Prayer of Asenath

Joseph and Aseneth is a narrative that dates from before the 6th century C.E. It seems to relate the romance, marriage and children of the Israelite patriarch Joseph and his Egyptian wife Aseneth. Some have regarded it as a Jewish midrash or elaboration on the story in Genesis (Genesis 37-50). Others question this interpretation partly because of its provenance (early Syriac Christianity), language (Son of God, Bride of God), symbolism (Eucharistic) and covering letter which appear to indicate a Christian context.

British Library manuscript #17,202 is an anthology containing a variety of writings including the oldest existing manuscript of this work. Written in Syriac, Joseph and Aseneth is a translation of an older Greek writing, made around 550 C.E. by Moses of Ingila. The anthology was compiled around 570 C.E.by an individual scholars call "Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor."

In 1870 J.P.N. Land published a transcription of Joseph and Aseneth in the third series of Anecdota Syriaca, using British Library manuscript #17,202.

The British Library acquired manuscript #17,202 from the British Museum. That institution purchased it on November 11, 1847, from an Egyptian merchant by the name of Auguste Pacho, a native of Alexandria. It had come from an ancient Syrian monastery, St. Mary Deipara, in the Nitrian desert in Egypt, where it had been housed for over 900 years.

Around 932, the monastery’s abbot, Moses the Nisibene, acquired over 250 manuscripts from Mesopotamia and Syria for the library. One of these is the manuscript we know as British Library #17,202.

From the 10th century back to the 6th century the manuscript was in Mesopotamia. In the 6th century we can pick up the trail. Manuscript #17,202 is an anthology, a collection of a number of important writings compiled by an anonymous Syriac author called by scholars Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor. He labelled his anthology “A Volume of Records of Events which have Shaped the World.” He was likely a monk. This Syriac anthology dates from around 570. It contains the oldest existing version of Joseph and Aseneth.

The compiler is called “Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor” because one of the items found in his anthology is an important church history by the real Zacharias Rhetor. Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, whoever he was, did not compose these documents: he compiled them. In the case of Joseph and Aseneth he used the existing Syriac translation that had been made by Moses of Ingila.

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