Hindy Najman
considering these texts prophetic.^22 Moreover, we have no evidence that
these texts are any less than "scriptural," "authoritative," or "biblical" at
Qumran (these terms, of course, have an anachronistic dimension in the
third and second centuries B.C.E.).
Thus, to classify Jubilees as prophecy, in the way we might call Daniel
or 4 Ezra or even Pesher Habakkuk prophecy,^23 enables us to consider these
texts in their own context. The possibility of writing new interpretive and li
turgical and even mystical texts was still alive in late second temple Judaism.
We see time and again that the possibility of prophetic inspiration and an
gelic visitation is invoked. By allowing ourselves to read Jubilees in the con
text of the texts and traditions it appropriates, we have begun to construct a
context for a text that has deliberately effaced its own origin. Jubilees is lo
cated at a time when scripture was being written and was very much in con
versation with the old as it attached itself to a discourse tied to a founder,
which is authoritatively old by the time of the second century B.C.E.
II. Exemplars in Jubilees: Two Levels
I will now turn to the role of the author in Jubilees. As I have argued else
where, the figure of Moses is invoked to authorize the work in the same
manner as found in Deuteronomy.^24 In Seconding Sinai I argued that it is
useful to bring Foucault's concept of authorship to bear on the Deutero-
nomic tradition:
What is the alternative to seeing this long-term expansion of Moses' role
— this long history of pseudonymous attribution and rewriting — as a- G. W. E. Nickelsburg, "The Nature and Function of Revelation in 1 Enoch, Jubi
lees, and Some Qumranic Documents," in Pseudepigraphical Perspectives: The Apocrypha
and Pseudepigrapha in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls; Proceedings of the International Sympo
sium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 12-14
January, 199/, ed. E. G. Chazon and M. E. Stone, STDJ 31 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 91-119; once
again, see J. C. VanderKam's two seminal articles that challenged the dichotomy between
prophecy and apocalyptic and prophecy and wisdom literature: "The Prophetic-Sapiential
Origins of Apocalyptic Thought" and "Prophecy and Apocalyptics in the Ancient Near
East"; see n. 10 above. See also I. Grunewald's discussion of what he calls para-prophecy in
From Apocalypticism to Gnosticism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988), 17-18. - Cf. J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). - See my discussion of this in Seconding Sinai, chap. 1.