Thomas of Harkal

Thomas of Harkal

Thomas was one of the most distinguished and profound learned men, a thorough and prolific writer who attained the peak of the art of literature and became the master of both subject and form. He belongs to Harkel, a village in Palestine. He studied at the Monastery of Qenneshrin and mastered the Syriac and Greek languages. He became a monk at the Monastery of Tar's and was consecrated a metropolitan of Mabug in the last decade of the sixth century. He was persecuted by Domitian, the Malkite bishop of Melitene, supported by the authority of his brother-in-law, Byzantine Emperor Maurice, and escaped to Egypt in 599, but later returned to his diocese. He went to Egypt for the second time during the Persian expedition against Syria and Palestine and resided at a monastery at the Enaton (or the Ninth-Mile Village) in the neighborhood of Alexandria. At this monastery, he undertook the revision of the Syriac version of the New Testament of Philoxenus-Polycarp which he collated with four accurate Greek copies, thus producing in 616 a Biblical version known as the Harklean version, which overshadowed other versions and whose quality has been unanimously recognized by scholars. 

Thomas exerted great efforts in order to produce this Biblical version which immortalized his name. This version spread through the libraries in the East and in the West, and was also used in the church services. In the Book of Psalms at the Oxford library, we read a note that these psalms were first translated in the time of the Apostle Addai, translated again by Philoxenus of Mabug and later by Bishop Thomas of Harkel at Alexandria. Thomas also assisted Athanasius I in holding the unity agreement with the Church of Alexandria and visited the Emperor Heraclius with him at Mabug in 627. He also drew up an alphabetically arranged liturgy in ten pages beginning with "Eternal and compassionate Lord," and translated into Syriac the liturgies of Dionysius the Areopagite, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom. The years of his birth and of his death are not known

Sources: 

• Patriarch Ignatius Aphram I Barsoum (2003), The Scattered Pearls, A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, Translated and Edited by Matti Moosa, New Jersey