The Assumption of Moses

I've mentioned before a few times that I think the Torah has undergone a few layers of redaction, during the post-Exilic period. Here's another spot I find suspicious: the burial of Moses.

The burial of Moses is famously Problematic, in its present place, even for Jews; it breaks the dogma that the Torah was Moses' book. But the (early) Jews kept copying it anyway with this segment. Further: it reads like an apologetic. God buries Moses, and won't reveal where.

The usual secular critique is that the Torah was composed long after Moses' death; such go on that the Jews (and Samaritans) didn't want the people venerating a prophet's grave or, worse, doing necromancy over it à la Saul with Samuel. Problem with that is that the Jews and Samaritans own all manner of other grave-sites throughout their Holy Land. Why single Moses out?

To that, I'd bring in another text: the Assumption of Moses. We don't actually own this book anymore. But Saint Jude had heard a part of it, and Clement and Didymus both of Alexandria were able to identify this part as from the Assumption. They seem to be right on account that in Jude's summary, the question is exactly about Moses' body - implicitly dead.

Elsewhere - so the Evidence Unseen blog is telling us - Moses may appear to visionaries in the company of Elijah. The Elijah cycle is very old, likely older than Torah in origin; in it, Elijah is never buried at all. This one is taken bodily into Heaven - "assumed", is the word. The Assumption likely had it that Moses enjoyed the same destiny. Jude tells us that Moses' dead body was assumed where Elijah was assumed alive.

I sense a disagreement in early Judaism over whether Moses was buried, at all. Moses comes back to Earth to deliver apocalypses (or so claimed the authors of these apocalypses). To shut down these new visions, the Torah got amended with an account of Moses' death. This had the side-effect of crippling the Torah as a book by Moses, but this could (and did) get explained away.

The Assumption was a riposte to that. It saved Moses for the apocalyptic visionaries. Among these visionary accounts is, of course, the Christly Transfiguration and now this event features in the Gospels.

If we still had the full text of the Assumption of Moses, we could tell if it is an early Christian document like the Ascension of Isaiah. My thought so far is that it is Jewish. Intrinsically this dogma exists to exalt Moses to be (at least) equal to Elijah and, thereby, the Torah to the Prophets. It promoted that version of Torah which includes Moses' death, at that. It doesn't lead up to the Christians' Transfiguration so much as to ANY Jewish apocalyptic text involving a Moses apparition.