Bible Review

John Milton may have been familiar with this pseudepigraphic book. In Paradise Lost, Milton has Eve begging to be allowed to work by herself in the Garden.

Phyllis Bird, “Images of Women in the Old Testament,” in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 47.

All quotations from the pseudepigrapha are based on the translations found in James Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983).

Phyllis Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40:1 (1973), p. 40.

Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (London: Pushkin Press, 1951), p. 47.

Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 10.

See David Noel Freedman, “Who Asks (or Tells) God to Repent?” BR 01:04.

Martin Buber, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), p. 201.

Anson Laytner (in Arguing With God [Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1990], p. 66) claims that the midrashim about Moses’ death served the didactic purpose of allaying the general anxiety over death: “The dialogue serves to instruct about the rabbinic concept of the world to come and its place and role in the system of divine justice.”