9-10. Jude sets forth two “texts” (Bauckham) containing judgment against those to whom he compares his opponents. The second (w. 14-15) is taken from the pseudepigraphic 1 Enoch. The example in w. 9-10 is taken from traditions around Moses, which are alluded to in extant material but not fully available.214 Two texts that are available to us provide the biblical background. In Deut 34 we read of Moses’ death but 34:6 adds “no one knows his burial place to this day,” exactly the sort of opening creative writers love. In Zech 3:1 we see “Joshua standing before the angel of the lord , and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.” 3:2 continues, “And the Lord said to Satan, 'The lord rebuke you, O Satan!” ’ In the Testament of Moses these texts are combined with a tradition about the Lord sending the archangel Michael to bury Moses. Satan, in his original role as accuser (as in Zech 3), resists the granting of such an honor on the grounds that Moses murdered an Egyptian, a biblical datum problematic for the tradition. Jude is not so much interested in the fate of Moses’ corpse as in the fact that Michael “did not dare to bring a condemnation [krisin] of slander [blasphëmias] against him” but looked to the Lord for judgment, quoting Zech 3:2, “The Lord rebuke you.”

This response is contrasted with that of “these people” ( houtoi), who slander (blasphëmousin) “what they do not understand” (hosa men ouk oidasin) and will in turn be “destroyed by those things ... they know by instinct” (hosa de physikös... epistantai), a nice parallelism indeed.