Jubilees

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The book of Jubilees belongs to a category of literature that contemporary scholars designate by the pleasantly vague tag “the Rewritten Bible.”¹ The author of the book, like a number of other ancient Jewish writers, found it convenient to convey his message through an annotated presentation of the older text. In this way he could show that his views arose from the authoritative account and would guide his readers into a proper understanding of it.

Jubilees presents itself as a divine revelation that God communicated to Moses through an angel on Mt. Sinai. The book recounts biblical history from creation to the arrival of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai. The author often reproduces the scriptural text word for word, but he also transforms it at numerous points by means of omissions and especially additions, giving the reader what he takes to be the proper interpretation of Genesis-Exodus and applying their teachings to the issues of his own day. It begins with a chapter that describes the setting and predicts Israel’s apostasy and final return to the way of the Lord.

As nearly as one can tell, the book was composed in about 160–150 B.C. A Greek version seems to have been available for centuries. A number of early Christian scholars refer to Jubilees and employ information from it to fill out what was stated too briefly or enigmatically in Genesis or omitted entirely. The Greek version, however, has 034been lost. But before it passed out of circulation, it served as the base for translations into two other languages that were important in early Christianity: Ethiopic and Latin. Though these translations were made perhaps as early as 500 A.D., their existence became known to Western scholars only in the 19th century. They knew that there had once been a document named the Book of Jubilees (or, the Little Genesis) because of the citations from and allusions to it in patristic literature. They first learned of the survival of the book’s entire text from the biblical scholar Heinrich Ewald, who, in 1844, published an article praising the complementary labors of missionaries and scholars.² Scholars 035were providing linguistic tools with which missionaries could learn the languages spoken in the lands where they worked, and missionaries assisted scholars by bringing back texts from those countries to European centers. Among the missionaries whom Ewald singled out for high praise was one L. Krapf, who had brought to Europe a considerable number of Ethiopic manuscripts. Krapf had traveled to the most southerly parts of old Ethiopia, visiting the most remote monasteries, and assembling a sizable collection of manuscripts. Though Krapf had sent some manuscripts to Europe in their original form, he preferred—for financial reasons—to have local scholars in Ethiopia prepare paper copies of them. One of these paper copies which Ewald investigated and described was, he was convinced (correctly, as it turned out), a book that ancient writers of Greek had called the Jubilees (ta ioµbeµlaia) or the Little Genesis (heµ leµpte genesis). The work enjoyed canonical status in the Abyssinian or Ethiopian Church which had become rather isolated from the rest of Christianity at an early time and retained a wide array of sacred works, some of which other churches excluded from the scriptural canon.

The lost Greek version of Jubilees had also served as the basis for a translation into Latin. Nothing was known about it, however, until 1861 when Antonius Maria Ceriani provided a transcription of the legible parts of the Latin translation that he had found in a fifth- or sixth-century manuscript in the Ambrosian library in Milan.³

What could not be known until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that Jubilees was also an extremely important book, probably authoritative, for the Jewish group known as Essenes, whom most scholars identify as the sectarians who lived at the settlement on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea called Qumran. We now know this because at least 15 copies of Jubilees—all fragmentary—have been identified from five different Dead Sea Scroll caves, the majority from Cave 4. For the Dead Sea Scroll sectarians, Jubilees was apparently canonical or biblical, although they would not have used those terms. These copies have shown, as was long thought, that the book was composed by a Jew in Hebrew, since that is the language of all the copies found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves.

In 1850–51, Ewald’s remarkable student August Dillmann inaugurated the modern Western study of the book, but the copy from which he labored 036proved so poor that the German text he produced was rather unsatisfactory. Dillmann improved this with the use of a second Ethiopic manuscript in 1859.⁴ He was followed in 1895 by R. H. Charles, who used four Ethiopic manuscripts.⁵ My own text and translation from the Ethiopic, using 27 manuscripts, was published in 1989.⁶

The 15 copies of Jubilees from the Dead Sea caves were originally assigned for publication to J. T. Milik, so they were not available to me when I produced my text in the 1980s. In 1989, the Jubilees fragments from Qumran were reassigned to me, and Milik has been kind enough to provide me with his extremely useful notes and transcriptions. With the Qumran fragments, a few significant and a number of minor improvements in the text have been made.

