James C. VanderKam
and who wrote down in a book the signs of the sky in accord with the fixed
pattern of their months" ]), #833 (names and relations of the wives of the sec
ond Cainan, Sala, Eber, Phaleg [Jub 8:5-7; 10:18]), #839 (but see below on
Didymus), #857 (the second Cainan's astronomy and divination), #861
(names and family relations of the wives of Ragau, Serouch, Nahor [Jub 11:1,
7, 9]), #i8o4b (Bilhah and Dinah died while mourning for Joseph, giving Ja
cob three reasons for grief and accounting for the day of atonement; see Jub
34:14-15,18); cf. #1829 (regarding Tamar; another reference to the Covenant/
Testament [see below]), and ##1850, 2268 (on the chronology of Joseph's
life). Of special note are the following two entries.
#867: In the comment on Gen 11:28 ("Haran died before his father
Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans"), the Catena entry ex
plains: "Arran died in the fire with which Abram burned the idols of his fa
ther, when he went in to remove them. Abram was then 60 years of age when
he burned the idols — (years) that are not figured in the years of his life be
cause he was in unbelief until then, as it is written in Jubilees [KOCOWC
Y£YPaTTTC(1 £y ™ TwPnXcxfio]."^35 The passage is alluding to Jub 12:12-14: "In
the sixtieth year of Abram's life (which was the fourth week in its fourth year
[1936]), Abram got up at night and burned the temple of the idols. He
burned everything in the temple but no one knew (about it). They got up at
night and wanted to save their gods from the fire. Haran dashed in to save
them, but the fire raged over him. He was burned in the fire and died in Ur
of the Chaldeans before his father Terah. They buried him in Ur of the
Chaldeans."
The passage unmistakably offers information documented in Jubilees,
which is named as the source, using a traditional formula for introducing a
scriptural citation. Abram's age at the time (sixty years) comes from Jub
12:12, as does his act of torching the sanctuary; it also mentions that Haran
died while trying to rescue the idols. But the notion that the first sixty years
of Abram's life were not counted in his true age — a note that relates to the
much discussed problem of the chronology in Gen 11:26, 32 — does not
come from Jubilees, or at least not from the form of the text represented in
the Ge'ez copies, although Jubilees is mentioned as the source in immediate
connection with this remark. The passage may imply that the Greek Jubilees
had a more expanded text at this point, but it is also possible that the writer
confused sources for this problem.
- For the text, see F. Petit, ed., La chaine sur la Genese: Edition integrate 11 Chapitres 4
a 11, Traditio Exegetica Graeca 2 (Louvain: Peeters, 1993), 218. The translation is mine.