Wednesday, December 14, 2022

A New Proposal to the Background of Jude 9 and Satan's Dispute Concerning the Body of Moses

  

Stokes’s contention that (the) Satan is in fact an executioner or attacker rather than an accuser coupled with the prominent traditions about Moses’s (non)burial, (non)death, and heavenly glorification leads him to a new interpretation of Jude 9, which more accurately reflects the celestial context in which Zech 3:1-7 occurs and to which Jude alludes. Zechariah 3:1 reads: ‎ ויראני את־יהושׁע הכהן הגדול עמד לפני מלאך יהוה והשׂטן עמד על־ימינו לשׂטנו. The NRSV translates this verse as: “Then he showed be the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.” Stokes’s argument that (the) Satan was thought to be God’s attacker or executioner, however, suggests that we should take לשטנו to mean “to attack him” rather than “to accuse him.” (Ryan E. Stokes, “Not Over Moses’s Dead Body: Jude 9, 22-24 and the Assumption of Moses in Their Early Jewish Context,” JSNT 133 [2014]: 201-2). This translation of שטן has the support of other passages as well (Nom 22:22, 32; 2 Sam 19:22-23 [MT}; 1 Kgs 5:18 [MT]; 11:14, 23, 25; 1 Chr 21:1; Pss 38:21 [MT]; 71:13; 109:4, 20, 29). This being the case, it is all the more likely that the tradition underlying Jude 9 refers to the devil attempting to attack Moses’s living body. (Daniel B. Glover, Patters of Deification in the Acts of the Apostles [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe 576; Tūbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022], 95)