I don’t think the persecutions in the area subsided until the fall of the Sassanids, so the addition (if it is indeed one) would have been made within the same historical context as Mar’s comment.

I agree that the translation you used makes it look a bit funny, but that’s because it immediately reminds you of people playing the dozens. (“Yo mamma so fat …”). To someone attending a Babylonian yeshiva, it would immediately have reminded him of the verse of Jeremiah. Once again, it’s all about context. Things sound different to us.

I’m afraid that, at the end of the day, I don’t share your sentiments. I still find humorous the manner in which the passage has been put together, irrespective of your (legitimate) form-critical concerns that render it more solemn than I would have perceived it to be. Still, I must ask: you derive historical meaning from the passage from the fact that it is penned (apparantly) by Mar, but also go on to note that the addition that speaks of non-Jewish graves was a later insertion. Is this not contradictory?

Mar lived in Babylon during the religious persecutions of the Sassanid reign. The practice of Judaism was outlawed, and many of Mar’s colleagues were killed. The smallish Christian community of Babylon was persecuted along with the Jews. We can tell that the “shame on your mothers” bit is meant to apply to the persecuting Sassanids and not the persecuted Christians because it’s actually a Biblical reference. It refers to the Book of Jeremiah ch. 50 which prophesies about the fall of Babylon, and it quotes part of verse 12: “Your mothers will be disgraced, humiliated the ones that bore you. Behold the last of the nations – desert, desolation and waste.”

The last words (which I suspect were added by a redactor) explain the presence of an obvious gap in the text. Here’s a prayer for Jewish graves, what about the graves of non-Jews? “There’s no need to compose a prayer over Babylonian graves,” the redactor notes bitterly, “Jeremiah already composed one. These corpses are dead and never to rise – their mothers labored in vain. The nobility that persecuted us has been reduced to nothingness. The graves are empty of life.”

I don’t mean to suggest any malicious intent on your part, but I’m amazed to see your flippant attitude to the passage. Surely you can see that it was written by real people with real emotions who experienced tragedies that you and I (I hope!) will never have to live through. If it reminds you of Monty Python it is only because you lack an historical context for it. Someone anonymous writer has reached out through fifteen centuries and expressed his pain through a finely-chosen pair of words. It’s quite an achievement.