Moses Gaster places its compilation about the middle or end of the third century BCE, and rendered a translation of the work in 1927 with the Royal Asiatic Society in London.
[5] The book is written in the form of a chronicle, its narrative covering the whole of the Pentateuch, starting with Adam, the first man, and concluding with the death of Moses, adding thereto anecdotal material not available in the Hebrew Bible.
Its antiquity is attested to by the fact that it was written when the vestiges of a "peculiar Samaritan Hebrew-Aramaic" was still in practice, and Arabic had only begun to supersede it.
Laud (Ld) and Aram, as having settled in a region of Afghanistan formerly known as Khorasan (Charassan), but known by the Arabic-speaking peoples of Afrikia (North Africa) as simply "the isle" (Arabic: Al-gezirah).
Some suggest that the author's familiarity with the geography of northern Erez Israel and Syria leads to the conclusion that he may have lived in this region, where large Samaritan communities then flourished in Acre, Tyre, and Damascus.
The Samaritan tradition, as conveyed by The Asatir, avers differently, that Noah divided the earth among his three sons and their descendants some twenty years before his death, when he was aged 930.