Daniel and Jubileesalso called God's "servants" — will receive healing, and in response will offer
their infinite praise to God. Their enemies, on the other hand, will be pun
ished and cursed. Such double judgment is hardly new. The opposition of
righteous and sinners is found throughout biblical literature, particularly in
sapiential texts and in the psalms, yet it is here propelled to an eschatological
extreme and applied to the last judgment scene.
The book of Jubilees displays several traits that are clearly apocalyptic.
As the introductory chapter makes clear, the author of Jubilees writes with
an eschatological context in mind, even though the book relates only a small
section thereof. History is heading for an eschatological finale, marked by
God's intervention, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment day. It is also
clear, however, that, while these eschatological concepts delineate the imagi
native frame of the book, they are not developed in any detail. They were not
triggered by, nor do they focus on, a concrete percussive event such as the
Antiochean persecution in the book of Daniel. In Daniel, the apocalypse is
the literary response to a specific historical crisis that in turn becomes the
focal point of the visions; in Jubilees apocalypticism is the mental horizon of
the author's imagination, not the literary mold of the book.
Biblical Exegesis
In chap. 9 of Daniel, we find Daniel studying Scripture. "I, Daniel, perceived
in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to
the prophet Jeremiah, must be fulfilled for the devastation of Jerusalem,
namely, seventy years" (Dan 9:2). The reference is to Jeremiah's prediction
that Babylon would fall after 70 years (Jer 25:11-12; cf. Jer 29:10). The author
of Daniel is writing at a time when the temple was desecrated and Judaism
was under siege, and so the redemption promised by Jeremiah still seemed to
lie in the future, even though the 70 years of Jeremiah had long passed. To
solve the obvious problem, the angel Gabriel reinterprets the 70 years to
mean seventy weeks of years, or 490 years (Dan 9:24-27).
The oft-quoted episode has become somewhat of a locus classicus in
scholarly treatments of inner-biblical exegesis, since it is one of the few
places in the Bible where a biblical author explicitly refers to an earlier book
and interprets it. The use of earlier prophecies in Daniel's revelatory visions
is made explicit in Dan 9 — but it is implicit throughout the latter half of the
book. No other part of the canon has been as formative for the composition
of Daniel's apocalyptic texts as the Prophets. The author speaks in the pro-