Moses’
Assumption
A further step in the honouring of
Moses as a great hero was the rise of the belief that he had ascended to
heaven. The Old Testament story of Elijah’s being carried up alive into heaven
and the statement in Genesis 5:24 that God took Enoch away is probably the
cause of the conviction that certain other Biblical heroes must have shared
this honor. In the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha there are traditions that
Moses, Jeremiah, Baruch, and Ezra have each “entered Paradise during their
lifetime” or “were taken up to heaven without tasting death.” The growing
esteem in which Moses was held made it inevitable that he would be among those
to receive this distinction.
In IV Ezra 14:9 God tells Moses, “thou
shalt be taken up from (among) men, and henceforth thou shalt remain with my
Son, and with such as are like thee, until the times be ended.” Similarly, in
II Baruch 59:3-4 occurs the statement: “But also the heavens at that time were
shaken from their place, and those who were under the throne of the Mighty One
were perturbed, when He was taking Moses unto Himself.” It is believed that II
Baruch uses the Assumption of Moses as a source and that the original
Assumption of Moses was constructed upon the framework of Moses’ ascension. Some
fragments of a document, Saying of Moses, were found at Qumran in cave 1Q. In
it Moses at the close of his career delivers a speech to the sons of Israel.
Barthélemy and Milik comment: “On peut supposer que la composition s’achevait
par la mort de Moise et eventuellement, son ascension.” It is more probable,
however, that this early document concluded with either Moses’ death or
his ascension—not with both, even though some attempts were made elsewhere to
combine the two ideas. The ancient belief in Moses’ ascension is preserved in
the thirteenth century Zohar, which states that “Moses did not die” (1:28a;
2:174a).
In any examination of the tales
of Moses’ ascension in the Midrash, it is necessary to distinguish between the
very temporary ascensions from which Moses quickly returned to earth before
the death, and the assumption of the type listed above in which Moses ascends instead
of meeting death. In these temporary ascensions Moses is characteristically
escorted to heaven by an angel and given special knowledge, such as being shown
the seven heavens, paradise, and hell (Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, II, 304-315). The late Midrash, Gedullat
Mosheh (Greatness of Moses), is devoted to this theme (Jellenik, Beth Ha-Midrash, pp. 9 ff.).
The legend of Moses’ ascension in
place of his death was a contradiction of the specific statement in Deuteronomy
34:5-6 that Moses died and was buried in the land of Moab. Consequently, the
two beliefs existed side by side in Judaism. The majority of the Jewish writers
followed the Biblical account and believed that Moses had died, but others
accepted the belief in his bodily translation to heaven to remain there until
his return to earth when the times were fulfilled. Philo believed that Moses
was translated to stand beside God himself (Philo, Sacr. 8-10). In BT, Sotah
13b, there is expressed the belief that Moses died; however, this passage
admits that “others [rabbis] declare that Moses never died.” Sifre on
Deuteronomy 357 (3rd c. A.D.) and the Midrash Tannaim 224 recognize the two
views and say that some hold that Moses did not die and “continues to
administer above.”
At the beginning of the Christian
era some Jews were quite opposed to the belief in Moses’ ascension, and efforts
were made to combat the idea. Charles concluded that our extant document, the
so-called “Assumption of Moses” (1st c. A.D.0 is really the Testament of Moses
which was combined with the original Assumption of Moses. The Testament of
Moses (Asmp. Moses 1:15) and Biblical Antiquities 19, 20d (A.D. 110-130), stress
the idea that Moses was buried in public: that is, many saw his burial;
Ginzburg remarks that this “has very likely the aim to combat the view that he
did not die at all, but was translated into heaven” (Ginzburg, Legends, VI, 152, n. 904). Josephus
tried to combat that view by saying that Moses wrote that he died, lest people
say that because of his extraordinary virtue he went to God; the same writer refers
to that story in his preceding sentence by saying that Moses disappeared in a
cloud as he was about to embrace Eleazar and Joshua (Antt. 4:323-326).
Another result of the
contradictory beliefs concerning the end of Mses’ career was that some writers
tried to harmonize them. The editor who combined the Testament of Moses and the
Assumption of Moses tried to harmonize his two sources by inserting the word “assumption”
after the word “death” (Asmp. Moses 10:12). Origen mentions a tradition in a book
(perhaps the lost version of the Assumption of Moses) which states that two
Moseses were seen at Moses’ death: the one alive in spirit and the other dead
in body (Origen, In Josuam, homily
2:1). The Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 200) also
tried to harmonize the two contradictory traditions: Joshua “saw Moses, when
taken up (to heaven), double—one Moses with the angels, and one on the
mountains honored with burial in their revines” (Clement of Alexandra, Stromata vi. 15) (Howard M. Teeple, The Mosaic Eschatological Prophet [Society
of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 10; Philadelphia: Society of Biblical
Literature, 1957], 41-43)
