Monday of the Robber - For Sami Rabia

[Paul Younan]

I thought it was very peculiar, especially the stick with the candles, but now that I see it and hear it I understand it, its very beautiful and maybe I am not well learned but it looks to me to be very old, is it?

Shlama Akhan Sami,

With regards to the stick and candels, Wigram describes it in his book "The Assyrians and their Neighbors":

...the boy to whom it has been given to 'act the Penitent Thief' for that year, storms the sanctuary vi et armis, and is driven back again and again by the blazing torches held by the deacons, who for the nonce represent the Cherubim that guarded Paradise with the flaming sword. At last the Penitent Thief secures the cross that lies always on a table at the entrance of the sanctuary - and which each worshipper kisses on entering the church - and comes forward brandishing that passport to bliss. Then the deacon-angels receive him, and - seeing that souls are always borne by angels into Paradise, and also that no unordained man my set foot in the sanctuary, the boy is carried pick-a-back into the 'Altar-enclosure'.

Yes, it is very old indeed (Jacob of Serugh mentions it in the early 6th century). Prof. Brock wrote a wonderful article about this very work (and the "dispute literature" genre in general) here:

http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol5No2/HV5N2Brock.html

The lively verse dialogue between the Repentant Thief (Luke 23:43) and the Cherub guarding the entrance to Paradise (Genesis 3:24) is an excellent representative of the ancient literary genre of dispute literature that has remained popular in the Middle East in various languages for nearly four millennia.......One of the most long-lived literary genres of the Middle East is the Precedence Disputation, the oldest examples of which go back to Sumerian literature of the early second millennium BC. The thread of continuity, over nearly four thousand years, can be traced through Akkadian, Middle Persian, Jewish Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic and Persian, right up to the present day when examples in Modern Syriac and in Modern Arabic have been collected.