From a Movement of Dissent to a Distinct Form of Judaismtime Jubilees continued to be commonly presented, if not as a Pharisaic text,
as the precursor of rabbinic haggadah or at least a testimony of the antiquity
of the rabbinic concept of the oral Torah.^42
However, both the "teachings of the fathers" of the Pharisees and the
rabbinic concept of the oral Torah are asymmetrical terms of comparison.
The "teachings of the fathers" are said to be handed down in an oral (not
written) fashion by "a chain of tradition" but are not said to derive from a
heavenly archetype or to be revealed on Mount Sinai. Not even the core of
the Mishnah makes this claim, except for a few halakoth. It is only with
Aboth that for the first time we have the idea that "the teachings of the fa
thers" are also "Torah," which will lead to the development of the rabbinic
concept of the "dual Torah," as the oral and written sides of the "preexistent
Torah."^43 But for Jubilees what is preexistent are the heavenly tablets, not the
Mosaic Torah. On Mount Sinai Moses received "two" written traditions,
both of them equally based on the same heavenly urtext. As Najman has ef
fectively pointed out, the opposite metaphors of "orality" and "writtenness"
highlight more than anything else the different attitudes and strategies of Ju
bilees and the rabbis while facing "the complex relationship between the au
thority of sacred writing and the authority of interpretation."^44
To better understand the place of Jubilees in ancient Jewish thought,
we have to look elsewhere. From ancient Jewish sources we know that there
was a group of Jews who in the second century B.C.E. parted from the rest of
the people. They were called "Essenes." The striking ideological similarities
between Jubilees and the Essenes did not go unnoticed even before the 1950s
by authors like Adolf Jellinek and Abraham Epstein,^45 and were only
strengthened by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.^46 James VanderKam's
consistent conclusion since his earliest studies in the 1970s that "the author
belonged to or was an immediate forerunner of the branch of Judaism that
- Joseph P. Schultz, "Two Views of the Patriarchs: Noachides and Pre-Sinai Israel
ites," in Text and Responses: Studies Presented to N. N. Glatzer, ed. M. A. Fishbane (Leiden:
Brill, 1975), 41-59; S. Tedesche, "Jubilees, Book of," IDB 2 (1962), 1002-3. - M. S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writingand Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism,
200 BCE—400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); G. Boccaccini, "The
Preexistence of the Torah: A Commonplace in Second Temple Judaism, or a Later Rabbinic
Development?" Hen 17 (1995): 329-50. - Najman, "Interpretation as Primordial Writing," 410.
- A. Jellinek, Uber das Buch der Jubilaen und das Noah-Buch (Leipzig: Vollrath,
1855); A. Epstein, Beitrdge zur jiidischen Althertumskunde (Vienna: Lippe, 1887). - M. Testuz, Les idees religieuses du livre des jubiles (Geneva: Droz, i960).