translated by R. H. Charles, in R. H. Charles's Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)
On the eve of his death, Moses summons Joshua and delivers a final testament: a prophecy of Israel's future from the entry into Canaan through the rule of wicked kings, the persecution of Antiochus, the martyrdom of the priest Eleazar's seven sons, a climactic tribulation, and God's final vindication of his people. Written by a Pharisaic Quietist between AD 7 and 30, the book survives only through a single sixth-century Latin palimpsest recovered from the Ambrosian Library in Milan -- itself a translation of a lost Greek version of a lost Hebrew original, and itself so damaged that whole verses are illegible. R. H. Charles's 1913 translation and introduction remain the standard English edition, printing every lacuna the manuscript itself refuses to yield.
Contents
This work is presented as continuous prose in twelve chapters, following Charles's own numbering; he supplies no descriptive chapter titles.
Introductory Note (1913, R. H. Charles)
Condensed from Charles's critical introduction.
The Assumption of Moses was almost certainly a composite work made of two originally independent books: a Testament of Moses, written in Hebrew between roughly AD 7 and 30, recounting Moses's final address to Joshua on the destinies of Israel down to the end of days; and a separate, shorter Assumption of Moses proper, describing the dispute between the archangel Michael and Satan over Moses's body and his bodily translation to heaven -- a book now lost except for a handful of Greek quotations preserved in Jude 9, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and other early Christian writers. An editor combined the two into one book in the first century AD (Jude's own epistle already draws on both), inserting the word "assumption" into the Testament at x. 12 to bridge the two works. What survives in continuous translated form here is the Testament portion; the true Assumption is lost save for the scattered quotations Charles catalogues and discusses in his introduction, which this condensation does not reproduce in full.
The one surviving witness to the Testament is a single Latin manuscript: a sixth-century palimpsest of eight folios, written on both sides with no division between words, discovered in the Ambrosian Library in Milan by Antonio Ceriani and first published in 1861. Occasionally whole verses are undecipherable. This Latin is a translation of a lost first-century Greek version, which was itself a translation of a lost Hebrew original -- Charles reconstructs all three layers from internal evidence (transliterated Greek words surviving in the Latin, Hebrew idioms surviving beneath the Greek).
The book's author was a Pharisaic Quietist: not a Sadducee (he expects God's direct intervention and a coming theocratic kingdom), not a Zealot (his silence about the Maccabean revolt, in a book minutely acquainted with Maccabean history, amounts to a deliberate reproach of armed resistance), and not an Essene (his consuming interest in the Jerusalem Temple and its sacrifices is foreign to Essene thought). His ideal hero is not a warrior but Eleazar and his seven martyred sons, who met persecution under Antiochus IV with no resistance but faith. Internal chronology -- the Temple still standing, Herod already dead, Herod's sons already reigning for "shorter periods" than their father, matching Archelaus's deposition in AD 6 -- dates the book to between AD 7 and 30: written, that is, during the childhood or public ministry of Jesus, and Charles notes its ideal of a spiritual religion opposed to any alliance with politics as one his own generation could recognize in the Gospels' teaching as well.
Charles's own scholarly apparatus -- his verse-by-verse discussion of the Latin text's corruptions, his proposed emendations, and his catalogue of the lost Assumption's Greek fragments -- is not reproduced here; his conclusions on the book's composite origin, authorship, and date are given above. His full critical edition (The Assumption of Moses, 1897) remains the primary scholarly resource for readers wanting the textual argument in full.
The Testament of Moses even the things which he commanded in the one hundred and twentieth year of his life, that is the two thousand five hundredth year from the creation of the world:
[But according to oriental reckoning the two thousand and seven hundredth, and the four hundredth
after the departure from Phoenicia], when the people had gone forth after the Exodus that was made
by Moses to Amman beyond the Jordan, in the prophecy that was made by Moses in the book Deutero-
nomy: and he called to him Joshua the son of Nun, a man approved of the Lord, that he might be the minister of the people and of the tabernacle of the testimony with all its holy things, and that he
might bring the people into the land given to their fathers, that it should be given to them according to the covenant and the oath, which He spake in the tabernacle to give (it) by Joshua: saying to Joshua
‘Testamentum Moysi Quae precepit aiio vi tae eius Cmo et xxmo.’
Here 1 have put gwae and not guod since in every case the Testaments have 4 or ὅσα in this very same context.
