Book of Jubilees, פַּרְשַׁת בְּשַׁלַח part 2 of 2

The Book of Jubilees concludes with the commandment of the Sabbath, which was given to Moses at this point. The Sabbath has been previously mentioned in Jubilees, in the account of Creation. Because there was a lot of information to convey at that point, I deferred that information to here; so here is it is:

Chapter 2 offers a rare glimpse into what constituted Sabbath observance in the pre-Talmudic period (i.e. a glimpse of how much of the Oral Law of the Talmudic period went back to (or further back than) the third century BCE):

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I strongly suspect that the rationale that is found in the Mishna, that because the commandment to keep the Sabbath is found in the Torah next to that to construct the Tabernacle, the principal activities forbidden on the day of rest are those which went into the construction of the Tabernacle, had not yet arisen at this point (i.e. the rationale is post-facto). Chapter 50 gives a similar list of forbidden activities:

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What stands out in this list is the prohibition of sex. Today sex between man and wife is regarded as an activity recommended for the Sabbath day. I have no idea whether this attitude towards it here represents a shift in views between then and the second century CE, or rather differences between the Pharisaic הַשְׁגָפָה and that of the sect (Saducees? Essenes?) which wrote the Book of Jubilees.

A word about the death penalty declared here for breaking the Sabbath. This is in line with the Torah, but the members of the Sanhedrin and later rabbis of the Talmud, as R. Jeremy Gordon puts it, though passionately in favour of the death penalty in theory, were passionately against its ever being carried out. They legislated impediments against it—the need for two witnesses and forewarning the perpetrator that what they are about to do carries a capital penalty—and ultimately legislated it out of existence, decreeing that only a Sanhedrin located on the Temple Mount had the authority to proclaim a death sentence, and then moving the Sanhedrin off the Temple Mount. Even beforehand, the Talmud says that any Sanhedrin which carried out the death penalty once in seven years, R. Eliezer b. Azariah says once in seventy was called a destructive Sanhedrin.

Unlike the Torah, Jubilees spells out that an exception to the Sabbath prohibitions is needed for the Temple worship to continue on the Sabbath:

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The book concludes with another list of proscribed activities on the Sabbath:

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Two interesting things stand out from this list: the prohibition on fasting: the two major fasts of Judaism today can both fall on Sabbath, but perhaps with the solar calendar used by the author of Jubilees that wasn't the case; presumably the book is rather talking about voluntary fasts.

The other interesting prohibition is that on making war. It would not be long after this book was written that the Hasmonean revolt broke out and put the Jews in the situation where if they refused to fight on the Sabbath, they would—and did—get slaughtered in battle, leading ultimately to the emergence of the principle of פִּקוּחַ נֶפֶשׁ, that the saving of human life overrides all commandments except for the prohibitions on idolatry, adultery and murder. But at the time that Jubilees was written, the Jews had been part of large empires for centuries, and had not needed to fight themselves.

Well, that's the end of my comments on the Book of Jubilees; I hope you found them interesting, Judith and ewx... is anyone else still reading this?

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