Joseph and Aseneth is a narrative that dates from between 200 BCE and 200 CE. The first part of the story (chapters 1-21), an expansion of Genesis 41:45, describes the diffident relationship between Aseneth, the daughter of an Egyptian priest of Heliopolis and the Hebrew patriarch Joseph, the vision of Aseneth in which she is fed honeycomb by a heavenly being, her subsequent conversion to the God of Joseph, followed by romance, marriage, and the birth of Manasseh and Ephraim. The second part (chapters 22-29) involves a plot by the Pharaoh's son, who recruits Dan and Gad to kill Joseph, only to be thwarted by Benjamin and Levi. The work was composed in Greek, attested by sixteen Greek manuscripts, and other sources. The oldest existing manuscript is a Syriac translation, contained in British Library manuscript #17,202, an anthology that contains a variety of writings. The Syriac translation of Joseph and Aseneth was made around 550 CE by Moses of Ingila. The anthology was compiled around 570 CE by an individual whom scholars call "Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor." Some have regarded it as a Jewish midrash or elaboration on the story in Genesis (Genesis 37–50). Others question this interpretation partly because of its provenance (early Syriac Christianity), language (Son of God, Bride of God), symbolism (Eucharistic) and covering letter which appear to indicate a Christian context. Gideon Bohak and others have drawn attention to the geographical location of the story (Heliopolis) and an important Jewish diaspora community centered on a Jewish temple in Leontopolis, located in the nome of Heliopolis during the Ptolemaic period, seeing this as the likely starting point. History of the Syriac manuscript In 1870 J.P.N. Land published a transcription of Joseph and Aseneth in the third series of Anecdota Syriaca, using British Library manuscript #17,202. The British Library acquired manuscript #17,202 from the British Museum. That institution purchased it on November 11, 1847, from an Egyptian merchant by the name of Auguste Pacho, a native of Alexandria. It had come from an ancient Syrian monastery, St. Mary Deipara, in the Nitrian desert in Egypt, where it had been housed for over 900 years. Around 932, the monastery's abbot, Moses the Nisibene, acquired over 250 manuscripts from Mesopotamia and Syria for the library. One of these is the manuscript we know as British Library #17,202. From the 10th century back to the 6th century the manuscript was in Mesopotamia. In