Although there is no hard proof for the date of origin of any of these compositions (including The Sword of Moses), scholars tend to agree that they were compiled during the third quarter of the first millennium.
A new critical edition was printed in 1997 by the Israeli scholar Yuval Harari based on a variant text found in another manuscript.
The largest manuscript of the Sword of Moses begins with a description of the heavenly realms and angels, and soon moves onto describing various prayers, invocations, and ritual procedures that the reader is to perform before he is able to use the "Sword"; this term refers to a huge list of magical names later in the text, divided into 136 sections, each with a different magical use.
The list of names is given first, followed by its uses in the next section: [1]If at a full moon you wish to seize and to bind a man and a woman so that they will be with each other, and to annul spirits and blast-demons and satans, and to bind a boat, and to free a man from prison, and for every thing, write on a red plate from TWBR TSBR until H’ BŠMHT.
[2] And if you wish to destroy high mountains and to pass (in safety) through the sea and the land, and to go down into fire and come up, and to remove kings, and to cause an optical illusion, and to stop up a mouth, and to converse with the dead, and to kill the living, and to bring down and raise up and adjure angels to abide by you, and to learn all the secrets of the world, write on a silver plate, and put in it a root of artemisia, from TWBR TSBR until H’BŠMHT.