Bible Review

Petirat Moshe (Jellinek, Beit Ha-Midrash 1.125), as seen in Kugel, The Bible As It Was.

Midrash Rabba to Deuteronomy 7:11, 11:10.

For more on Moses’ denial, see Thomas W. Mann, “Theological Reflections on the Denial of Moses,” Journal of Biblical Literature 98:4 (1979), pp. 481–494.

Yalkut Shimoni, Numbers, 763. Mekhilta Wayassa’ 5; see James Kugel, The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1997), pp. 363–364.

Avot deRebbi Natan 12.

Sifrei to Deuteronomy, 205.

Biblical translations are based on the New Jewish Publication Society version of the Hebrew Bible. Translations of the midrash are the author’s.

Debates about which books belonged in the canon went on for some time. Esther did not gain universal acceptance until the third century A.D. There are also different canons for different groups: The Hebrew Bible, Septuagint and Old Testament are all different, although with much overlap.

The Temple Scroll from Qumran may quote a passage in Leviticus from 4Q365. See Tov and White, “4Q365,” in VanderKam et al., Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIII, pp. 290–296.

This is the position of Ulrich (“The Qumran Scrolls and the Biblical Text,” in Schiffman, Tov and VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls).