The Manuscript Tradition of Jubilees
James C. VanderKam
The book of Jubilees began its modern life as an object of study by Western
scholars when copies of the work were found in Ethiopia and brought to Eu
rope in the 1840s. Since that time a large number of copies in Ge'ez have
been identified and photographed, and fragmentary evidence for the text of
the book in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Syriac has come to light. Actually,
much of the Greek evidence had been available for a long time: in the 1720s
Johann Fabricius had collected citations from Jubilees in Greek and Latin in
his Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti.^1 Today there are more such
passages available than the ones Fabricius had assembled.
In this paper I will present a report detailing all the textual sources for
the book of which I am aware and a short analysis of them. The presentation
will follow a chronological order. For clarity's sake, the early history of the text
and the evidence for it can be summarized briefly in these five statements:
Jubilees was written in Hebrew (extant evidence: fourteen mss. from
Qumran).
Jubilees may have been translated from Hebrew into Syriac (excerpts,
no ms. copies).
Jubilees was translated from Hebrew into Greek (excerpts, no ms.
copies).- The two-volume work appeared in 1722-23 (Hamburg: T. C. Felginer). The Jubilees
citations may be found in 1:849-64; 2:120-22.