Assumption of Moses

← Encyclopedia

A dying man calls his successor to him and tells him the future. That is the whole architecture of the Assumption of Moses: the lawgiver, at the end of his life on the plains of Moab, summons Joshua and, before he goes up the mountain to die, lays out for him the entire course of what is to come — 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 model is the closing chapters of Deuteronomy, where Moses, forbidden to enter the land, hands the people to Joshua and speaks his song and his blessing on the edge of death. Here the device is stretched to its limit: the farewell becomes a panorama of the whole age, prophecy placed in the most authoritative mouth the tradition possesses.

The Death of Moses, the deathbed scene that frames the testament — Alexandre Cabanel, 1851, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The form is a testament — a patriarch’s deathbed survey of what is to come, a genre the late Second Temple period favored for exactly this reason. A revered figure on the point of death gives his children, or his heir, a last accounting: he reviews the past, names what will go wrong, and points beyond the wreckage to an ending only God can bring. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs work the same vein, putting ethical warning and apocalyptic forecast into the mouths of the dying sons of Jacob. What distinguishes this text is its narrowed focus: it is not a moral handbook but a single unbroken prophecy of national history, told in advance, all of it spoken by the one man whose authority over Torah and covenant no one in the tradition could dispute.

Moses Blesses Joshua Before the High Priest, the deathbed handover the testament dramatizes — James Tissot, c. 1896–1902, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A text preserved by a thread

The work comes down to us by the narrowest of margins. It survives in one incomplete sixth-century Latin palimpsest — a manuscript whose original writing was scraped away and overwritten, then partly recovered — discovered in the Ambrosian Library in Milan and first published in 1861 by Antonio Ceriani. The Latin is itself a translation, made through a Greek intermediary, of a presumed Hebrew or Aramaic original; the surviving text is rough, broken in its grammar in places, illegible in others. The manuscript is missing its opening lines and breaks off before its own ending, and somewhere between a third and a half of the original is reckoned lost. The text as we have it runs to twelve chapters: an introduction in which Moses summons Joshua, then a sweep of Israel’s history from the entry into the land to the end of the age, closing on a hymn of God’s final appearing.

This single torn witness is the whole textual base, and almost everything else in the study of the work descends from it. The first dedicated critical edition, with the Latin restored and an English translation, was the 1897 volume of R. H. Charles; he folded the text into his great collection, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, in 1913, where it reached a wide readership and acquired most of the framing — the dating, the source-theory, the reading of its key figure — that later scholars have argued with ever since. The standard modern edition, a full critical text and commentary, is the 1993 study by Johannes Tromp, which re-examined the Latin line by line and reset much of the debate.

Testament or Assumption — the question in the name

The title under which the fragment is known is itself a problem, and it opens onto the deepest question the text poses. Ceriani identified his manuscript as the lost Assumption of Moses on the strength of a single external clue: a Greek quotation attributed to that work in the spurious Acts of the Council of Nicaea compiled by Gelasius of Cyzicus, which matches a line near the opening of the Latin text. Yet the surviving work contains no assumption at all — no scene of Moses being taken up, no ascent, nothing answering to the title. What it reads as, from first chapter to last, is a testament: a deathbed handover and prophecy.

Ancient book-lists deepen the puzzle rather than resolving it. The Stichometry of Nicephorus and a related catalog name two distinct writings about Moses standing side by side — a Testament and an Assumption — and even give them separate lengths, on the order of eleven hundred lines for the one and fourteen hundred for the other. So the tradition itself remembered two books. The dominant scholarly view is that what survives is the Testament, with the Assumption either a separate work now wholly lost or the very conclusion the manuscript lacks; the title under which Ceriani first published has simply stuck. Charles proposed that the two were once fused into a single composite work, the testament running into the assumption; Tromp and much later scholarship instead treat the surviving text as one coherent first-century composition and prefer to call it the Testament of Moses outright, holding that the lost ending, if it narrated an assumption, was the original author’s own and not a separate book. The dispute is not settled in either direction, and the older title endures mostly by inertia.

