The Medieval Church · c. 750–800
Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer
Anonymous
What it is
A retelling of Genesis and Exodus as continuous narrative rather than verse-by-verse comment, full of material found nowhere earlier: the ten trials of Abraham, Samael riding the serpent, the sun and moon quarrelling, and Ishmael's descendants as a kingdom of the writer's own day.
Why it lasted
The first rabbinic work composed under Islam and shaped by it, and the bridge between classical midrash and the medieval Jewish imagination. Much of what later Christians thought Jews believed about Genesis comes from here.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below.
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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