Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

James C. VanderKam

brew Jubilees.^25 The inference is possible, but there are other ways of ex­
plaining the evidence.

III. Greek

There is solid reason for thinking that the book of Jubilees was translated
from Hebrew into Greek, even though no copy of a Greek translation has
been identified. As a result, one must use other kinds of arguments to estab­
lish the existence of the translation.

1. Ethiopic biblical literature was translated from Greek. As Jubilees is
   regularly included among the scriptural books of the Abyssinian church, it
   too would have come from a Greek model.


2. Clues in the Ethiopic text betray a Greek base for the translation. Be­
   sides transliterated Greek words and names spelled in their Greek forms,
   there are mistakes in the Ge'ez text that can be explained convincingly by
   positing a Greek Vorlage for the Ethiopic reading. One example recently sug­
   gested by William Gilders is in Jub 7:4: "he [Noah] put some of its blood on
   the meat of the altar." Since there would have been no meat on the altar for
   this riNOn offering, Gilders proposed that the original Hebrew here would
   have been, not "It^D, but ITUTp, so that Noah put the blood on the horns of
   the altar. Neither the Hebrew nor Ethiopic terms for these two words are
   likely candidates for confusion, but KSpcrra (horns) and Kpeara (flesh, a plu­
   ral form of Kpeac) could easily have caused the mistaken reading in the Ge'ez
   manuscripts.^26


3. A few citations of and allusions to Jubilees, made by writers of Greek
   who used Greek sources, have survived. These are not abundant in number
   but do make it reasonable to think that a translation of Jubilees into Greek
   (or at least a Greek rendering of parts of it) existed. While most of the evi­
   dence comes from relatively late texts, the sources of the late citations may
   go back to a much earlier time in history.


4. E. Tisserant, "Fragments syriaques du Livre des Jubiles," RB 30 (1921): 55-86, 206-


5. For the edition of the chronicle, see J. B. Chabot, Chronicon ad annum Christi 1234
   pertinens I, CSCO 81, Scriptores Syri 36 (Louvain: Secretariat du CorpusSCO, 1920). I repro­
   duced the Syriac fragments in The Book of Jubilees, 1.


6. W. Gilders, "Where Did Noah Place the Blood? A Textual Note on Jubilees 7:4,"
   JBL 124 (2005): 745-49. For other examples of such confusions, see Charles, The Book of Jubi­
   lees or the Little Genesis (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1902), xxx.