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3 THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA Esther's reception by the king, taking the Hebrew /. Edict permitting In the the Jews to defend themselves, after viii. 12. Vulgate these additions are detached from their connection and brought together in an appendix to the book, with a note remarking that they are not found in the Hebrew. Purports to be the words 6. Prayer of Manasses. of the prayer spoken of in II Chron. xxxiii. 18 et seq. probably designed to stand in that place. In many manuscripts of the Greek Bible it is found among the pieces appended to the Psalms in the Vulgate it is printed after the New Testament with III and IV Esd. and like them is not canonical. 7. Judith. Story of the deliverance of the city of Bethulia by a beautiful widow, who by a ruse deceives and kills Holophernes, the commander of the besieging army. The book was written in Hebrew, but is preserved only in Greek or translations from the Greek; an Aramaic Targum was known

after iv. 17

e.



the place of

v. 1 in







,

Apocrypha

a. "Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum," attributed to Philo. This was first published, with some other works of Philo, at Basel in 1527(see Cohn, in " Jew. Quart. Eev." 1898, x. 277 et seq.; Schiirer, " Gesch." 3d ed., iii. 541 et seq., additional literature). Extends from Adam to the death of Saul, with omissions and additions— genealogical, legendary, and rhetorical— speeches, prophecies, prayers, etc. The patriarchal age is despatched very briefly the Exodus, on the contrary, and the stories of the Judges, are much expanded. The author deals more freely with the Biblical narrative than Jubilees, and departs from it much more widely. The work is preserved in a Latin translation made from Greek but it is highly probable that the original language was Hebrew, and that it was written at a time not very remote from the common era. Considerable portions of it are incorporated— under the name of Philo—in the Hebrew book, of which Gaster has published a translation under the title " Chronicles of Jerahmeel " (see Gaster, I.e., Introduction, pp. xxx. et seq., and below, d) b. Later works which may be compared with this of Philo are the na>D Su> O'DTi n:i, ibd, and the ijjbm flic, on which see the respective articles. c. To a different type of legendary history belongs the He;



wn

brew Yosippon {q. v.). d. The " Chronicles of Jerahmeel," translated by Gaster from a unique manuscript in the Bodleian (1899), are professedly compiled from various sources they contain large portions ex;

to Jerome.

The scene of this tale, with its attractive pictures of Jewish piety and its interesting glimpses of popular superstitions, is laid in the East (Nineveh, Ecbatana); the hero is an Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali, who was carried away in the deportation by Shalmaneser (" Enemessar "). The story is related in some way to that of Ahikar. 9. Third Maccabees. (See Maccabees, Books op. ) story of the persecution of the Egyptian Jews by Ptolemy Philopator after the defeat of Antiochus at Eaphia in 217 B.C. their steadfastness in their religion, and the miraculous deliverance God wrought The book, which may be regarded as an for them. Alexandrian counterpart of Esther, is found in manuscripts of the Septuagint, but is not canonical in any branch of the Christian Church. Tobit.

8.

A



§ V. Historical Pseudepigrapha. The books named above are all found in the Greek and Latin Bibles and in the Apocrypha of the Protestant versions.

"We proceed

now

the same general class, epigrapha. " 10.

The Book of

to

other writings of

commonly

Jubilees, called

called

also

"Pseud-

Leptogenesis

WO,

in probably Xt01T TV distinction, not from the canoniAl Genesis, but from '3. It tfbntains a haggadic a larger Midrash, a treatment of the history of the Patriarchs as well as of the history of Israel in Egypt, ending^with the institution of the Passover, based on Gen. and Ex. It is a free reproduction of the Biblical nari.-xii. rative, with extensive additions of an edifying char-

("The

Little Genesis"),

rm

acter, exhortations, predictions, and the like. It gets the name " Book of Jubilees " from the elaborate chro-

nology, in which every event is minutely reckoned out in months, days, and years of the Jubilee period. The whole is in the form of a revelation made through an angel to Moses on Mt. Sinai, from which some writers were led to call the book the " Apocalypse of Moses. " (See Apocalypse., § V. 10. ) It was written in the first century B.C., but is extant only in Ethiopic and in fragments of an old Latin translation, both made from an intermediin

Hebrew, probably

now

ate

Greek version.

Brief mention

may be made

containing Haggadah of early

here of several similar works

Hebrew

history.

cerpted from the Greek Bible, Philo (see above), and "Yosippon," as well as writings like the Pirke de R. Eliezer, etc. e. Any complete study of this material must include also the cognate Hellenistic writings, such as the fragments of Eupolemus and Artapanus (see Freudenthal, "HellenistischeStudien") and the legends of the same kind in Josephus.

§ VI.

Books of the Antediluvians. The Book

of Jubilees makes repeated mention of books containing the wisdom of the antediluvians (e.g., Enoch, iv. 17 et seq. Noah, x. 12 et seq.) which were in the possession of Abraham and his descendants also of books in which was preserved the family law of the Patriarchs (compare xli. 28) or their prophecies (xxxii. 24 et seq. xlv. 16). These are all in the literal sense "apocryphal," that is, esoteric, scriptures. considerable number of writings of this sort have been preserved or are known to us from ancient lists and references others contain entertaining or edifying embellishments of the Biblical narratives about these heroes. Those which are primarily prophetic or apocalyptic are enumerated elsewhere (x., xi.); the



,

A



following are chiefly haggadic This is essentially a 11. Life of Adam and Eve. Jewish work, preserved in varying recensions in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Armenian. It resembles the Testament literature (see below) in being chiefly occupied with the end of Adam's life and the burial According to an introductory of Adam and Eve. note in the manuscripts, the story was revealed to Moses, whence the inappropriate title " Apocalypse On the apocryphal Adam books see of Moses."

—

—

Eve, Book of. Other apocryphal books bearing the name of Adam are: The Book of Adam and Eve, or the Conflict, of Adam and Eve with Satan, extant in Arabic and Ethiopic; and The Testament of Adam, in Both these are Christian offSyriac and Arabic. Apocalypses of shoots of the Adam romance. Adam are mentioned by Epiphanius; the Gelasian Decree names a book on the Daughters of Adam, and one called the Penitence of Adam. Seven Books of Seth are said by Epiphanius

Adam and

^

("Ad versus Heereses," xxxix. 5; compare xxvi. 8; also Hippolytus, "Refutatio," v. 22; see also Josephus, " Ant. " i. 2, § 3) to have been among the scriptures of the Gnostic sect of Sethians.