Israel of Alqosh (around the end of the 16th and the first decades of the 17th cent.) [Ch. of E.]

E-Syr. priest, poet, scholar, and scribe, founder of the Shikwānā (or Qashā) family of scribes.

E.-Syr. priest, poet, scholar, and scribe, founder of the Shikwānā (or Qashā) family of scribes. He is considered the leader and inspirer of the so-called School of Alqosh. A number of liturgical works in Classical Syriac are attributed to him: a revision of the E.-Syr. calendar, preserved in an Alqosh ms. dated 1705; a ʿonithā ‘On Repentance’ (1590/1; ed. G. Cardahi, De arte poetica Syrorum [1875], 97–100); a turgāmā, preserved in a ms. dated 1726, now in Cambridge; a number of ḥuttāme ‘funeral hymns’ and funeral laments, preserved in various 18th- or 19th-cent. mss. of European and Iraqi collections (e.g., ms. Groningen, Add. 326, f. 139b–141b). Scribal headings and authorial or editorial interventions in the text lead us to attribute to Israel the following dorekyāthā in Sureth: ‘On Perfection’ (dated 1610/1 in the text), ‘On the Sin of Man’ (a poetic adaptation of the Syriac Revelation of Paul), and ‘On Shmuni and her Seven Sons’ (1610/1 or 1631/2).