The earliest of these Hebrew texts from Qumran dates to approximately 125 B.C., about 25 to 35 years after the book was written; the latest is from the first century A.D. The texts are dated paleographically—that is, by the shape, stance and form of the letters. Altogether, the Dead Sea Scroll fragments contain words, and in some cases just letters, from 215 of the 1,307 verses in the book. These fragments show, when they are compared with earlier available versions, that the ancient translators of the book did their work with remarkable care. Though the Ethiopic version is a granddaughter translation separated by the Greek translation from the Hebrew original, it largely agrees with the Hebrew in the fragments from the Dead Sea caves.

The author of Jubilees appears to be the earliest Jewish writer to maintain that Moses wrote the stories of Genesis and Exodus. In the Old Testament itself Moses is associated with the writing of laws, not the narratives.

But the most obvious modification Jubilees introduces into Genesis-Exodus is to fit the biblical stories into a detailed and continuous chronological framework. The author begins his year count from the first day of creation and concludes it with the date of Israel’s entry into the land of Canaan—038a total of 2,450 years. He is able to use some year numbers from Genesis and Exodus, but they are less than complete. He uses as his standard unit of measure a 49-year period which he calls a “jubilee”—hence the name of the book. The author of Leviticus clearly understands the word differently. In Leviticus 25, “jubilee” designates the fiftieth year when individual Hebrews could gain release from slavery and when parcels of land reverted to their original owners even after a sale. Our author, followed by a few other ancient Jewish writers, took “jubilee” to mean the 49-year period that culminated in or was marked off by this fiftieth year. His 2,450-year chronology is divided into 50 of these 49-year units.

His choice of chronological categories is no 039accident. It proves to be theologically eloquent: In the 50th jubilee period of his chronology the Israelites were released from Egyptian servitude and entered the land long ago promised to their ancestors. That is, as a nation they accomplished in the 50th jubilee what was done on an individual basis (release for a slave and return of land to its original owner) during the 50th or jubilee year in the Bible. No doubt the writer also appreciated the fact that his chronological system used a base of seven (a jubilee period was seven times seven years), just as many other facets of biblical life involved heptads (e.g., the seven days of creation, the sabbath as the seventh day, various sacrifices, etc.^a).

Jubilees also introduces a degree of organization or system at points where it was not as evident in Genesis. In its version of creation, Jubilees explicitly enumerates 22 acts of creation (seven on the first day), after which came the sabbath. For Jubilees, the total is theologically significant and relates to Israelite history: The biblical patriarchs from Adam through Isaac number 22 generations, one more than in the Hebrew Bible; after them comes the book’s hero, Jacob, the eponymous ancestor of Israel.

When dating an event, Jubilees almost always specifies the number of the jubilee, the week, and the year in which it occurred. The year, however, is solar, though it has only 364 days, not 365 and a fraction. This 364-day year was standard among the Essenes. The solar year of 364 days had certain obvious advantages: Every date occurred on the same day of the week each year because 364 is precisely divisible by seven. In the lunar calendar that became normative in Judaism, the holidays moved through the days of the week, sometimes occurring on the sabbath; in the Jubilees calendar they never migrate. Thus, there would never be a conflict regarding which laws took precedence—those of the sabbath or those of a festival that happened to fall on the sabbath in a particular year. This difference in calendar was probably one of the causes for the eventual separation of the Essenes from their fellow Jews in the mid-second century B.C.

The calendar of course played a significant role in preserving social cohesion. The authorities of the Jewish nation used the date of the new moon (= the beginning of the month) on the basis of observation to establish subsequent dates. Once the first of the month was fixed, the dates of the festivals that occurred in that month were also set. If a dispute arose about when the month began, or if a group refused to use lunar calculations for its religious calendar (as the Essenes did), this would entail celebrating holidays at different times, thus introducing divisions within the community. If a factional group did not celebrate Passover when everyone else did, it would be difficult for it to feel at one with the nation. Calendrical disputes clearly had political consequences.

The author of Jubilees was almost surely a priest. His concern with sacral topics suggests as 060much. Also, he takes great pains to show that Jacob’s son Levi, who in the Bible is the eponymous ancestor of the priests but himself does nothing of a sacerdotal sort, was in fact designated priest and functioned as one for his father and brothers. To Levi the books of the ancestors were given, and he presumably passed them along to his priestly descendants.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book of Jubilees is the manner in which the author at times subjected the text of Genesis-Exodus to a wholesale expansion. Where the biblical text may contain only a brief notice or nothing at all, Jubilees occasionally adds an entire story.

