The Composition of Jubileesfestival? According to the rewritten story in Jub 17:15-18:17 (parallel to the
Akedah story in Gen 22:1-19), God appeared to Abraham on the night of the
twelfth of the first month (17:15), and commanded him to offer his son Isaac
as a sacrifice. Abraham awoke that morning, departed on his journey, and on
the third day (18:3), the fourteenth of the first month (the festival of Pass
over), arrived at the location where the Akedah took place, Mount Zion
(18:13). Before he had the opportunity to sacrifice his "firstborn" son Isaac
(w. 11, 15), God sent an angel to prevent him from doing so, and Abraham
offered a ram in Isaac's place. These four motifs — the date (fourteenth of
first month), the firstborn being saved, the location in Jerusalem, and the
sacrifice of a sheep — are found in only one biblical context, the Passover
law. The rewritten story thus functions as a foreshadowing of the Passover
law. According to the rewritten story (based upon Gen 22), Abraham and
Isaac reached the land of Moriah on the third day of their journey. Following
the trial, Abraham returned with his servants to Beersheba, a destination
that, unless noted otherwise, should have been reached on the third day. The
round-trip should not have taken any longer than six days (and perhaps only
five, assuming that Abraham and Isaac set out to return to Beersheba on the
day of the Akedah itself). The rewritten story does not mention the number
seven at all.
In contrast, the legal passage at the end of chap. 18 (w. 18-19) trans
forms the story into a precedent for the seven-day festival of Massot (fif
teenth to twenty-first of the first month), and explicitly assumes that the
journey lasted seven days. Even if one assumed that the rewritten story pos
ited a seven-day journey, the dates of the trip (beginning on the twelfth of
the first month) do not correspond to the Festival of Unleavened Bread (be
ginning on the fifteenth of the month).
- The plague of the firstborn. In the rewritten story regarding the
plagues and the exodus from Egypt (Jub 48), God and the angel of presence
work against the will of Mastema in helping Moses return to Egypt, in the
bringing of all the plagues (in particular the slaying of the firstborn), and in
the salvation of Israel. There is explicit emphasis on God's active role in met
ing out the plagues himself (w. 5, 8). In contrast, according to the juxtaposed
legal passage in Jub 49, the Lord sent "the forces of Mastema," described two
verses later as "the Lord's forces," to kill the firstborn (49:2), and refrained
from being directly involved in this plague. These two descriptions thus dif
fer in terms of God's role in this specific story, but more significantly in the
place of the forces of evil (represented by Mastema) in the world, who work
either at cross-purposes with God or as his agents.