Before the Church · c. 100 BC
The Genesis Apocryphon
1QapGen
Anonymous
What it is
Genesis retold in the first person by Lamech, Noah, and Abraham. Lamech suspects his wife of conceiving by a watcher and she swears she did not; Abraham dreams of a cedar and a palm; and the courtiers of Pharaoh describe Sarah's beauty from the hair of her head to her hands.
Why it lasted
The most vivid of the rewritten scriptures, filling in exactly what Genesis leaves out — motive, dialogue, and what the characters were feeling. Its Aramaic is a key witness to the language spoken in Palestine in the period.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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