Jubilees, Sirach, and Sapiential Traditionments. Sir 19:20 perhaps sums it up best: "The whole of wisdom is fear of the
Lord, and in all wisdom there is the fulfillment of the Law." Who is more able
to accomplish this than the scribe? Laborers cannot seek wisdom; there is
not time. The rich and powerful encounter more pressing demands that pre
vent them from such pursuits. Claudia Camp and I have argued that the idea
of "fear of the Lord" helps Ben Sira to rationalize certain social inequalities
that he judges problematic, and it elevates the status of the scribe in his so
cial world.^19 But like Jubilees, Ben Sira's scribe is the guardian of wisdom
and the keeping of the law — along with its proper/authorized interpreta
tion. He argues for this claim in a way very different from Jubilees, however.
Both Jubilees and Ben Sira construct the scribe as the guardian of tradition
and authorized interpretation. In Jubilees the exemplars are the ancient fig
ures who kept the laws and received the heavenly tablets, but in Ben Sira it is
the ideal scribe. I suspect, though, that even more than an ideal figure, Ben
Sira is presenting himself to his disciples as the exemplar, the one who needs
to be emulated.^20
IV. Jubilees and Wisdom
While I have not exhausted here what could be said about Jubilees and
sapiential tradition, particularly as we see it in Ben Sira, what I have sketched
out suggests that attending primarily to genre differences might mask other
significant aspects of our literature. One need only read Jubilees and Ben
Sira, for example, to see that they are formally quite different. Yet, common
questions and problems seem to occupy both of them. How does one legiti
mate and authorize interpretations of an authoritative text? How can they
convince a reader to accept their positions? Who are the appropriate guard
ians of the tradition as it has been handed down, and who are the authorized
interpreters of that tradition? To answer these questions, the author of Jubi
lees and Ben Sira resort to similar strategies, even if they execute them differ
ently. In this light, then, whatever formal distinctions we recognize between
these two works potentially distract us from noticing their common prob
lems and their individual solutions to them.
- B. G. Wright III and C. V. Camp, " 'Who Has Been Tested by Gold and Found Per
fect?* Ben Sira's Discourse of Riches and Poverty," Hen 23 (2001): 153-74. - Ben Sira's self-presentation raises interesting questions for Najman's connection
of exemplarity with the issue of pseudepigraphy. See her chapter in this volume as well as
her other work cited there.