Michael Segal
- The punishments for Reuben and Bilhah. In the brief story in Gen
35:22, which describes how Reuben slept with his father's concubine Bilhah,
there is no reference to a punishment for Reuben or Bilhah. Other biblical
passages criticize Reuben for his behavior (Gen 49:3-4), and describe how
this led to his loss of the birthright (1 Chron 5:1-2), but do not mention an
individual punishment in response to their behavior. This absence is at odds
with biblical laws that prohibit intercourse with one's father's wife (Lev 18:8;
20:11; Deut 23:1; 27:20), and especially Lev 20:11, which calls for the death
penalty for both the man and his father's wife. According to Pentateuchal
law, both Reuben and Bilhah should have been punished by death.
The rewritten story in Jub 33:1-98 presents Bilhah as the victim of rape,
thus offering a justification for her nonpunishment. There is no explicit
mention of a punishment for Reuben in this section, although interestingly,
in the Testament of Reuben, which preserves a partially overlapping version
of the events,^27 he is indeed punished, as Reuben recounts, "he struck me
with a severe wound in my loins for seven months" (TReu 1:7), a particularly
apt punishment for sexual impropriety.
In contrast, the legal passage (w. 9b-2o) uses completely different legal
categories to absolve Reuben and Bilhah. Instead of compulsion versus free
will, the legal passage acquits both Reuben and Bilhah from any punishment
for a different, technical reason: "for the statute, the punishment, and the
law had not been completely revealed to all" (v. 16). This approach does not
impart significance to the individual's intentions or motivations, but rather
to the status of the laws themselves at the time of their violation.
II. The Literary Development of Jubilees
While each of these individual contradictions can be harmonized to resolve
the inherent tension, as has been suggested by scholars regarding a few of the
examples, I suggest that their cumulative effect is sufficient to demonstrate
that the book is not the product of one author. The presence of two differ
ent, and often contradictory, interpretations or traditions side by side in
each of these cases should not be viewed merely as "overkill," to use the term
- For an analysis of the relationship between the versions of the story in Jubilees
and the Testament of Reuben, see J. L. Kugel, "Reuben's Sin with Bilhah in the Testament of
Reuben," in Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Rit
ual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom, ed. D. P. Wright et al. (Winona Lake, Ind.:
Eisenbrauns, 1995), 525-54 (here 550-54).