Lethargic Man (anag.)

Chapter 10

The whole Christian idea of Satan isn't a very Jewish one; Satan in Jewish thought is decidedly subject to God, as we see in the Book of Job, for example. In modern Jewish thought, the idea of an external tempter is scarcely present at all; we talk about temptation coming from within, and everyone having an evil inclination and a good inclination. But the Christian conception didn't come from nowhere, and at one point Judaism was very much into the idea of an external tempter, referred to as Satan or Prince Mastema. But this leaves the question of how to reconcile such a tempter with God as ruler of the universe. Here's how the Book of Jubilees solved it:

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Jubilees portrays Noah as expressing a favouritism to the ancestor of the Hebrews that is not shown in the Bible; and again we see here Noah portrayed as eminently righteous:

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The Bible describes how God confounds the building of the Tower of Babel, but from the Biblical account it would appear the half-built tower is left standing. From the point of view of the author of Jubilees (writing, perhaps unlike the originators of the oral tradition that led to Genesis, at a time when the eponymous ziggurat in Babylon no longer stood), that is not theologically acceptable:

The Lord sent a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it upon the earth.

The author of Jubilees was apparently bothered by the fact the ancient Israelites gained their kingdom by dispossessing the earlier occupants of the land, and sought to justify it thus:

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(And this answers the question I was asking in yesterday's post.)

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Chapter 6

In a similar way to that in which the Pharisees sought to find precedents in the lives of the Patriarchs for their own innovations, Jubilees tries to trace reasons for the Jewish festivals, which God does not give in the Torah (beyond the fact, which is of secondary importance in Judaism, that they are associated with agricultural events), to the lives of the ancients.

In this case, at issue is the date of שָׁבוּעוֹת (Shāvuoth, Pentecost). Nowadays, this celebrates the Giving of the Torah at Mt Sinai, but this association did not exist in Temple times. Rather, it was invented afterwards as a means to justify the continuation of the festival once the Temple had been destroyed, and it was no longer possible to offer its requisite sacrifices.

However, this reason would not have been available at all to the author of Jubilees, because of their differing interpretation of Leviticus 23:15:

Leviticus 23:15	ויקרא כג טו-כג טו
You shall count for yourselves from the morrow after the sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven sabbaths shall be complete:	וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת מִיּוֹם הֲבִיאֲכֶם אֶת־עֹמֶר הַתְּנוּפָה שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימֹת תִּהְיֶינָה׃

Two thousand years ago, this was the subject of sectarian divisions between the Pharisees, who interpreted "the sabbath" here as the first day of Pesach, and the Saducees and Boethusians, who interpreted it as the first sabbath after Pesach. I've become convinced that in their opposition to everything the Saducees stood for, the Pharisees here threw away the baby along with the bathwater, and that the seven weeks of the Omer were indeed measured from the sabbath after Pesach. This would have made שָׁבוּעוֹת fit in with the other two Pilgrimage Festivals and occur at full moon.

At any rate, the author of Jubilees would have certainly gone with the "sabbath after Pesach" interpretation; and here is the justification he places in the mouth of the angel for the date of שָׁבוּעוֹת:

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One of the other divisions between the Pharisees and the Qumran community was the nature of the calendar. For the Pharisees, and their spiritual descendant, rabbinic Judaism, the calendar is lunisolar, based on the sighting of the new moon (with leap months intercalated every two or three years, to keep it synched with the solar year, unlike the purely lunar Islamic year, which creeps forward eleven days each year). For the Qumran community, by contrast, this was rank heresy; they believed that the true Jewish calendar had always been solar, and laid out in a highly structured order. Jubilees continues by laying out this order and its justification in the time of Noah:

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This looks like it's talking about new moons, but it's not, it's just the terminology for the first of each month, as becomes clear from its continuation below, which is incompatible with a lunar calendar:

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(It is thought that they did not actually observe a three hundred and sixty-four day year, which would get out of sync pretty quickly; IIRC, once a while they would have a week which was not counted as part of the year, which would get everything back into sync.)

The above passage then leads into a rant against the Pharisees who, with their lunisolar calendar are causing the Israelites to sin by celebrating the wrong days as yomtov, and that this will lead to mixed dancing eating blood:

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In 1 Enoch it is made clear that the practice of setting the calendar by observations of the New Moon was a practice taught to humanity by the Watchers, and part of their corruption of humanity.

