fire on parchment of white fire, and that Moses received it by divine dictation, writing the exact words spoken to him by God. The rabbis also explained how the Torah was handed down to later generations: "Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly," who in turn transmitted it to the rabbis. (The Great Assembly, according to Jewish tradition, was called by Ezra to ensure the accurate transmission of the Torah of Moses, when the Jews returned from exile). Orthodox rabbis therefore say that thanks to this chain of custodians the Torah of today is identical with that received by Moses, not varying by a single letter. The rabbis were aware that some phrases in the Torah do not seem to fit with divine dictation of a pre-existent text, and this awareness accounts for a second tradition of how the divine word was transmitted: God spoke and Moses remembered the divine words and wrote them down afterwards, together with some explanatory phrases of his own. This explanation is a minority one, but it explains, for example, why every step in the description of the construction of the Tabernacle is followed by the phrase, "As the Lord commanded Moses." There were also passages which seemed impossible for Moses to have written, notably the account of his own death and burial in last verses of Deuteronomy: the Talmud's answer is that "Joshua wrote ... [the last] eight verses of the Torah," yet this implied that the Torah was incomplete when Moses handed it to Israel; the explanation of rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was that the verses were indeed by Moses, but written "with tears in his eyes" as God dictated to him this description of his end. More serious were a few passages which implied an author long after the time of Moses, such as Genesis 12:6, "The Canaanite was then in the land," implying a time when the Canaanites were no longer in the land. Abraham ibn Ezra (c.1092–1167) made a celebrated comment on this phrase, writing that it contains "a great secret, and the person who understands it will keep quiet;" the 14th century rabbi Joseph ben Samuel Bonfils responded that Moses had written this and similar passages, as he was a prophet, but that it