The Sword of Moses is the title of an apocryphal Hebrew language book of magic edited by Moses Gaster in Zikhron Ya'akov (now in Israel) in 1896 from a 13th- or 14th-century manuscript from his own collection,[1] formerly MS Gaster 78, now London, British Library MS Or. 10678. Gaster assumed that the text predates the 11th century, based on a letter by Hai ben Sherira (939-1038) which mentions the book alongside the Sefer haYashar, described as another book of formulas, and that it may even date to as early as the first four centuries CE. Yuval Harari disagrees, saying, "It seems more reasonable that the book stemmed from the (later) era of magical treatises, such as Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa or Havdala de-Rabbi Aqiva. 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."[2]
Besides the medieval manuscript used by Gaster, a short fragment of the text survives in Cod. Oxford 1531. A new critical edition was printed in 1997 by the Israeli scholar Yuval Harari based on a variant text found in another manuscript. An English translation of the same was published in 2012.