The unrolled future

What Moses lays before Joshua is history told as prophecy. After the entry into the land the survey moves through the period of the judges and kings, the division of the tribes, the sin that brings the first exile, the burning of the city, and the carrying-off to the east; then a return, a rebuilding, and a second stretch of decline. The narrative grows most pointed as it nears its author’s own day. It describes a wave of Hellenistic persecution — priests defiled, the worship corrupted, the faithful pressed to abandon the commandments — and then the rise of a line of rulers who are not of the priestly stock, insolent men who deal harshly with the people.

It is in these late chapters that the text gives away its own date. One figure is described as a bold king, not of priestly descent, who reigns thirty-four years and treats the nation with cruelty — a portrait that fits Herod the Great, whose effective reign ran almost exactly that span and ended in 4 BCE. After him his sons rule for shorter periods, and a powerful ruler from the west sends an army that burns part of the sanctuary and crucifies many — read by most as the punitive campaign of Quintilius Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, who put down the unrest that followed Herod’s death in that same year. The forecast runs confidently up to about that point and then turns vague, which is the ordinary signature of this literature: prophecy after the fact down to the writer’s present, genuine expectation beyond it. The composition therefore belongs to the early first century of the Common Era, the work of a learned Palestinian Jew writing as one age of foreign domination gave way to another. This places it squarely within the world of late Second Temple Judaism and the apocalyptic imagination it shared with works like the Book of Enoch and the Book of Daniel.

The survey does not end in history. Its last movement is a hymn of the end (chapter ten), close in temper to the great vision at the close of Daniel: God arises from the seat of his kingdom, the heavens shake and the sun is darkened and the moon turned to blood, the earth trembles, and the kingdom of God appears throughout the whole of creation. The adversary — named in the Latin as the devil — is brought to nothing, sorrow departs, and Israel is raised up and set among the stars, lifted above the nations that oppressed it. What is striking is what the hymn does not contain: no anointed king from the line of David, no warrior messiah leading the deliverance. The decisive act is God’s alone. The shape of this hope, vengeance on the oppressor and the exaltation of the faithful at the turn of the ages, is the recurring grammar of Jewish eschatology in this period; the Psalms of Solomon, composed within a few generations and in the same charged climate, hope for the same vindication while keeping a place for a royal deliverer the testament pointedly leaves empty.

The body of Moses and the missing scene

The lost ending matters for a reason that reaches beyond cataloguing. Early Christian writers report that one of the strangest moments in the Epistle of Jude was drawn from this very book. Jude alludes, almost in passing, to the archangel Michael contending with the devil over the body of Moses, and declining to bring a slanderous charge against him, saying only that the Lord rebuke him. The allusion is unexplained in Jude, as though its readers were expected to know the story already — and according to the church father Origen, they did, because it stood in the Assumption of Moses. In his treatise on first principles Origen names the work as “a little treatise of which the Apostle Jude makes mention,” and identifies it as the source of the dispute over Moses’s body, adding that it also told how the serpent, moved by the devil, had brought about the fall in Eden. Clement of Alexandria and other early readers report the same attribution.

The Archangel Michael and Satan Disputing about the Body of Moses, the scene Jude alludes to and Origen traced to this book — Nicolai Abildgaard, 1782, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The difficulty is plain: the surviving Latin contains no such scene. There is no quarrel over the body, no Michael, no burial. This absence is one of the strongest arguments that a substantial portion of the text is missing — and one of the threads binding the lost portion to the title, since a contest over the body at the moment of Moses’s death is exactly the kind of episode that could shade into an account of his being taken up. Whether the letter of Jude quoted this precise book, or an Assumption that was its sequel, or a shared body of legend about the death of the lawgiver, cannot be decided from what remains. The devil who disputes the corpse, the archangel who restrains himself, the burial whose place the older scriptures say no one knows — these are the lost work speaking through a single sentence in another book.