Jubilees posts                     Jewish learning notes index

Chapter 4

( The Biblically unnamed wives of the first generations )

Mahalalel took unto him to wife Dinah, the daughter of Barakiel the daughter of his father's brother, and she bare him a son in the third week in the sixth year, [461 A.M.] and he called his name Jared, for in his days the angels of the Lord descended on the earth, those who are named the Watchers, that they should instruct the children of men, and that they should do judgment and uprightness on the earth.

Jared is named in Genesis, but his name is not interpreted. It does indeed derive from a root meaning "descend".

The myth of the Watchers is also found in the First Book of Enoch; on account of which 1 Enoch is deemed to predate Jubilees, though how they can tell it's this way around and not the other I don't know.

What's notably different in Jubilees from the account of the Watchers in 1 Enoch is that the Watchers here came at God's behest, and only later went astray; in 1 Enoch they were sinning from the word go. Regardless, the end result was the same: the Watchers taught humankind lots of inappropriate knowledge, which, along with their son's marrying human children to beget the Nephilim, occasioned the destruction of the Watchers and ultimately the Flood. (This story is broken up in several pieces, according to their chronological order, in Jubilees, and I am not listing each one here or telling the story in full; you'll have to read Jubilees or 1 Enoch (or Wikipedia) if you want to learn it!)

In the fifteenth jubilee in the third week Lamech took to himself a wife, and her name was Betenosh the daughter of Barakiel, the daughter of his father's brother, and in this week she bare him a son and he called his name Noah, saying, 'This one will comfort me for my trouble and all my work, and for the ground which the Lord hath cursed.'

Later rabbinic thought follows this, deriving נֹחַ (Noaḥ) from the root נחם NḤM "comfort", rather than נח NḤ "rest"; I cannot see the justification for this.

Have you ever noticed how Adam died only a little short of a thousand years old? The Bible gives no explanation for this, and I have not heard of a midrashic one either, but the Book of Jubilees gives a nice explanation, leveraging Psalms 90:4 ("For a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."):

At the close of the nineteenth jubilee, in the seventh week in its sixth year, Adam died, and all his sons buried him in the land of his creation; he was the first to be buried in the earth. He was just seventy years short of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore was it written concerning the tree of knowledge: 'On the day that ye eat thereof ye shall die.' For this reason he did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it.

The author of Jubilees evidently does not consider that Cain received enough punishment in the Biblical story, and adds to it as follows:

At the close of this jubilee Cain was killed after him in the same year; for his house fell upon him and he died in the midst of his house, and he was killed by its stones; for with a stone he had killed Abel, and by a stone was he killed in righteous judgment. For this reason it was ordained on the heavenly tablets: With the instrument with which a man kills his neighbour with the same shall he be killed; after the manner that he wounded him, in like manner shall they deal with him.'

Jubilees posts                     Jewish learning notes index

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I am fascinated with what filled the gap between the last books of the Bible being written and the opening of the Talmudic era. A few months ago I read the Book of Jubilees, which fits slap-bang into the middle of this period, being written roughly contemporaneously with the Hasmonean revolt. After a while, I found myself, as one does, beginning to forget what I'd learned in it, so I decided I'd do the same with it as I did the other year with the Samaritan Torah and, week by week, blog the portion relevant to that week's sedra (only with multiple posts the first two weeks, because there's a lot of interesting differences with the Masoretic Text those weeks); so I shall be doing this starting with פַּרְשַׁת בְּרֵאשִׁית next week. The backlog of posts will be available here.

But first I should give an introduction to what the book is, as it's not well known today in Judaism or most branches of Christianity (with the notable exception of the Ethiopian church).

The book purports to be a dictation, at God's behest, of the history of the world by the Angel of the Presence to Moses on Mt Sinai; it differs in various interesting ways from the account in the Bible. The book does not represent the mainstream Jewish tradition (i.e. what became it, by virtue of the other traditions dying out!), though; indeed, it was heavily used by the monastic community at Qumran (possibly the Essenes) who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

One of the biggest differences between its worldview and that of mainstream Judaism is that it recognises a solar calendar. As I learned from Rachel Elior's book The Three Temples and the talk she gave about it at Limmud, at this time the Jewish world was split between those who believed that the calendar was and had always been solar, and calculated, and those who believed that the calendar was and had always been luni-solar, and based on observations of the moon. The calendar was, as we shall see, very important to the author of Jubilees; indeed the reason for the name of the book is that everything in it is dated in jubilees (forty-nine year periods) since the creation of the world, which are divided up into "weeks" of seven years, which are further divided into into individual years.

Jewish learning notes index