-4. These verses are an interpolation—apparently made by a Greek scribe and in the West. No Hebrew writer would regard himself other than an Oriental, and a Jew is beyond question the author of this book. Hence he could not have written verse 3. Nor could a Jew have described Hebron, from which Jacob set out for Egypt, as being in Phoenicia. Moses, moreover, could not have spoken of Amman as beyond the Jordan: only a dweller in Jerusalem could have so described it.
Amman—in the tribe of Gad, Onom. Sacr., ed. Lag., 88, 313 92, 2.
saying to Joshua, resumes verse 6, ‘ And he called’.
these words: ‘(Be strong) and of a good courage so as to do with thy might all that has been com- I, 12 manded that thou mayst be blameless unto God.’ So saith the Lord of the world. For He hath created the world on behalf of His people. But He was not pleased to manifest this purpose of creation from the foundation of the world, in order that the Gentiles might thereby be convicted, yea to their own humiliation might by (their) arguments convict one another. Accordingly He designed and devised me, and He prepared me before the foundation of the world, that I should be the mediator of His covenant. And now I declare unto thee that the time of the years of my life is fulfilled and I am passing away to sleep with my fathers even in the presence of all the people. And receive thou this writing that thou mayst know how to preserve the books which I shall deliver unto thee: and thou shalt set these in order and anoint them with oil of cedar and put them away in earthen vessels in the place which He made from the beginning of the creation of the world, that His name should be called upon until the day of repentance in the visitation wherewith the Lord will visit them in } the consummation of the end of the days. And nowthey shall go by means of thee into the land which He determined and promised to give to their fathers, in the which thou shalt bless and give to them individually and confirm unto them their
the books, i.e. the Pentateuch.
with m ἷξ
until the day of repentance. This must have been written before A. D. 70, as the existing temple is expected
to stand until the T ic kingdom is set up.
inheritance in me and establish for them the kingdom, and thou shalt appoint them prefectures according to the good pleasure of their Lord in judgement and righteousness. And it shall come to pass five years after they enter into the land, that thereafter they shall be ruled by chiefs and kings for eighteen years, and during nineteen years the ten tribes shall break away. And the twelve tribes shall go down and transfer the tabernacle of the testimony. Then the God of heaven will make the court of His tabernacle and the tower of His sanctuary, and the two holy tribes shall be (there) established: but the ten tribes shall establish kingdoms for themselves according to their own ordinances. And they shall offer sacrifices throughout twenty years: and seven shall entrench the walls, and I will protect nine, but four shall transgress the covenant of the Lord, and profane the oath which the Lord made with them. ‘And they shall sacrifice their sons to strange gods, and they shall set up idols in the sanctuary, to worship them. And in the house of the Lord they shall work impiety and engrave every form of beast, evex many abominations. I And in those days a king from the east shall come against them and his cavalry shall cover their land. And he shall burn their colony with fire together with the holy temple of the Lord, and he shall carry away all the holy vessels. And he shall cast forth all the people, and he shall take them to the land of his nativity, yea he shall take the two tribes with him. Then the two tribes shall call upon the ten tribes, and shall march as a lioness on the dusty plains, being hungry and thirsty. And they shall cry aloud: ‘Righteous and holy is the Lord, for, inasmuch as ye have sinned, we too, in like manner, have been carried away with you, together with our children.’ Then the ten tribes shall mourn on hearing the reproaches of the two tribes, and they shall say: ‘What have we done unto you, brethren? Has not this tribulation come on all the house of Israel?’ And all the tribes shall mourn,
A parenthesis.
twenty years, the twenty sovereigns (including Athaliah’s) of Judah.
Apparently the ‘seven’, ‘nine’, and ‘four’ reigns must be taken successively of three periods, of the advance, power, and falling away of Judah. :
The ‘ seven’ are Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Athaliah. The ‘nine’ are Joash, Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh. Amon, Josiah; while the ‘four’ are Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah.
four, inserted to complete the twenty.
᾿ς 9 crying unto heaven and saying : ‘God of Abraham God of Isaac and God of Jacob, remember Thy
: covenant which Thou didst make with them, and the oath which Thou didst swear unto them by
_ 10 Thyself, that their seed should never fail from the land which Thou hast given them,’ Then they
shall remember me, saying, in that day, tribe unto tribe and each man unto his neighbour : ‘ Is not
this that which Moses did then declare unto us in prophecies, who suffered many things in Egypt
and in the Red Sea and in the wilderness during forty years: and assuredly called heaven and
earth to witness against us, that we should not transgress His commandments, in the which he was
a mediator unto us? Behold these things have befallen us after his death according to his declaration,
as he declared to us at that time, yea behold these have taken place even to our being carried away
captive into the country of the east.’ Who shall be also in bondage for about seventy and seven years.
