From a Movement of Dissent to a Distinct Form of Judaism
Jackson, Enochic Judaism, 221.
ogy.... The author's aim in Jubilees is to unify the theologies of
Enochism and Zadokitism.^24My interest was primarily in locating Jubilees as an essential link
within the chain of documents (including Enochic texts) leading more di
rectly to the emergence of the Qumran community. What my "systemic
analysis" made apparent was the growth of an intellectual movement, not
the history of a single, homogeneous social group. The "Qumran chain of
documents" was not intended to suggest that members of the same group
wrote one after the other the entire literature. In this sense my work was an
expansion and clarification of an intuition already formulated in 1958 by
Frank M. Cross in the aftermath of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls:
"The concrete contacts in theology, terminology, calendrical peculiarities,
and priestly interests, between the editions of Enoch, Jubilees, and the Testa
ments of Levi and Naphtali found at Qumran on the one hand, and the de
monstrably sectarian works of Qumran on the other, are so systematic and
detailed that we must place the composition of these works within a single
line of tradition."^25
More decidedly, David Jackson has seen in Jubilees a representative of
Enochic Judaism ("It is not so much that 1 Enoch or Jubilees are works of the
Qumran sect, but rather that the Qumran sectarian works are works of
Enochic Judaism"),^26 a position he reiterated at the conference: "Jubilees
represents a significant and groundbreaking stage of development in the
early history of Enochic Judaism."
While agreeing on the existence of a very close relationship between Ju
bilees and Enochic Judaism, I am hesitant to follow Jackson in labeling Jubi
lees as one of the "works of Enochic Judaism." In spite of its anti-Zadokite at
titude and its dependence on Enochic concepts, there are too many elements
of discontinuity, too many things that Jubilees apparently did not like in the
earlier Enochic tradition. The differences are many and profound (both John
Bergsma and Annette Reed highlight them in their contributions to this vol
ume), and all of them go in the direction of enhancing human responsibility
and safeguarding the eternal validity of God's covenant with Israel.
- P. Sacchi, "History of the Earliest Enochic Texts," in Enoch and Qumran Origins:
New Light on a Forgotten Connection, ed. G. Boccaccini (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005),
401-7 (here 404). - F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library oj Qumran (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958),