James M. Scott
six jubilees of years. They showed him everything on earth and in the heav
ens — the dominion of the sun — and he wrote down everything." This ap
peal to Enoch is the book's clincher, part of a general tendency within the
writing to ascribe its scriptural interpretations regarding cultic and halakic
matters to the primeval and patriarchal periods. For Jubilees, Enoch, the sev
enth patriarch in the line from Adam, is the prototypical priest, the mediator
par excellence between heaven and earth. Enoch is the model that the
priestly author of the book seeks to emulate. Enoch is also the harbinger of
the author's most treasured hope — the restoration of sacred space and sa
cred time, so that all things, especially the cultus in the restored land of Is
rael, eventually will be "on earth as in heaven." For as we learn in Jub 4:25-26,
Enoch's priestly service in the primeval sanctuary of the Garden of Eden sets
up a trajectory to the expected priestly service in the eschatological temple
on Mount Zion in the new creation. By that time at the latest, all things in
heaven and earth will conform to the Creator's original intention.
As a polemical writing, Jubilees engages in critical dialogue with its
scriptural base text and the Enochic apocalyptic tradition within which it
stands. Although the book is firmly based on Israel's scriptures, it is neverthe
less also, at least in part, a radical reworking of those texts. Jubilees shapes the
biblical text, particularly Genesis to Exodus, so that it conforms to the book's
own theological agenda and chronological scheme. Similarly, Jubilees adapts
and reinterprets Enochic apocalyptic tradition, most notably the Apocalypse
of Weeks, in order to assert that its own version of the revelation to Enoch
(and to Moses after him) has the greater claim to authenticity and authority.
To this end, the book seeks to demonstrate the divinely ordained symmetry
between the temporal and spatial axes in the space-time continuum.
Fundamental to our reconstruction of Jubilees' chronological system are
two overarching trajectories in the book nestled one within the other: on the
one hand, the trajectory set up by the all-inclusive revelation to Moses of the
division of the years in their jubilees "from the time of creation until the time
of the new creation when the heavens, the earth, and all their creatures will be
renewed like the powers of the sky and like the creatures of the earth, until the
time when the temple of the Lord will be created in Jerusalem on Mt. Zion"
(Jub 1:29); on the other hand, the trajectory set up by the juxtaposition of
Enoch's entrance into the primeval sanctuary of the Garden of Eden and the
expected entrance of the eschatological priesthood in the rebuilt temple on
Mount Zion, "which will be sanctified in the new creation" (4:23-26; cf. 1:29).
The first trajectory provides the basic jubilean structure for the whole course
of history as outlined in the book from creation to new creation. The second