The article deals with the dating and literary environment of the Gädla Lalibäla, which are critical to understanding the text, its structure and its ideology concerning political power. Since Jules Perruchon's edition of the Gädla Lalibäla, based on the partial translation of a unique manuscript (Orient. 718), does not meet today's requirements, the author began to work on a new edition of the text. In the course of the work, some new information concerning the dating of Lalibäla's life was gainde. From a corpus of six ge'ez manuscripts, it had been confirmed that the version edited by Perruchon is the only ge'ez version of the gadl; however, the text structure attested by the manuscripts proves to be slightly different. Two long passages have been omitted in Perruchon's edition : the introduction and Lalibäla's ascension. The latter was inspired by the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah, which is an indication of the terminus ante quem, insofar as this text was probably excluded from the canon of the Ethiopian Bible during the reign of Zär'a Ya'eqob, in the middle of the 15th cent.