Jubilees, Sirach, and Sapiential Traditionsame one originally written by the father figure of the text. So in l En 82:1-3
Enoch gives books to Methuselah in which he has recorded all the wisdom
he has revealed to Methuselah, "so that you may give it to the generations of
the world. Wisdom I have given to you and to your children and to those
who will be your children so that they may give this wisdom which is beyond
their thought to their children for the generations."^7
Unfortunately, there is nothing this explicit in Jubilees, but the im
portance of writing and the presence of several books, which reflect what is
written in the heavenly tablets, suggest that Jubilees itself is the end product
of a chain of transmission that originated with patriarchal figures. Here,
though, we must distinguish between establishing the authority of Jubilees
based on the preexisting heavenly tablets and constructing the reader as a
descendant of the patriarchal father for the purpose of obligating him/her
to acquiesce to what is in the book(s), since the written text substitutes for
the father's voice. That is, the book that is passed down enables intervening
generations to be skipped so that the patriarch speaks directly to his "child."
In one suggestive passage (45:15), upon Jacob's death "he gave all of his
books and his fathers' books to Levi, his son, so that he might preserve
them and renew them for his sons until this day!' The exact relationship be
tween these books and Jubilees remains unclear, except that in this instance
the tradition inherited from the ancestors is preserved in a priestly context,
one that presumably represents something of Jubilees' self-understanding,
and thus has some relationship to Jubilees itself.^8 In fact, most of the major
figures in Jubilees write books, in some cases more than one, but Jubilees
does not present them as identical to itself. In fact, they must be different
from Jubilees, even if they reflect the heavenly tablets in some way, since
Moses acts as the amanuensis for the angel of the presence in writing the
book. Indeed, Jubilees itself is never portrayed as a book that Moses has
transmitted to his children.
So the two strategies that we see in some wisdom and narrative litera
ture that construct the reader as the child of the "father" of the text appear
only in a somewhat attenuated way in Jubilees. Although they do not func
tion centrally in the book as mechanisms for authorizing its ideology, they
play a supporting role.
- Translation is from G. W. E. Nickelsburg and J. C. VanderKam, / Enoch: A New
Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004). - J. C. VanderKam, The Book of jubilees (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001),
81,120.