Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

Reconsidering Jubilees: Prophecy and Exemplarity

apocalyptic vision, and inspired interpretation are all features of both exilic
and postexilic prophecy.^9 The texts do not reflect any linear development
from one concept of the revelatory to another.
In addition, the dichotomy of wisdom and apocalyptic or prophecy
and apocalyptic has been challenged in recent years.^10 By categorizing Jubi­
lees as apocalyptic as opposed to wisdom, or as Mosaic as opposed to
Enochic, or as rewritten Bible as opposed to new Torah, we simply compro­
mise our ability to read the texts with the openness and clarity required to
carefully chart the development of second temple Judaism along with the in­
sight required to contextualize the book of Jubilees.

Despite all this, I want to acknowledge that there is something accurate
and profound about claims to the cessation of revelation. It would be more
accurate, however, to speak of the transformation of revelation after the first
exile in the sixth century B.C.E. We need to consider that despite the build­
ing of the second temple, the destruction of the first temple was never over­
come.^11 There was, thus, from 587 B.C.E. on, a sense of lost intimacy with the
divine, which is reflected in textual witnesses from the second temple and
the post-70 eras.^12 But it was through learning how to mourn loss that these
texts gained access to the divine in a different way.
It also concerns the establishment of access to the divine. To be sure,
there are prophecies that communicate a special relationship with the di­
vine, or inaccessible information about the past. One goal of revelation in
the second temple period was to recover a lost relationship between God and
humanity. Thus, the desire for revelation is the aspiration to approach and
perhaps even imitate divine perfection by recovering an idyllic past and
imagining an inspired future.

9. See my new work on this topic, "Defining Prophecy," in Prophetic Ends: Concepts of
   the Revelatory in Late Ancient Judaism (forthcoming).


10. For the most recent discussion of the relations between apocalyptic and wisdom
    literature, see Conflicted Boundaries in Wisdom and Apocalypticism, ed. B. G. Wright and
    L. M. Wills, SBLSymS (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005). On the relationship be­
    tween prophecy and apocalyptic, see J. C. VanderKam's two essays now reprinted in From
    Revelation to Canon: Studies in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature, JSJSup 62
    (Leiden: Brill, 2000): "The Prophetic-Sapiential Origins of Apocalyptic Thought," 241-54,
    and "Prophecy and Apocalyptics in the Ancient Near East," 255-75.


11. See M. A. Knibb, "Exile in the Damascus Document," JSOT 25 (1983): 99-117, and
    "The Exile in the Literature of the Intertestamental Period," HeyJ 17 (1976): 253-72.


12. See the important discussion of persistent exile in B. Nitzan's engagement of peni­
    tential prayer in her "The Penitential Prayer of Moses in Jubilees 1 and Its Relation to the
    Penitential Tradition of the Post-Exilic Judaism," Hen 30, no. 2 (2008).