The Assumption of Moses, also known as the Testament of Moses (Hebrew עליית משה Aliyah Mosheh), is a 1st-century Jewish apocryphal work. It contains secret prophecies Moses revealed to Joshua before passing leadership of the Israelites to him. It is characterized as a "testament", meaning the final speech of a dying person, Moses. The text is thought to have been originally written in Hebrew or another Semitic language, and then translated to Koine Greek. The only surviving manuscript is a 6th-century Latin translation of the Greek text. The manuscript was incomplete, and the rest of the text is lost. From references in ancient works, it is thought that the missing text may have depicted a dispute over the body of Moses, between the archangel Michael and Satan.

Manuscript history

The Assumption of Moses is known from a single sixth-century incomplete manuscript in Latin that was discovered by Antonio Ceriani in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan in the mid-nineteenth century and published by him in 1861.

Identification

The two titles of this manuscript are due to different identifications with lost texts. The Stichometry of Nicephorus and some other ancient lists refer to both a Testament of Moses and an Assumption of Moses, apparently as separate texts.

Relation to the Epistle of Jude

Some ancient writers, including Gelasius of Cyzicus (2,21,7) and Origen in De principiis III:2,1 cite the Assumption of Moses regarding the dispute over the body of Moses, referred to in the Epistle of Jude, between the archangel Michael and the devil. This dispute does not appear in Ceriani's manuscript, which could lend support to the identification of the manuscript with the Testament of Moses but could also be explained by the text's incompleteness (it is believed that about a third of the text is missing). An alternative explanation is that Jude is compounding material from three sources: This explanation has three arguments in favour: (1) Jude quotes from both 1 Enoch 1:9 and Zechariah 3. (2) Jeshua in Zechariah 3 is dead - his grandson is serving as the high priest. The change from the "body of Jesus" to the "body of Moses" would be required to avoid confusion and to reflect the historical context of Zechariah 3 in Nehemiah concerning intermarriage and corruption in the "body" of the priesthood. (3) The example of Zechariah 3 provides an argument against the "slandering of heavenly beings", since the Angel of the Lord does not do in Zech. 3 what Michael is reported to do in 1En1.

Content

The text is in twelve chapters:

Date, original language and themes

Due to the vaticinia ex eventu, most scholars date the work to the early 1st century AD, contemporary with the latest historical figures it describes. These sections appear to be familiar with the death of Herod the Great, suggesting that at least these sections date from between 4 BCE–30 CE. Other scholars date the work to the previous century and suggest that the 1st-century references in Chapters 6 and 10 were later insertions. Based on the literal translation of idioms within the text, it is generally accepted that the extant Latin version is a translation from Koine Greek, with the Greek itself probably a translation from Hebrew or at least a text with considerable Semitic influence. There are no theological peculiarities to help us attribute the text to any specific Jewish group.

Sources