The Institution of the Benai Qeiama and Benat Qeiama in the Ancient Syrian Church

Abstract

The Syriac term qeiama, “covenant,”1 with its derivations benai qeiama, “the sons of the covenant,” and benat qeiama, “the daughters of the covenant,”2 not only marks the idiosyncracy of primitive Syrian Christianity but it also mirrors a development which parallels the whole process of transformation in ancient Syrian Christianity. Originally the term qeiama designated the whole church comprised of ascetically oriented Christians.3.Standing face to face with this singular concept of church and the peculiar profile of primitive Syrian Christianity, we must be reminded that the first Christian impulses in the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris did not come from Hellenistic Christianity via Antioch but from Palestinian Jewish Christianity.4 Therefore the earliest traditions implanted here reveal the Palestinian Aramaean influence not only in the contacts which these Christian Jews had with the Palestinian Jewish Christians5 but also in the use of the ancient Palestinian Targum as the first biblical texts translated into Syriac6 and in the fundamentally ascetic orientation of the Christian Kerygma7 which echoes the Palestinian ascetic trends.8 These archaic conditions, which understood the qeiama as the whole

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