Hebrew in a close imitation of Biblical style, it presents a history of the life of Moses embellished with many legends.[1]
Contents
These legends must be very old, since the same or similar stories are found as early as
Ethiopians, his use of the ibis in combating the snakes that have made his way dangerous, and the love of the king's daughter for him (according to the midrash Moses enters the camp of the Ethiopian king קיקנוס, upon whose death he marries the latter's widow, and, overcoming the dangers due to the snakes, captures the long-besieged city).[1]
Authorship and publication
According to
A. Jellinek, the life of Moses was originally treated in detail in a chronicle which employed sources still older. This work was incorporated in the well-known collection of legends entitled Sefer ha-Yashar; and from this the Yalkut Shimoni took extracts which agree with the Sefer ha-Yashar and not with the present Chronicle of Moses. At a later time, however, a shorter recension of the older chronicle was made, which is the one now existing.[1] According to H. Strack and G. Stemberger, the work probably dates to the 10th or 11th century.[3]
Serbian versions. The earliest manuscripts of the former are from the 15th century. The Serbian version is derived from the East Slavic. Its earliest manuscripts are from the 16th century.[4] The East Slavic manuscripts can be grouped into two recensions.[5]
Émile Turdeanu argued that the translation was made in the circle of the Novgorod Judaizers shortly before 1477, the date of the earliest manuscript of which he knew. The Slavic text does not perfectly corresponding to any surviving Hebrew version, but its unique episodes probably derive from a lost Hebrew version.[5]Moshe Taube pushes the date of translation back to the late 14th or early 15th century based on a copy of the Life in the Barsov Paleja. Melissa Lee Farrall argues that the date should be pushed back to the time of Kievan Rus', before the mid-13th century.[4][6]
^Horace G. Lunt and Moshe Taube, "Early East Slavic Translations from Hebrew?", Russian Linguistics12 (1988): 147–187.
Further reading
Melissa Lee Farrall, A Jewish Translator in Kievan Rus': A Critical Edition and Study of the Earliest Redaction of the Slavic "Life of Moses", PhD diss., Brown University, 1981.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). "Smaller Midrashim". The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
