Two verses in the Hebrew Bible point readers to a text that no longer exists. In Joshua 10, following a short poem about the sun halting over Gibeon, a note asks whether the event is not already written down somewhere else, and in 2 Samuel 1 a parenthetical remark about David's lament for Saul and Jonathan says the same thing about that poem. A book carrying the name found in those two notes circulates widely today in paperback reprints and free downloads, and readers familiar with those references often conclude that it is this lost source. This is a real text with a documented history, but that history starts in medieval Europe rather than in Iron Age Israel.
Biblical References to the Lost Book of Jasher
The Hebrew phrase behind the English name is a description rather than a personal name. The word rendered "book" meant a text, document, letter, or scroll in Classical Hebrew, and the definite article attached to the second word indicates a common noun rather than a person called Jasher, which yields something closer to "the scroll of the upright." Both poems quoted from this source in the Hebrew Bible are archaic in language, and a third probable citation appears in the Greek translation of 1 Kings, where a poetic fragment is credited to a "Book of the Song."[1] Several recent English translations register the point by dropping the proper name entirely.
The Greek tradition does not support the two Hebrew citations equally. In the Septuagint translation of Joshua the reference is missing altogether, while the Greek of 2 Samuel 1:18 reads "in a book of the upright," and one proposal holds that the Greek preserves the earlier form of the Joshua verse, with the citation entering the Hebrew text later under the influence of the Samuel passage.[2]
Whatever the history of the citation, the collection behind it is gone, and it is one of several named sources that did not survive. The "Book of the Wars of the Lord", the annals of the kings of Israel and of Judah, and the record of the acts of Solomon are all cited and all lost, and nothing from any of them survives beyond the fragments the biblical writers quoted.
Different Books Called Jasher
"Scroll of the upright" is an ordinary Hebrew phrase, and medieval authors attached it to texts that have nothing to do with one another. A collection of responsa by the leading Talmudist of twelfth-century northern France circulated under that name.[3] A book of Jewish magic compiled in roughly the same period carried it too, listed by later cataloguers alongside similar handbooks of spells and recipes.[4] The title advertises upright conduct or upright teaching, which made it useful to authors working in unrelated genres, and none of these books has any relationship to the poems quoted in Joshua and 2 Samuel.
Two different English books add to the confusion. One was published in 1751 and presented itself as a translation of Jasher made by the eighth-century researcher Alcuin of York, and although it was recognized as a fabrication, reprints continue to be issued and library lists still list them under Alcuin's name. The translation behind nearly all present-day circulation is a separate one, published in New York in 1840 from the Hebrew narrative printed at Venice in 1625.[5] The two share a title and nothing else, and they are regularly treated as one book.
Why the Later Book Cannot Contain David's Lament
The narrative that circulates today is a continuous retelling of biblical history, described in reference literature as a review of the past running from Adam to the exodus from Egypt.[6] The printed text carries the story a little further, through the settlement of the land, closing with the death of Joshua and the years in which the elders who outlived him judged Israel. A narrative that ends there has no room for a lament David composed over Saul and Jonathan generations afterward, which means the book cannot contain the poem that the note in 2 Samuel assigns to the source it names.
The Joshua passage does appear, in chapter 88, where the sun halts over Gibeon and stands still for thirty-six moments before the moon follows. That is the wrong direction of dependence for a source, since the plain verses have been filled out with a measurement the biblical text does not supply, which is what a later retelling does to the narrative it works from.
Want to learn more about this? Filling Narrative Gaps
Latin Kings and a War in Britain
Chapter 90 covers the years after the conquest, and the material in it comes from medieval Europe rather than the southern Levant. Kings of Chittim campaign against Edom, a ruler named Abianus dies and one called Latinus reigns in his place for fifty years, and Latinus then raises an army and goes to war against the inhabitants of Britannia. Rome and Britain had no place in the geography available to a writer in the land of Israel at the end of the second millennium BCE, and their appearance in a book that claims to have been finished before the conquest was over points to an author working with the map of his own continent.
Claims About the Book's Origins and Publication
The book presents itself as a survivor of the fall of Jerusalem, saved by an old man when Titus captured the city, an origin that would place its composition before 70 CE and explain its absence from every library list of the intervening centuries. The narrative is built from Scripture, the Talmud, and midrash, together with traditions that are not Jewish in origin, and it is usually dated to the eleventh or twelfth century, although another proposal places its composition in Naples at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Details inside the text favor the later setting, among them a portrayal of Joseph as an astronomer at a Gentile court and the use of the astrolabe. The printing history is no better documented. The Venice edition of 1625 refers to an earlier printing supposedly made in Naples in 1552, but that printing appears never to have existed, and no manuscript of the text survives.[7]
Study of the book's treatment of Enoch places its composition in southern Spain toward the end of the eleventh century and finds that its portrait of Enoch as a philosopher-king who ruled the whole world and taught humanity morality may reflect Islamic sources. That portrait carries embellishments found nowhere else, and it leaves out the violence and disorder before the flood that the rest of the tradition emphasizes.[8]
Archaic Language Is Difficult to Imitate
The archaic Hebrew of the poems quoted in Joshua and 2 Samuel is one reason they are considered early. Archaic features in the Hebrew of those songs are not the kind of thing that can be produced on demand, as writers at Qumran demonstrated a thousand years later when they set out to imitate Classical Hebrew and could not keep the later forms of their own speech out of the result.[9]
That test does not apply to the medieval retelling, whose narrative is assembled out of Talmudic and midrashic material that did not exist until more than a thousand years after the events it describes. Its Hebrew could not pass for the language of the conquest period.
Jasher in the Study of Medieval Jewish Interpretation
Describing the book as excluded from biblical studies gets the situation backwards. It has a settled place in the study of medieval Jewish narrative, and it helped shape a category still used in the study of early Jewish interpretation. The idea now called rewritten Bible was first worked out on this text, because its author expanded the biblical narrative to anticipate questions and resolve difficulties.[10] The argument for taking it seriously was explicit about the late date, holding that composition centuries after the biblical period should not stop students of early Jewish exegesis from working on it, because some of the interpretive traditions embedded in it predate the rabbinic sources that also carry them.[11]
That is a different claim from the one made for the book in popular circulation. A medieval retelling that preserves earlier haggadah is evidence for the history of interpretation, showing which traditions about Abraham or Joseph were current at a given moment and how the people who passed them on reshaped them. It is not evidence for anything that happened in the tenth century BCE, and it cannot supply the poems its title promises.
Borrowing an Established Name
Attaching the name of an authoritative figure or text to a later composition was ordinary practice in Jewish literature long before the Middle Ages, and reading it as simple fraud misses what it accomplished. A pseudonymous writer functions less as an author than as someone handing on and vouching for a tradition, and a figure named in an earlier text can become the patron of a whole developing genre, so that the name operates as a literary character whose story keeps being expanded with new episodes rather than as an author.[12]
By adopting the title of Joshua's source, the retelling claims a place in an established tradition. What the medieval author's readers were offered was a retelling of Genesis with the authority of a name from Scripture attached to it, not the collection of songs itself. Readers looking for that collection still have only what the biblical writers quoted, three short passages, one of them uncertain, and a phrase that means "the upright."