The Dream of King Jehoash: A Textual Analysis

The term "apocryphal" has been applied to a broad range of medieval Slavonic texts. Many of them were composed in the Judeo-Hellenistic literary tradition and brought into the Slavic lands, forming a particular textual corpus abundant in a variety of contents and narrative styles. However, there is also a group of pieces regarded as Slavonic apocrypha but whose origin is unclear. The Dream of King Jehoash, a very short story written in Old Slavonic, is one of such texts, copies of which were mostly circulated from the 13th to the 18th century in Russia. This paper compares nine copies of the Dream, including the oldest one, analyzes linguistic and structural features of them, and presents the early transmission pattern of copies. Based on a particular expression reminiscent of the one found in The Song of Songs, the author concludes that the Dream was a Slavonic creation.