The Asatir

The Asaṭīr (Arabic: الاساطير, al-Asāṭīr), also known as the Samaritan Book of the Secrets of Moses, is a collection of Samaritan Biblical legends, parallel to the midrash, and which draws heavily upon oral traditions known among Jews in the Rabbinic period, written in the 10th or 11th centuries CE.

The book is written in the form of a chronicle, its narrative covering the whole of the Samaritan Torah, starting with Adam, the first man, and concluding with the death of Moses, adding thereto anecdotal material not available in the Hebrew Bible. It primarily deals with the succession of personages from Adam to Moses, spanning approximately 26 generations. The entire book is written around the story of their lives, as passed down through oral traditions. The book ascribes 2800 years from the first man, Adam, to Israel's victory over the Midianites.

The book, preserved by the Samaritans of Nablus, compiled on parchment in late Samaritan Aramaic mixed with an antiquated Arabic vernacular, and divided into twelve chapters, was discovered by Gaster in 1907. Its antiquity is attested to by the fact that it was written when the vestiges of a "peculiar Samaritan Hebrew-Aramaic" were still in practice and Arabic had only begun to supersede it. Since there is no evidence that Moses conveyed the oral traditions contained therein, various Samaritan writers merely refer to its author as "the Master of the Asatir" or the "Author of the Asatir" (Baal Asatir), leaving it undecided whether Moses was the source of these legends. The book is therefore considered pseudepigraphic. The account tells of the Pharaoh in the time of Moses being from the progeny of Japheth, rather than of Ham. Pharaoh in the time of Joseph, the same account says, was from the progeny of Ishmael.