Jubilees, the Temple, and the Aaronite Priesthoodpriesthood,^27 while James VanderKam responds that Jubilees is a retelling of
Genesis, so that the narrative antedates the revelation of such rules to Moses
at Mount Sinai and the establishment of the tabernacle.^28 Its absence from
the concerns of Jubilees thus is no indication of the importance of the con
cern for the maintenance of purity for the author of the book but rather is
the consequence of the lack of a temple in that period to which the rules of
purity might refer.
However, while it may be correct to argue that the author of Jubilees
has simply chosen to omit the purity regulations of Leviticus from his selec
tive anachronism, it is probably better not to tie that omission to the lack of
a sanctuary in the patriarchal period to which the regulations might apply.
In effect, the author's selective anachronism has included elements of the
temple — its sacrificial cultus and its system of festivals — in the patriarchal
period, and it seems necessary to ask why the purity regulations would not
apply by extension to the temple service as to the sanctuary itself. At the
same time, it is worth noting that the concept of sanctuary in Jubilees is not
spatially and temporally defined in quite the same way it is in the Torah or
the Temple Scroll, where, particularly in the latter case, the temple seems to
be intended to be isolated from the world around it. In Jubilees, sanctuaries
— Eden, Sinai, Zion, and the mountain of the east — are rooted in the be
ginning and the end. They are part of the order of creation as well as the or
der of the new creation at the end of days. Their purpose is the sanctification
of the entire earth. The ritual practice of the patriarchs should be seen as a
part of that order in that it adapts elements of the temple service to a period
in which no temple actually exists. The implication may be that sanctuaries
do not require temples to sanctify the earth; the service itself will suffice.
Actually, it would be a mistake to argue that purity concerns are absent
from Jubilees. The book does not for the most part read the rules of ritual pu
rity back into the world of the patriarchs in the same way that it does the
priestly sacrificial practice. As we have observed, however, it does treat the
Garden of Eden as a sanctuary, using it to connect the purification period for
a mother after childbirth to enter the sanctuary to the periods after their cre
ation when Adam and Eve are introduced to the garden. It might be better to
suggest that Jubilees simply is not obsessed with ritual impurity, or rather
that the kind of impurity with which it is obsessed is that which comes from
- L. Ravid, "Purity and Impurity in the Book of Jubilees," JSP 13 (2002): 61-86.
- J. C. VanderKam, "Viewed from Another Angle: Purity and Impurity in the Book
of Jubilees," JSP 13 (2002): 209-15.