Then there shall enter one who is over them, and he shall spread forth his hands, and kneel upon his
knees and pray on their behalf saying: ‘ Lord of all, King on the lofty throne, who rulest the world,
and didst will that this people should be Thine elect people, then (indeed) Thou didst will that Thou
shouldst be called their God, according to the covenant which Thou didst make with their fathers.
And yet they have gone in captivity in another land with their wives and their children, and
taroundy the gates of strange peoples and where there is great vanity. Regard and have compas-
sion on them, O Lord of heaven.’ Then God will remember them on account of the covenant which
He made with their fathers, and He will manifest His compassion in those times also. And He will
put it into the mind of a king to have compassion on them, and he shall send them off to their land
ο΄ 4and country. Then some portions of the tribes shall go up and they shall come to their appointed
_ 8 place, and they shall anew surround the place with walls. And the two tribes shall continue in their
prescribed faith, sad and lamenting because they will not be able to offer sacrifices to the Lord of their
g fathers. And the ten tribes shall increase and multiply among the Gentiles during the time of their captivity.
δ: And when the times of chastisement draw nigh and vengeance arises through the kings who share
in their guilt and punish them, they themselves also shall be divided as to the truth. Wherefore
divided as to the truth. Already under the Seleucid domination the enormities of the Sadducean priesthood reacted upon the stricter scribes and led to a religious awakening and the formation of what was later known as the Pharisaic party. See 1 En, xc. 6, 7 (note).
it hath been said: ‘They shall turn aside from righteousness and approach iniquity, and they shall defile with pollutions the house of their worship,’ and [because] ‘they shall go a-whoring after strange gods.’ For they shall not follow the truth of God, but some shall pollute the altar with the (very) gifts which they offer to the Lord, who are not priests but slaves, sons of slaves. And many in those times shall have respect unto desirable persons and receive gifts, and pervert judge- ment [on receiving presents]. And on this account the colony and the borders of their habitation shall be filled with lawless deeds and iniquities: those who wickedly depart from the Lord shall be judges: they shall be ready to judge for money as each may wish. ; Then there shall be raised up unto them kings bearing rule, and they shall call themselves priests of the Most High God: they shall assuredly work iniquity in the holy of holies. And an insolent king shall succeed them, who will not be of the race of the priests,a man bold and shameless, and he shall judge them as they shall deserve. And he shall cut off their chief men with the sword, and shall destroy ¢hem in secret places, so that no one may know where their bodies are. He shall slay the old and the young, and he shall not spare. Then the fear of him shall be bitter unto them in their
they shall call themselves priests of the Most High God. Jonathan became high-priest in 153 B.C., and the office was declared to be hereditary in the Maccabean family in 141 B.C.
an insolent king, Herod the Great, 37-4 B.C. He was only half a Jew, Josephus, Av. xiv. 15. 2, the son of Antipater of Idumea, though Nicolas of Damascus claimed a Jewish origin for Antipater.
judge them. Herod cut off the Maccabean family, the Sadducean aristocracy, and according to vi. 4, 5 oppressed the nation at large. The Pharisees and the Essenes did not suffer under him.
; os a chief men. ."Herod on becoming king executed forty-five of the Sadducean nobles (Avz. xv. 1.23 Bell. ud. i. 18. 4).
secret places. These secret murders are mentioned in Avz. xv. 10. 4.
j THE ASSUMPTION OF MOSES 6. 6—7. 7
land. And he shall execute judgements on them as the Egyptians executed upon them, during
thirty and four years, and he shall punish them. And he shall beget children, (who) succeeding him
_ 8 shall rule for shorter periods. Into their parts cohorts and a powerful king of the west shall come,
who shall conquer them: and he shall take them captive, and burn a part of their temple with fire, : (and) shall crucify some around their colony.
