The Book of the Wars of the Lord is one of several otherwise unknown works mentioned in the Bible. Gil Student, a Jewish scholar, in "On the Authorship of the Torah," at http://www.aishdas.org/toratemet/en_torah.html , says "... we have seen the talmudic and midrashic evidence that the forefathers, including Moshe, wrote books other than the Torah that were maintained and studied. However, there is also much internal evidence that there were other books written." The Book of the Wars of the Lord, quoted in Numbers 21:14-15, would be one of those books.
No one knows exactly what this book was but there have been many educated guesses: a collection of victory songs or poems; a book of Hebrew/ Israelite military history; another name for The Book of Jasher (mentioned in Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18); a collection of sacred poems; and a military instruction manual written by Moses for use by Joshua.
Non-canonical books such as The Wars of the Lord are mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments and Paul even quoted pagan poets to make his points.
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