Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/139

 Jehovah in this chapter, does, or does not, refer back to this vision. Origen, and some of the other Church Fathers, state that the quotation in Jude is from an apocryphal book, the title of which is "The Ascension," or "Assumption of Moses"; but, in the fragments of that legendary apocalyptic writing which have come down to us either in Latin, Hebrew, or Arabic (in which elements belonging to various dates as far apart as the first or second and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries after Christ are discernible) no such tradition as a strife between Michael and the Evil One over the body of Moses is to be found, nor is there anything to prove that it ever existed in those parts of this apocryphal book which are missing the confused allusions in the Fathers being prob ably to legends in the Talmud and Midrashim to a contest between Samael, the Angel of Death, and Michael, which had reference, not to the body of Moses after his death, but to his soul while he was still living. There are also different legendary accounts of contests between Moses himself and the Angel of Death, whom he put to flight when he came to take his soul by striking him with his rod, on which the ineffable name Jehovah was inscribed. In the end (so one legend proceeds) God Himself, accompanied by Gabriel, Michael, and Zagziel (the former teacher of Moses), descended to take Moses soul. " Gabriel arranged the couch, Michael spread a silken cover over it, and Zagziel put a silken pillow under Moses head. At God's command Moses crossed his hands over his breast and closed his eyes, and God took his soul away with a kiss."

On the other hand, there is just a possibility that the expression "the body of Moses," in Jude, is used in an allegorical sense of the Jewish people; in which case the reference would certainly be to this vision.

" It is true that no instance can be cited in which the body of Moses, or any similar expression, is used of the people of Israel; but it is possible that the phrase niight\\a.ve been employed by Jude in that signification in imitation of the expression the body of Christ, which is used in reference to the Church of Christ in the Epistles of St. Paul, and in view of the fact that the Jewish Church in the writer's day had become bitterly opposed to the Church of Christ, while it looked back to Moses as its teacher a claim which might well be admitted as true in the most real sense of the Jewish Church in the days of Zechariah " (C. H. H. Wright).

I must refer those who are desirous to enter more fully into