Assumption of Moses

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The Assumption of Moses is a short Jewish apocalyptic work, most likely written in the early first century of the Common Era, framed as the final words Moses speaks to Joshua before his death. In it the dying lawgiver hands over his successor and then unrolls the whole future of Israel — conquest, kingdom, exile, return, the persecutions of the Hellenistic and Roman ages, and at the last a decisive intervention of God that ends history and exalts Israel above the nations. The form is a testament: a patriarch’s deathbed survey of what is to come, a genre the period favored for putting prophecy in a revered mouth.

The text comes down to us by a thread. It is preserved in one incomplete sixth-century Latin palimpsest, discovered in the Ambrosian Library in Milan and first published in 1861 by Antonio Ceriani; the Latin is itself a translation, through Greek, of a presumed Hebrew or Aramaic original. The manuscript breaks off before its own ending, and that gap has shaped the work’s modern history. Ancient book-lists name two writings about Moses, a Testament and an Assumption, and the surviving fragment contains no scene of Moses being taken up. Scholarship is therefore divided over what this text actually is: many hold that what survives is the Testament, with the Assumption either a separate work now lost or the missing conclusion; the title under which the fragment was first published has simply stuck. The dating turns on internal allusions — a notice of Herod’s reign and its aftermath places composition around the turn of the era.

The lost ending matters for a reason beyond cataloguing. Early Christian writers, Origen among them, reported that the dispute in the Epistle of Jude — the archangel Michael contending with the devil over the body of Moses — was drawn from the Assumption of Moses. The surviving Latin does not contain that scene, which is part of why a portion is thought missing; whether Jude quoted this very book or a related tradition cannot be settled from what remains.

The work’s most arresting figure appears near the surviving close. A man named Taxo, of the tribe of Levi, gathers his seven sons and resolves that they will withdraw to a cave and die rather than transgress the commandments — choosing death in fidelity over survival in compromise. Their act is presented as the hinge: it is after this, the text says, that God’s kingdom appears throughout creation and the adversary is brought to an end. Whether Taxo was meant as a specific historical figure or as a type of the faithful under persecution remains debated; the name itself has resisted explanation.

Among the pseudepigrapha the work holds a particular place. It belongs to the literature in which late Second Temple Jews, writing under foreign rule, set their own crisis inside the sweep of sacred history and looked past it to an ending only God could bring. It is read now chiefly for what it discloses of that hope — and for the single sentence in another book that says, on ancient authority, that it once said more than its torn pages now allow.

→ In the library: Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Testaments Of The Twelve Patriarchs · Psalms Of Solomon · Prayer Of Manasseh · Epistles Of John