Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

From a Movement of Dissent to a Distinct Form of Judaism

to relativize it.... Jubilees suggests that even as a book of law the Torah

has limitations. Not only had other books already revealed some of its

contents (the same is true for Jubilees itself), but there are laws engraved

on the heavenly tablets that are not to be found in the Torah. Thus Jubi­

lees demotes the Torah by undermining its claims to uniqueness and

completeness, claiming for itself a separate but equal sphere.^7

Hindy Najman (1999):

Long before Moses ascended Mount Sinai, the calendrical and historical

tradition inscribed upon the heavenly tablets was transmitted, in the

form of a written tradition, to Enoch and then Noah and the patri­

archs. ... While the authority of Moses' revelation at Sinai is invoked on

behalf of the solar calendar, that authority is at the same time down­

graded. Moses was not unique; he was one of the many bookish heroes

charged with the transcription of heavenly tablets.... Jubilees' insistence

on the pre-Sinaitic origin of its heavenly tradition... underminejs] the

special authority that had been accorded to the Mosaic Torah.^8

We all agreed that labeling Jubilees as "rewritten Torah" would be im­
proper and "misleading,"^9 as the document was not "motivated by an out­
burst of curiosity and trust in the inexhaustible comprehensiveness of the
Mosaic revelation."^10 On the other hand, Jubilees was not even the "super-
canonical text" that Ben Zion Wacholder believed it to be, aimed to "replace"
the Mosaic Torah as a more authoritative and reliable testimony of God's
will.^11 Nothing in the text of Jubilees suggests that the Mosaic Torah should
be abandoned or disregarded. "In contrast to the familiar Christian claim to
supersede the Sinaitic covenant with a new covenant... Jubilees belongs to a
family of texts that claims an equivalent or perhaps even a higher authority
than that accorded to Mosaic revelation insofar as the Heavenly Tablets were

7. Himmelfarb, "Torah," 27-28.


8. Najman, "Interpretation as Primordial Writing," 385, 388, 410.


9. Najman, "Interpretation as Primordial Writing," 409 {pace J. C. Endres, Biblical In­
   terpretation in the Book of Jubilees, CBQMS 18 [Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Associa­
   tion of America, 1987]).


10. Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, 89-90.


11. B. Z. Wacholder, "Jubilees as the Super Canon: Torah-Admonitions versus Torah
    Commandment," in Legal Texts and Legal Issues, ed. M. Bernstein et al., STDJ 23 (Leiden:
    Brill, 1997), 195-211.