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Both Enlil and Tammuz were addressed as ‘Shepherd’; the hero Gilgameš is the ‘shepherd of Uruk’, while Ur and Uruk called itself ‘the sheepfold’. The king was also frequently called ‘shepherd’. The same pattern is found in the Hebrew Bible, where both God and the king are called shepherd of God’s people, and in the New Testament, where Christ, the ‘Good Shepherd’, entrusted his sheep to Peter, and in turn 1 Peter 5:2-4 exhorts the clergy to ‘tend the flock’ in such a way as to earn commendation from the ‘Chief Shepherd’. The Syriac words involved are rāˁyâ, ‘shepherd’ (Christ being ‘chief shepherd’), allānâ ‘under-shepherd’, which is a word used regularly for members of the clergy. A word for the flock and the monastery is dayrâ, ‘dwelling sheepfold’ and tyārâ, ‘hurdle, sheepfold’. In the Acts of Thomas and the Syriac Acts of John almost all the few expressions which refer to the Church employ this pastoral symbolism. Christ is addressed as Good Shepherd and there are other New Testament allusions in both Acts, but the characteristic expressions are those which concern entering into Christ’s ‘fold’ and being joined to the number of his sheep. As a consecrated liturgical phrase, it passed also to Manichaeism, where we find great stress on the number of the elect, still expressed in the imagery of the flock. ‘I also am one in the number of thy hundred sheep’ says the author of the ‘Psalms to Jesus’, and the elect sing: ‘we were numbered in the number of the sheep; we passed from the number of the goats, let no man add toil for us.’
Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
1 Peter 5:2-4
Bibliography
| Allberry 1938, 93 | Allberry, C. R. C. A Manichaean psalm-book. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1938. |
| Murray 1975, 187-188 | Murray, Robert. Symbols of Church and Kingdom. A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975. |
Amar Annus
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