Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

The Book of Jubilees and Early Jewish Mysticism

length elsewhere.^19 Here I will focus only on the aspects of her discussion of
early Jewish mysticism in which Jubilees plays a central role.
Like Maier and Alexander, Elior finds the origins of early Jewish mysti­
cism in priestly circles, and like Alexander, she emphasizes the contribution
to its development of priests alienated from the priestly establishment of the
second temple period. In her view the scrolls and other works of the period,
especially the apocalypses, are the work of these alienated priests. More than
Alexander, Elior sees the hekhalot texts as standing in direct continuity with
what she calls the "heavenly corpus" of these priests, though she notes the
"neutralization" of their critique of the Jerusalem temple establishment in
the hekhalot literature, which was composed long after the destruction of
that temple.^20

Jubilees figures prominently in Elior's picture of early Jewish mysti­
cism. Though Elior has little to say about the heavenly temple in Jubilees,
like Alexander, she notes the importance of the correspondence of heaven
and earth for it. But Elior also focuses considerable attention on an aspect of
that correspondence that does not figure at all in Alexander's discussion, cal­
endar:^21

According to the authors of Jubilees and the Apocalypse of Weeks, not

only does cyclic time, as represented by the calendar, flow in an eternal

sevenfold rhythm through the sabbaths of the year — but the whole of

history, from beginning to end, marches forward in recurrent cycles of

sabbaths, years, sabbaticals, jubilees, and ages.... Heaven and earth have

thereby been linked together since the seven days of Creation, through

signs, covenants, and oaths that constitute bonds between God and

man, through the sacrifices that man offers God, in a fixed, sevenfold

progression governed by the solar calendar and observed by the angels.^22

The picture of that calendar that Elior constructs draws on the contents of a
number of texts; the conflation of sources is characteristic of Elior's ap­
proach to what she takes to be a common body of mystical tradition. It

19. Martha Himmelfarb, "Merkavah Mysticism since Scholem: Rachel Elior's The
    Three Temples!' in Wege mystischer Gotteserfahrung/Mystical Approaches to God, ed. Peter
    Schafer, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien 65 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006), 19-


20. 
    


21. Elior, Three Temples, 232-33.


22. She devotes chaps. 3-6 of Three Temples to the calendar, 82-152.


23. Elior, Three Temples, 135.