This feature (and others) reveal that Jubilees is an early part of the ongoing, centuries-old process of retelling and re-presenting the early biblical stories as individuals and groups try to relate the ancient tales to contemporary concerns and interests. This process begins already in the Bible itself (the earliest being the book of Deuteronomy) and continues in the midrashic literature, sermons, novels, movies and liberation movements of various kinds.

One textual expansion in Jubilees arises in connection with Genesis 6:1–4 and the Flood account that follows. Genesis 6:1–4 is the strange story of the “sons of God” who came down from heaven and cavorted with the daughters of men. Their children were giants, the Nephilim.^b Then follows the story of Noah and the Flood. Like many ancient Jewish and Christian writers, the author of Jubilees had a specific interpretation of the cryptic words in Genesis 6:4: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.”⁷ Our author understood “the sons of God” to be angels. They descended from heaven and married women through whom they fathered giants. These giants in turn produced the extraordinary, superhuman level of evil that forced God to send the Flood. Though the gigantic offspring of the angels who had descended perished in the flood waters, demons who emanated from them and their fathers continued to exercise their baleful influence in the postdiluvian period. In this way, the ongoing presence of evil in the world is explained.

Other major supplements in the Jubilees text have to do with the remarkable achievements of Enoch,^c the division of the earth among Noah’s three sons, the youthful exploits of Abram, the battles that Jacob and his sons fought against their enemies, and several sermonic expansions—for example, against intermarriage with foreigners, or using the wrong calendar.

A final type of change Jubilees introduces into the biblical text can be characterized as problem-solving. Genesis-Exodus raises many difficulties—and has for readers over the centuries. Jubilees shows that they troubled expositors more than two thousand years ago. For example, Genesis omits any account of the creation of angels. Mentioned at several places in the biblical text, angels may be implied in Genesis 1:26, where God is speaking to someone, though no rational creature has yet been created. If angels were already present at creation and guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden, when were they made? Genesis does not say, but Jubilees places their origin on the first day of the first week. The text that provides warrant for making this claim is Genesis 1:2 “… the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind (ruach) from God swept over the face of the waters.” The word translated wind can also mean spirit; the author of Jubilees took it in that sense as a collective term that referred to the multiplicity of spiritual or angelic creatures whom the Bible mentions.

One final feature of Jubilees’ revision of the biblical text: Jubilees insists that certain religious rites, such as the celebration of festivals whose origins the Bible traces to the time of Moses, were in fact practiced by earlier ancestors. The author argues that if read properly Genesis shows that special Jewish practices did not arise in a later time but can be traced to the earliest days—to the eras of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This may be the author’s answer to his fellow Jews who were raising questions about the laws that made their way of life different from all other peoples. Some Jews, if their argument resembled an approach that seems to have been popular elsewhere in the Hellenistic period, argued that there had once been a time—before Moses—of legal purity or innocence for their people but that it had ended when the national lawgiver imposed narrow, ethnic rules on his people. Jewish opponents of the traditional Mosaic laws may have wanted to return to what they surmised were the simpler conditions of patriarchal times, when great Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not celebrate the festivals, follow kosher law, or encumber the sabbath with a multitude of crimping laws. All of that came only later, when Moses appeared on the scene. This appears to be the kind of argument that Jubilees tries to refute. For him, there was no pristine period of simple worship; Moses continued what had been in place long before.

If the numerous copies of the book in their library are any evidence, Jubilees certainly appealed to the strict sect of the Essenes. It also caught the fancy of some Christian groups who may have had strong legal interests and who appreciated how it supplemented the information in Genesis-Exodus.

The rediscovery of this book in modern times reveals ancient debates and approaches to the biblical text. It illustrates the kind of milieu that inspired the Essenes 062when they decided to separate from normal Jewish society and form an isolated community in the Judean wilderness. Jubilees suggests that the Essenes were strict interpreters of the law, avid students of scripture, and a group that looked eagerly to the final divine intervention in human affairs.

Adapted from James C. VanderKam, “The Book of Jubilees,” Missouri Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1992).

The book of Jubilees belongs to a category of literature that contemporary scholars designate by the pleasantly vague tag “the Rewritten Bible.”1 The author of the book, like a number of other ancient Jewish writers, found it convenient to convey his message through an annotated presentation of the older text. In this way he could show that his views arose from the authoritative account and would guide his readers into a proper understanding of it. Jubilees presents itself as a divine revelation that God communicated to Moses through an angel on Mt. Sinai. The book recounts biblical history from […]