The Book of the Cave of Treasures

Introduction

The sources of the "CAVE OF TREASURES" AND ITS CONTENTS.

In the centuries immediately preceding the Christian Era certain professional Jewish scribes composed a number of works which may well be described as "historical romances," and which were based on the histories of the patriarchs and others as found in the four main divisions of the text of the Hebrew Bible. There is little doubt that most of these works were written either in Hebrew or in the Palestinian vernacular of the period. One of the oldest of such works appears to be the "Book of Jubilees" (see page 3), (also called the "Lesser Genesis" and the "Apocalypse of Moses"), which derives its name from the fact that the periods of time described in it are Jubilees, i.e. each period contains forty-nine years. It is more or less a Commentary on the Book of Genesis. That a version of this book existed in Greek is proved by the quotations given by Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus (born about A.D. 320, and died in 403 or 404), in his work on "Heresies" (chapter xxxix). The author claimed boldly that his work contains the revelations which were made to Moses by the command of God by the Archangel Michael, who is frequently described as the "Angel of the Face," The book is not wholly original, for it contains narratives and traditions derived from the works of earlier writers; and some of the legends appear to have been taken from early Babylonian sources. The Hebrew, or Aramean, original is lost, and the complete work is only found in Ethiopic, in which language it is known as "Kûfâlê," or "Sections." The Ethiopic translation was made from Greek.