ALLUSIONS IN SACRED BOOKS OP THE EAST. 



197 



For traces of such influence we turn to the Apocrypha and 

 to the Apocalyptic hooks in particular. It does not concern 

 me here whether one author or many went to the writing of 

 each of these pseudo-prophecies ; I deal only with the astronomy 

 wherever it is present, though questions of date and of inter- 

 polations are sometimes involved.* 



There is no question as to the date of that Salathiel who 

 assumed to himself the name of the great Scribe of the Return 

 from the first Exile. He himself said he wrote the book in 

 " the thirtieth year after the ruin of the city," that is after the 

 destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in A.D. 70. All scholars 

 agree on dates close to this, even when they divide iv Ezra 

 into a Salathiel-Apocalypse and an Ezra-Apocalypse. But 

 the book is not, as Dr. Sanday says, " a pure product of 

 Judaism/' for a Jew untainted by Grseco-Magian traditions 

 would have divided all time into seven millenniums, based on 

 the seven days of Creation, but Pseudo-Ezra, in chapter xiv, 

 10-12, writes : 



"For the world hath lost its youth and the times begin to wax 

 old. For the world is divided into twelve parts, and ten parts 

 of it are gone already, even the half of the tenth part, and there 

 remain of it two parts after the middle of the tenth part." 



This is manifestly a direct reproduction of the Bundahis 

 " Time was for 12,000 years," and like the Bundahis, he places 

 the writing of his book in the tenth millennium, after the middle 

 of it. A " pure " Jew would have dated the fall of Jerusalem 



* I have found no important material for my present purpose in the 

 Apocalypse of Baruch, the Assumption of Moses, the Ascension of Isaiah, 

 or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. But for the fact that I 

 have been able to search these books for astronomical allusions, and not 

 only these, but the more fruitful fields of the Enoch literature and the 

 Book of Jubilees, 1 am entirely indebted to the Jong series of magnificent 

 works produced by Canon Charles. I am deeply indebted to him, not 

 for the mere rendering into English only, but for the fullness and the 

 particularity of the translation and his notes, by which he has placed the 

 immense resources of his scholarship freely at the disposal of a student 

 quite unlearned in Oriental languages. My only clue in the interpretation 

 of these books is the astronomical one, and it has happened in more than 

 one instance that where Dr. Charles himself has deemed the text to be 

 so corrupt as to be unintelligible, I have been able to grasp what was the 

 astronomical meaning that the author had desired to convey ; for though 

 he had expressed himself confusedly, he had not been wholly without 

 intelligence, and Dr. Charles placed the details of the problem so 

 completely before me that I was able to arrive at a probable solution of 

 the enigma. 