Taxo and the hinge of the end

The most arresting figure in the surviving text appears near its close. A man named Taxo, of the tribe of Levi, gathers his seven sons and tells them that rather than transgress the commandments they will withdraw to a cave and die there — choosing death in fidelity over survival in compromise. Their fast unto death is not a defeat in the logic of the book; it is the pivot on which the whole prophecy turns. It is after this act, the text says, that God’s kingdom appears throughout creation and the adversary is ended. The innocent blood, offered without resistance, is what calls down the final intervention.

This places the work on one side of a sharp division within Second Temple piety. The Maccabean tradition celebrated armed revolt against the persecutor; this author celebrates something else — a patient, unresisting martyrdom that leaves the avenging to God and refuses the sword. The deliverance in chapter ten is not won; it is awaited, and the awaiting is itself the decisive deed. The author’s silence about armed resistance, and the placing of the world’s redemption on the death of a man and his sons rather than on any battle, mark a quietist current — often called Pharisaic — running counter to the militancy of the revolt literature.

Who Taxo was meant to be has resisted explanation as stubbornly as anything in the study of the text. The name occurs only here, and proposals have ranged from numerical ciphers — readings that convert the letters into the value of a known name such as a martyr of the Antiochene persecution — to corrupted transliterations of a Hebrew word, to the view that Taxo is no individual at all but a type, the figure of the faithful Israelite under persecution generally. The seven sons drew Charles toward the mother and her seven sons who died under Antiochus in the books of the Maccabees, a parallel that has tempted readers ever since; others see only a literary echo. The figure remains a cipher in both senses — a possible code and an unsolved one — and the readings stand unresolved alongside one another.

The text and its scholarship

The study of the work is, in a strict sense, the study of one manuscript. Antonio Ceriani’s 1861 publication of the Ambrosian palimpsest gave the text to scholars; R. H. Charles’s The Assumption of Moses of 1897, with the Latin restored and the first full English rendering, set the questions that have organized the field since, and his version in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) remains the most widely read entry point. The 1993 critical edition and commentary of Johannes Tromp re-edited the Latin from the manuscript and argued for a single, coherent first-century composition under the title Testament of Moses, against Charles’s source-critical fusion of two works; the debate over composition, title, and the place of the lost ending runs straight through the difference between them. A concise survey of the manuscript, the dating, and the patristic testimonia is given in the reference treatment by J. Magliano-Tromp, Assumption of Moses in the Encyclopedia of Ancient History. The connection to Jude and the question of how the dispute over Moses’s body relates to this work and its lost portion are re-examined in Ryan Stokes’s study, Not over Moses’ Dead Body, which reads the angelic contest against the wider field of early Jewish tradition about the lawgiver’s death rather than treating the surviving Latin as the sole key. The composition and the eschatological hymn of the tenth chapter, with its debt to the closing vision of Daniel, have drawn their own technical literature, and the riddle of Taxo a steady stream of proposals, none of which has won the field.

Among the pseudepigrapha

The work belongs to the literature in which Jews of the late Second Temple, writing under foreign rule, set their own crisis inside the long sweep of sacred history and looked past it to an ending that lay in God’s hand alone. It sits beside the apocrypha and the wider body of pseudepigrapha — works ascribed to ancient holy figures — and shares their characteristic move: to gather the whole of time into a single revealed survey and to read present suffering as the next-to-last chapter of a story whose last chapter belongs to heaven. What singles this text out is the authority of its attributed speaker and the cost of its hope: redemption arrives not by the sword but on the far side of a chosen death, spoken in advance by the man who gave Israel its law and was buried where no one could find him.

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 · Epistle Of Jude · Second Temple Judaism · Book Of Enoch · Apocrypha · Eschatology · Moses · Joshua · Origen · Michael · Devil · Torah · Deuteronomy · Book Of Daniel