The Book of Jubilees
Anonymous; translated by R. H. Charles, 1917
A retelling of Genesis and Exodus revealed to Moses on Sinai, structured in forty-nine-year jubilee cycles, with an angelology and calendar the biblical text does not contain.
- Composed
- 2nd century BCE
- Original language
- Geʿez (from a Hebrew original)
What this text is
The Book of Jubilees, called the Little Genesis, retells the narrative from creation to Sinai as a revelation dictated to Moses by the Angel of the Presence. It divides all history into jubilees, cycles of forty-nine years, and insists on a 364-day solar calendar against the lunar reckoning that became standard, a dispute that mattered enough to help define the community at Qumran.
Like 1 Enoch, Jubilees survived complete only in the Geʿez of the Ethiopian church, and like Enoch it was vindicated by the Dead Sea Scrolls, where fifteen Hebrew manuscripts of it were found. For the community that kept those scrolls, this was scripture.
Why researchers read it
Jubilees shows canon formation in motion: a text authoritative to one ancient community and excluded by others, rewriting Genesis with an explicit cosmological calendar. SOL’s investigations into ritual calendars and into what the excluded books actually taught both use it as primary evidence.
Research that draws on this text
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