When it is said
Its first editor read it as a hymn for a day when the whole city of Nisibis prayed together as war came near.
A reader can pray it for any city or country where war is close.
Where it comes from
Author known
A city waiting for an army
St Ephrem the Syrian lived at Nisibis in Mesopotamia through three sieges by the Persian king Shapur. The hymns’ first editor, Gustav Bickell, dates this one to early April of AD 359, when sure news reached the city that Shapur was coming with a huge army. He reads it as written for a day of prayer at which the whole city, its little children too, asked God to end the war.
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 13 (1898), the introduction; Gustav Bickell, S. Ephraemi Syri Carmina Nisibena (1866), on Hymn IV
The city speaks
The hymn’s refrain is “Our hope, be Thou our Wall!”, and in its verses Nisibis speaks for herself. Her young men have fled and hidden like chicks chased by an eagle, and she asks God’s peace to bring them home. Her ears miss the sound of her grape-pickers, whose voices have gone quiet. In the verses that follow, she asks to hear her farmers outside the walls again, as the sound of peace.
St Ephrem, Nisibene Hymns, Hymn IV, verses 1, 23 and 24, Stopford’s translation (1898)
Part of a longer hymn
These are three of the last four verses of the fourth Nisibene hymn, which has 28. The verse left out, the 27th, asks God to end the mourning of the city’s altar and of its priest, who stands dressed for mourning in sackcloth. It speaks of that city’s own church in its grief, while the verses around it can be prayed for any city at war.
St Ephrem, Nisibene Hymns, Hymn IV, verses 25 to 28, Stopford’s translation (1898)