Isidore

This record gathers the various correspondents named Isidore addressed by Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 450), and the honorifics in the letter-addresses are not consistent: the same name appears as a scholasticus (advocate), a deacon, a presbyter, and a bishop, so several distinct men sharing the common name Isidore have plainly been merged here. What the letters consistently show is the sender acting as an exegetical authority, answering scriptural questions these correspondents put to him: why Miriam alone was punished for accusing Moses (Numbers 12), what "sixty are the queens" means (Song of Songs 6:8), the lawyer's question "who is my neighbor" (Luke 10), the tongue as a fire (James 3), the blessing on peacemakers (Matthew 5), and the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. They are known only as recipients of Isidore of Pelusium's biblical and moral instruction, otherwise unattested, and the conflated honorifics make any single identification impossible. Context for the corpus is the Pelusium and eastern Nile Delta milieu of early-to-mid 5th-century Egypt.