hymns are preserved from Syria in a collection known as the Odes of Solomon which are likely to be second century in date. One of them gives what may be the first reference beyond the biblical text to Mary the mother of Jesus as a virgin mother, and they pioneer a characteristic feature of Syrian Christianity, reference to the Holy Spirit as female. Grammatically, after all, ruha, the Syriac word for spirit, is feminine, although later Christians found this disconcerting and from around 400 CE arbitrarily redefined the word as masculine in grammatical gender.67 Ephrem
