boundaries in the midst of this diversity. Caliphal rule did not impel bishops in Syria to claim innovative new jurisdictions for Christian law to the degree that their contemporaries did in Iraq and Iran. But they did take an interest in regulating specific marital practices in an effort to define the acceptable modes of interaction between Christians and others, especially the region’s new rulers.
While the religious elites of the late antique and early medieval Middle East had vested interests in keeping their communities clearly differentiated in both social and religious terms, there is good reason to think that those boundaries were often much more fluid, at least from the sixth century into the eighth.25 The sources of this period are littered with examples of less doctrinal, more capacious conceptions of religious belonging that allowed for many modes of social and ritual interaction between individuals of different religious affiliations. The mishmash of peoples, scripts, and magical spirits of the Aramaic incantation bowls—where it is unremarkable to find a Christian commissioning a protective incantation against Iranian demons from a Jewish magician—is one good example. To take a few others from Christian-authored texts, we find that a villager baptized in the Church of the East might feel no compunction receiving communion from miaphysites, or that Christian Arab tribesmen might readily join Muslims on raiding expeditions and slide into praying alongside them.26 These individuals and countless others like them were embedded in any number of social networks, from villages to business partnerships to tribes and even marriages, not perfectly congruent with their confessional communities.27 Especially in rural areas, where the vast majority of the region’s population resided, hints in the sources suggest that loyalty to local leaders and local sources of sacred power could mean as much to conceptions of religious affiliation as the lettered elite’s doctrines; the religious practices and social obligations that confessional belonging entailed thus look increasingly varied the further away any given community was from the instruction and oversight of literate, trained religious elites like bishops, rabbis, or Zoroastrian priests.28 Overall, it appears that many subjects of the late antique empires did not understand religious belonging as an identity so exclusive as to determine all social ties, institutions, and ritual activities in which one could participate. The emergence of nascent Islam, moreover, likely intensified these already heterogeneous and hybrid socioreligious patterns. What were the faith commitments of the new ruling Arab tribesmen, whom their Christian subjects called magaritai and mhaggrāyē in reference to their self-designation as “militant emigrants” (muhājirūn in the seventh-century Arabic usage) who had come from Arabia to conquer the known world?29 They proclaimed the God of Abraham and venerated Jesus the Messiah. In Syria they tended to settle in old urban centers (rather than found new garrison cities as in Egypt and Iraq), and in the early days after the conquests they sometimes performed their prayers in churches.30 If some non-elites already did not know or care much about the distinctions between Chalcedonians, miaphysite West Syrians, and Nestorians, what made these new Abrahamic monotheists so different? The general indeterminacy of the relationship between the Arabs’ religious movement and other scriptured traditions likely rendered the boundaries between conquerors and conquered uncertain in the eyes of many.
That uncertainty should not be taken to imply that religion “on the ground” was a free-for-all, however, and here the responsa of bishops like Jacob enter the picture. Most late antique subjects must have understood themselves to belong to one religious community or another, whatever they understood the content of its traditions to be; there were certain actors for whom religious difference was very clear and to be enforced with violence;31 and local institutions (such as kin networks and village leaders) created boundaries of their own that made religious difference socially concrete, as most assuredly did political hierarchies between conqueror and conquered. This, in fact, is where the writings of religious elites like bishops, rabbis, and Muslim ulama become especially instructive. They frequently focus on the specific contested practices around which elites and others made competing claims as to how religious belonging should impact social relations and how religious difference should be enacted; beyond simply attesting to fluid socioreligious boundaries, elite prescriptive texts identify the particular institutions through which they sought to solidify those boundaries. For our purposes, the responsa literature of seventh-century Syrian bishops underscores the significance of marriage in just this respect. The Arab conquerors, as a new element introduced to already diverse socioreligious environments, refocused ecclesiastical attention on defining the marital practices and attitudes toward sexuality that were a chief feature distinguishing Christians from others.
Two areas of concern are especially evident in the responsa: sexual contact between Christians and the new rulers and polygamous marriages. Regarding the former, for example, Jacob of Edessa responds in a letter to the priest Adday to the question of whether a Christian woman married to a Muslim (mhaggrāyā) can still receive communion—a concern especially pressing because, in this case, “her husband is threatening to kill the priest [gāzem baʿlāh ʿal kāhnā d-qāṭel lēh] if he does not give her the Eucharist.”32 Elsewhere, Jacob takes up the question of the appropriate penance for a Christian who commits adultery with a non-Christian.33 An epistle of the West Syrian patriarch Athanasios II of Balad (r. 684–87) and a series of questions and answers by the Chalcedonian monk Anastasios of Sinai (fl. late seventh century) also address the permissibility of interreligious marriage.34 Anastasios considers as well the spiritual status of enslaved Christian concubines of Muslim masters.35 The ecclesiastics disapprove of all of these cases, though they accommodate them to differing degrees and to different ends that we will examine in detail in Chapter 8. For now, it suffices to note that household ties and sexual contact between the Arab conquerors and subject Christians were not uncommon in the first decades after the conquest, whether through marriage or because women among the considerable numbers of captives taken by the conquerors could be pressed into slave concubinage.36 This spurred bishops to assert that religious difference required social separation: whatever they were, the Arab conquerors were not orthodox believers, and as such marriage with them was to be avoided.
Polygamy crops up conspicuously as well in bishops’ responsa from seventh-century
