It should not be confused with the very different Book of Jasher (Pseudo-Jasher) printed by Jacob Ilive in 1751, which was purported to have been translated by the English monk Alcuin.
This appears in Jasher 56:9 among the last words of Jacob to his son Judah: But the book as a whole was written much later, as shown by chapter 10, which covers the descendants of Noah, but uses medieval names for territories and countries, most obviously Franza for France and Lumbardi in Italia for Lombardy.
[6] According to this narrative, which is also alluded to in Josephus' Antiquities (2.10.1–2),[7][8] Moses assisted the indigenous peoples of the country in their conquest of one of the rebellious cities (whose proprietor was Bilʻam the sorcerer) and which had been under siege for nine years.
The earliest extant version of this Hebrew midrash was printed in Venice in 1625, and the introduction refers to an earlier 1552 edition in Naples, of which neither trace nor other mention has been found.
The printer Yosèf ben Samuel[citation needed] claimed the work was copied by a scribe named Jacob the son of Atyah, from an ancient manuscript whose letters could hardly be made out.
Although I removed the fantasies and falsehoods from it, [e.g.,] that it is the Sefer ha-Yashar mentioned in Scripture, there are still those who claim that it was discovered during the time of the destruction [of the temple].
But who can stop those who imagine in their minds whatever they wish.Despite Modena's intervention, the preface to the 1625 version still claims that its original source book came from the ruins of Jerusalem in 70 CE, where a Roman officer named Sidrus allegedly discovered a Hebrew scholar hiding in a hidden library.
The officer Sidrus reportedly took the scholar and all the books safely back to his estates in Seville, Spain (in Roman known as Hispalis, the provincial capital of Hispania Baetica).
The 1625 edition then claims that at some uncertain point in the history of Islamic Spain, the manuscript was transferred or sold to the Jewish college in Cordova.
The Arabic connections suggest that if the preface to the 1625 version is an "exaggeration", it was then probably written by a Jew who lived in Spain or southern Italy.
Johann Georg Abicht, professor of theology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg,[14] translated the 1625 text into Latin as Dissertatio de Libro recti (Leipzig, 1732).
Noah's 1840 preface contained endorsements by Hebrew scholars of the day, all of whom praised the quality of the translation, but these said nothing to indicate they believed it to be the work referred to in Joshua and 2 Samuel.
In fact one of them, Samuel H. Turner (1790–1861), of the General Theological Seminary in New York City, commented that "The work itself is evidently composed in the purest Rabbinical Hebrew, with a large intermixture of the Biblical idiom", indicating he was not of the opinion that it was an ancient text.
[17] Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, acquired a copy in 1841 or 1842 and wrote in the September 1, 1842 edition of the Times and Seasons, in reference to the patriarch Abraham: "the book of Jasher, which has not been disproved as a bad author, says he was cast into the fire of the Chaldeans".
[21][22] Some of these scholars suggest that the book likely contains many original portions of the Sefer HaYashar referenced in the Old Testament but also has a number of added interpolations.