41 And when this is done the times shall be ended, in a moment the (second) course shall be (ended),
_ 2,3 the four hours shall come. They shall be forced.... And, in the time of these, destructive and
impious men shall rule, saying that they are just. And these shall stir up the poison of their minds,
| being treacherous men, self-pleasers, dissemblers in all their own affairs and lovers of banquets at
δ: 6 every hour of the day, gluttons, gourmands.... Devourers of the goods of the (poor) saying that
they do so on the ground of their justice, but iz reality to destroy them, complainers, deceitful,
concealing themselves lest they should be recognized, impious, filled with lawlessness and iniquity
ous | and four years. Herod reigned for thirty-four years after Antigonus’s death, and thirty-seven after he had been declared king by the Romans.
from sunrise to sunset: saying: ‘We shall have feastings and luxury, eating and drinking, and we
shall esteem ourselves as princes.’ And though their hands and their minds touch unclean things, yet
their mouth shall speak great things, and they shall say furthermore : ‘Do not touch me lest thou shouldst pollute me in the place (where I stand’)...
And there shall come upon them a second visitation and wrath, such as has not befallen them from the beginning until that time, in which He will stir up against them the king of the kings of the earth and one.that ruleth with great power, who shall crucify those who confess to their circumcision :
and those who conceal (it) he shall torture and deliver them up to be bound and led into prison,
And their wives shall be given to the gods among the Gentiles, and their young sons shall be operated
on by the physicians in order to bring forward their foreskin. And others amongst them shall be punished by tortures and fire and sword, and they shall be forced to bear in public their idols, polluted
as they are like those who keep them. And they shall likewise be forced by those who torture them to enter their inmost sanctuary, and they shall be forced by goads to blaspheme with insolence the word, finally after these things the laws and what they had above their altar.
from sunrise to sunset, not ‘from East to West’ as the phrase in Greek might also mean.
princes. Text adds ‘we shall be’. An intrusion due to the difficulty of os.
king of the kings of the earth, used of Artaxerxes in Ezra vii. 12, 50 naturally here of the despot Antiochus IV.
polluted, &c. The rendering is uncertain and difficult.
This piecing together of details has a purpose. The author intentionally avoids a reference to Mattathias, and thus by implication censares the Maccabean uprising with its methods and aims. He emphasizes the opposed policy of the Chasids, as evidenced by the passages quoted above, by way of suggesting and urging their stricter and quietistic methods. The ideal is not ‘ Let us war’, but ‘ Let us die rather than transgress’.
Then in that day there shall be a man of the tribe of Levi, whose name shall be Taxo, who having
seven sons shall speak to them exhorting (them): ‘Observe, my sons, behold a second ruthless (and) unclean visitation has come upon the people, and a punishment merciless and far exceeding the first. For what nation or what region or what people of those who are impious towards the Lord, who have done many abominations, have suffered as great calamities as have befallen us? Now, there- fore, my sons, hear me: for observe and know that neither did the fathers nor their forefathers tempt God, so as to transgress His commands. And ye know that this is our strength, and thus we will do. Let us fast for the space of three days and on the fourth let us go into a cave which is in the field, and let us die rather than transgress the commands of the Lord of Lords, the God of our fathers. For if we do this and die, our blood shall be avenged before the Lord. τ And then His kingdom shall appear throughout all His creation, And then Satan shall be no more, And sorrow shall depart with him. Then the hands of the angel shall be filled Who has been appointed chief, : And he shall forthwith avenge them of their enemies.
For the Heavenly One will arise from His royal throne,
And He will go forth from His holy habitation With indignation and wrath on account of His sons.
And the earth shall tremble: to its confines shall it be shaken:
And the high mountains shall be made low And the hills shall be shaken and fall.
day there shall be. | read εἶξε erit for text dicente.
second . . . unclean visitation, under Antiochus, with its ceremonial defilement and moral abominations. The first was under Nebuchadnezzar. See chapter iii.
‘(Et) cornua solis confringentur et in tenebras convertet se ; Et luna non dabit lumen et τοῖα convertet se in sanguinem.’
Israel to triumph in this world over Rome.
‘And thou shalt go up against the eagle And its necks and wings shall be destroyed.’ g. Israel to be exalted to heaven.
‘And He will establish thy habitation among them.’
they shall pursue till they are consummated. And I shall go to sleep with my fathers. Wherefore, Joshua thou (son of) Nun, (be strong and) be of good courage; (for) God hath chosen (thee) to be minister in the same covenant.
