James M. Scott
symmetrical. In this conception of the progress of world history, Jubilees
represents a major advance over the Apocalypse of Weeks, which also has
periods of equal length (ostensibly 490-year "weeks"), but fails to achieve
the same degree of bilateral symmetry in world history. Instead, the Apoca
lypse of Weeks has merely a partial and asymmetrical complement between
"weeks" 1-7 and 8-10, with the center of history constituting the building of
the temple at the culmination of "week" 5 (1 En 93:7).
Alongside this interest in temporal symmetry, Jub 23 demonstrates the
author's interest in spatial symmetry, particularly the twofold loss and return
of the Promised Land to Israel. To appreciate this point, we must recall that
Jub 50:4-5 contains the chronology of Jubilees that runs throughout the en
tire book and ends at the expected entrance into the Promised Land. This oc
curs at the culmination of the jubilee of jubilees, when the nation will experi
ence on a grand scale what an individual Israelite could have experienced in
the year of jubilee — freedom from servitude and return to ancestral land (cf.
Lev 25). The return of Israel to its ancestral home presupposes Jubilees'
lengthy section about the original assignment of the land to Shem after the
flood and the theft of the land by Canaan soon thereafter (chaps. 8-10).
Thus, from the perspective of Jubilees, when Israel conquered the land
from the Canaanites it was a matter of retaking property that rightfully be
longed to them in the first place. It will not go unnoticed, however, that the
theft of the land by Canaan was paralleled in the author's own day by the
theft of the land by the Greco-Macedonians, which likewise constituted a vi
olation of the eternal oath made by the sons and grandsons of Noah: "All of
them said: 'So be it'! So be it for them and their children until eternity dur
ing their generations until the day of judgment on which the Lord God will
punish them with the sword and fire because of all the evil impurity of their
errors by which they have filled the earth with wickedness, impurity, forni
cation, and sin" (Jub 9:15).^19
The day of judgment is mentioned again in Jub 23:10-11. The appropri
ateness of the apocalyptic section of chap. 23 (and its connection with the
earlier oath in chap. 9) can be seen by the fact that the narrative trigger for
- Cf. P. S. Alexander, "Jerusalem as the Omphalos of the World: On the History of a
Geographical Concept," Judaism 46 (1997): 147-58 (esp. 149-51); Alexander, "Jerusalem as the
Omphalos of the World: On the History of a Geographical Concept," in Jerusalem: Its Sanc
tity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. L. I. Levine (New York: Contin
uum, 1999), 104-19 (esp. 105-7), who argues that Jubilees is a Hasmonean document that is
politically motivated: it contrasts Jerusalem to Delphi, makes Greek influence in the East il
legitimate, and justifies Hasmonean expansion.