At my church not long ago, the Sunday reading was from 2 Samuel, giving David’s unforgettable lament for Jonathan. Preceding that, though, was a cryptic reference attributing a statement to the Book of Jasher. That is not the only Biblical reference to a now lost book: we have (or to be more precise, don’t have) the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the book of Samuel the seer, the book of Nathan the prophet, and so on. Sometimes such texts are lost entirely, but on other occasions they survive through partial quotations in known writings. In my next couple of columns, I will be writing on one such semi-lost text, namely the Book of Noah. I will be drawing throughout on an excellent collection of essays published by Michael E. Stone, Aryeh Amihay, and Vered Hillel, eds., Noah and his Book(s) (Society of Biblical Literature, 2010).
Through the story of the Ark, Noah is a very well known figure in Christian history and popular culture. So familiar is he in fact that we may underestimate his role as a pivotal figure in Jewish and early Christian thought, and not merely as the justification for toymakers or documentary film-makers. Noah mattered immensely, and so did members of his family, who all became the subjects or alleged authors of multiple pseudepigrapha and pseudo-scriptures. I barely exaggerate when I say that in Second Temple Judaism, Noah attracted almost as much attention as Abraham or Moses. The reasons for that focus demand discussion.
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