And when Joshua had heard the words of Moses that were so written in his writing all that he had before said, he rent his clothes and cast himself at Moses’ feet. And Moses comforted him and
wept with him. And Joshua answered him and said: ‘Why dost thou comfort me, (my) lord ; Moses? And how shall I be comforted in regard to the bitter word which thou hast spoken which has gone forth from thy mouth, which is full of tears and lamentation, in that thou departest from
this people? (But now) what place shall receive thee? Or what shall be the sign that marks (thy) sepulchre? Or who shall dare to move thy body from thence as that of a mere man from place to place? For all men when they die have according to their age their sepulchres on earth ; but thy
sepulchre is from the rising to the setting sun, and from the south to the confines of the north: all
to the world is thy sepulchre. My lord, thou art departing, and who shall feed this people? Or who τι is there that shall have compassion on them and who shall be their guide by the way? Or who shall pray for them, not omitting a single day, in order that I may lead them into the land of ¢ezr fore-
fathers? How therefore am I to foster this people asa father (his) only son, or as a mistress her
daughter, a virgin who is being prepared to be given to the husband whom she will revere, while she guards her person from the sun and (takes care) that her feet are not unshod for running upon the
Will? For of them there shall be 600,000 (men), for these have multiplied to this degree through
τῷ thy prayers, (my) lord Moses. And what wisdom or understanding have I that I should judge or
answer by word in the house (of the Lord)? And the kings of the Amorites also when they hear
that we are attacking s/em, believing that there is no longer among them the sacred spirit who
A word of comfort against the time of Israel’s tribulation. God made Israel and the nations, and foresees the destinies of both. Therefore all that befalls must tend to the same end (Israel’s benefit, i. 12).
Colophon
Prepared from R. H. Charles (ed.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, Vol. II: Pseudepigrapha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), pp. 407-424, translation and introduction by R. H. Charles. Source: archive.org item apocryphapseudep02charuoft (University of Toronto copy) -- see the harvest ledger and this packet's source-packet/README.md for the witness-verification record. Public domain (published 1913, US).
The manuscript and its lacunae. This book survives in only one witness: a sixth-century Latin palimpsest of eight folios discovered in Milan by Ceriani, itself a translation of a lost Greek version of a lost Hebrew original. The manuscript is genuinely damaged -- entire lines and, in places, whole verses are illegible. Charles marks this three ways in his printed translation, and all three are preserved here exactly as printed: an ellipsis ("....") where the manuscript yields nothing recoverable at all; a parenthesis, "(word)", where Charles supplies a word the damaged text does not itself preserve, to complete the English sense; and a square bracket, "[passage]", where Charles judges a passage to be a later insertion into the original text rather than manuscript damage (for example, i. 3-4, which his own apparatus identifies as a probable interpolation). No lacuna has been silently filled or smoothed over; where the manuscript is silent, this translation is silent with it.
Apparatus. Charles's extensive verse-by-verse critical apparatus -- his Latin-emendation arguments, proposed restorations of the manuscript's illegible portions, and discussion of the lost Greek Assumption's surviving quotations elsewhere -- is omitted throughout, per this shelf's standing policy for this volume. It survives complete in the printed edition and the cited scan. A mechanical classifier separated apparatus from translation by scoring each block for editorial signals (Latin gloss formulas, named critical scholars, biblical-citation abbreviations, sustained Greek/Latin density) rather than by any leading verse-number pattern -- the manuscript's own first surviving verse happens to begin "1. The Testament of Moses...", indistinguishable by a digit-and-period shortcut alone from a footnote entry like "6. called to him... Nun. Cf. Deut. xxxi. 7." A small number of short apparatus fragments lacking any strong editorial signal (a sentence or two of paraphrased scholarly commentary with no citation, Latin gloss, or named scholar) may remain embedded after these passes, disclosed here rather than hunted down one by one, matching this shelf's established limitation for this volume's denser works.
Chapter structure. Charles supplies no descriptive chapter titles for this work. It is presented here as continuous prose in the source's own twelve chapters, without invented subdivisions.
Verse numerals. Tested empirically with a local-window footnote-alignment script (the same method already applied to this shelf's other Vol. 2 works): of 11 local comparisons between a footnote's own cited lemma word and the marginal digit's actual position in the translation, 0 aligned (0%) -- confirming the same failure mode already found for Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and the Testaments: Charles's marginal numbers mark the start of each printed line, not each verse. They are dropped throughout; the work is presented as continuous prose, per this shelf's standing convention.
OCR noise. This witness's OCR was run with a forced Greek-plus-English language pack across the whole scan (documented in this packet's source-packet/README.md); a small number of stray Greek-lookalike glyphs are known to bleed into otherwise-clean English words in a few places. These are left as the scan preserves them rather than silently corrected.
Prepared for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted transcription and editorial work.
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