Page:LostApocryphaOfTheOldTestamentMRJames.djvu/114

 APPENDIX

way of appendix to the fragments of lost books I should like to add one or two notices of apocrypha which do not quite fit into the framework of the main part of the book.

The first of these is the Ladder of Jacob, which exists in two recensions in Slavonic, and was translated by Bonwetsch in the Göttingen Nachrichten, 1900 (p. 76). I depend upon his text for my rendering.

The first recension, contained in a single MS., rather mutilated, of 1494, in the Rumjançov Museum at Moscow, gives the most original text. The other has been printed by various Russian scholars and, like other apocrypha, is found in the text of the Palæa, or Old Testament History.

(Rec. 2): Now Jacob went to his Uncle Laban, and he found a place and fell asleep there, laying his head on a stone, for the sun was set: and there he saw a vision.

(Rec. I begins): And lo! a ladder was set up on the earth, whose top reached unto heaven. And the top of the ladder was a face as of a man, hewn out of fire. Now it had twelve steps up to the top of the ladder, and upon each step up to the top were two human faces on the right and on the left—twenty-four faces seen to their breast, on the ladder. But the middle face was higher than them all, which I saw made of fire, to the shoulder and the arm, very terribly, more than the twenty-four faces. And as I looked, behold, the Angels of God ascending and descending thereon: but the Lord was set above it, and he called me, saying: Jacob, Jacob. And I said: Here am I, Lord; And he 96