Citation Responsibility
But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him an abusive judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” Jude 1:9 NASB
About the body of Moses – The basis of this story is in Deuteronomy 34:1-12, but the story Jude uses is not in the Torah. Jude is citing the book, The Assumption of Moses. The problem is that this book is no longer extant. There is a first century apocyrphal work called The Testament of Moses but the ending is lost. The reason we believe Jude is using The Assumption of Moses is because Clement said this was the case. The story Jude uses has to be reconstructed from many different ancient documents. But this isn’t the only odd thing about Jude’s verse.
“Archangel” appears only here and in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 in the New Testament. Otherwise the term is found in pseudepigrahical works like 1 Enoch and Jubilees and a work called “Life of Adam and Eve.” It also appears in Christian writings from later centuries. The angel Michael is referred to only in Daniel, and “the devil” as a Greek term appears only in post-exilic translated texts. But Jude must have assumed that his readers were familiar with Michael as archangel. This suggests that believers in the first century had a well-developed angelology, something not found in the Tanakh. The source is non-canonical, pseudepigraphical works and rabbinic thinking, probably influenced by Egyptian and Hellenistic ideas.[1] In other words, the scope of sacred and religious material in the first century was much broader than later canonical material. If we truly want to understand how the first century followers of the Messiah (and Judaism in general) thought about their spiritual world, we’ll need to look far beyond the modern canon.
In Deuteronomy 34, the Hebrew Bible implies that God buries Moses but the LXX reads, “they buried him.” This was taken to mean angels and God. Therefore, later religious works concluded that Michael was involved in the disposition of Moses’ body. Clearly Jude expected his readers to know this story not from the Hebrew Bible but from the LXX. This raises the question, “Why would the Jewish translators of the Hebrew text change the subject from singular to plural in the Greek text?” The answer must be that by the time the Hebrew Tanakh was translated into Greek (2nd century BCE), rabbinic theology had already developed an important angelology. Common believers knew the story because it had been circulating in Jewish contexts for a long time.
Finally, we should note that Jude combines various other texts into his account. Michael’s response to the devil is a citation from Zechariah 3:2, also a judgment scene regarding the office of the accuser. With all of these issues, one wonders how Jude ended up in the canon. The answer is his personal connection to Yeshua. But the lesson for us is not about the canonization of Jude. It’s about the problem of canonization itself. Canonization reduces the authorized spiritual material to whatever the authoratative body decides. Clearly, Jude’s audience knew and used a much wider body of materials, and considered them all spiritually appropriate. That raises the real question behind Jude’s citations. Why have we allowed the Church to tell us what is spiritually valuable and what isn’t?
Topical Index: Michael, archangel, angels, The Assumption of Moses, canonization, Jude 1:9
Perhaps you will want to listen to the full lectures on Jude, available on the web site HERE
[1] Cf. Annette Evans, THE DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH IDEAS OF ANGELS, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37319575.pdf
