The Asatir

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Revered figures Abraahm Yesaahq Yaaqob Yoosef Mooshe Aahrron Ye'oosha
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The Asaṭīr (Arabic: الاساطير, al-Asāṭīr), also known as the Samaritan Book of the Secrets of Moses, is a collection of Samaritan Biblical legends, parallel to the Jewish Midrash, and which draws heavily upon oral traditions known among Jews in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Moses Gaster places its compilation about the middle or end of the third century BCE, and rendered a translation of the work in 1927 with the Royal Asiatic Society in London.^[1] Others have said that its language style resembles more the Arabic language used by the scholar Ab Ḥisda [Isda] of Tyre (Abū'l-Ḥasan aṣ-Ṣūrī)^[2] in his poems of the eleventh century CE, and place its composition in the second-half of the tenth-century.^[3][4] The book's title, Asatir (or Astir), was thought by Gaster to mean "secrets," from which name, he applied to the book its newer title, "The Secrets of Moses." Even so, such an interpretation has nothing to do with the contents of the book, nor with its subject. A more precise translation of the Arabic title of the work, al-Asāṭīr, would be "legends" or "tales," as in the Koranic expression asāṭīr al-Awwalīn ("the Legends of the Ancients").^[5]

The book is written in the form of a chronicle, its narrative covering the whole of the Pentateuch, starting with Adam, the first man, and concluding with the death of Moses, adding thereto anecdotal material not available in the Hebrew Bible. It deals mainly with the succession of personages from Adam to Moses, some 26 generations. The whole book is written around the story of their lives, as handed down by oral traditions. The book ascribes 2,800 years from the first man, Adam, to Israel's victory over the Midianites.^[6]

The book, preserved by the Samaritan community of Nablus, compiled on parchment in late Samaritan Aramaic mixed with an antiquated Arabic vernacular, and divided into twelve chapters, was discovered by Gaster in 1907. Its antiquity is attested to by the fact that it was written when the vestiges of a "peculiar Samaritan Hebrew-Aramaic" was still in practice, and Arabic had only begun to supersede it. Since there is no evidence that Moses actually conveyed the oral traditions contained therein, various Samaritan writers merely refer to its author as "the Master of the Asatir," or the "Author of the Asatir" (Baal Asatir), leaving it undecided as to whether Moses had actually conveyed its legends. The book is therefore largely ascribed as being pseudepigraphic. The account tells of the Pharaoh at the time of Moses being from the progeny of Japheth, rather than of Ham.^[7] The Pharaoh at the time of Joseph, the same account says, was from the progeny of Ishmael.