64 A History of Judaism
an account of a revelation disclosed to Moses on Mount Sinai by an
‘angel of the presence’ deputed to tell Moses everything ‘from the begin-
ning of creation’. Jubilees is a rewritten version of the narrative from
the start of Genesis to the middle of Exodus encased in a chronology of
‘jubilees’, that is, units of forty- nine years (‘seven weeks of years’). Some
Bible interpretation seems entirely literary, like the legend, found both
in Josephus’ Antiquities and (in different form) in the work of Arta-
panus, an Egyptian Jewish writer of the same period as the author of
Jubilees, that Moses, who was said in passing in the Pentateuch to have
married a ‘Cushite woman’, had won this bride by virtue of his prowess
as general of the Egyptian army in a campaign against the Ethiopians,
in the course of which he had won the admiration and the love of Thar-
bis, the daughter of his adversary, the Ethiopian king. Other forms of
biblical interpretation were aimed at supporting legal stances, such as
the hermeneutical rules ascribed to R. Ishmael, a rabbinic sage of the
second century ce, which refer, for instance, to the ‘construction of a
general principle from one verse and construction of a general principle
from two verses’ with an example:
‘If he knocks out his slave’s tooth’ (Exod 21:27). I might understand this
to mean even if it is only a milk tooth that the master knocked out, but
Scripture also states: ‘If a man strikes his slave’s eye ... and destroys it’
(Exod 21:26). Just as the eye is an organ which cannot grow back again,
so also the tooth must be one which cannot grow back again. So far only
the tooth and the eye are specifically mentioned. How about the other
chief organs? Behold, you can establish a general principle on the basis of
what is common to both of these. The specific character of a tooth is not
the same as that of an eye, nor is the specific character of an eye the same
as that of a tooth, but what is common to both of them is that loss of
them constitutes a permanent defect: they are chief organs and visible, and
if the master intentionally destroys them, the slave gets his freedom in
recompense.^39
The public teaching of the laws, of which Josephus and Philo boasted,
must have been accompanied at times by communal prayer, since Jews
in Egypt as far back as the third century bce referred to their communal
buildings as ‘prayers’: the word used in Greek, proseuche, was a strange
term to use of a building, which reinforces the notion that prayer must
have been its central function. The term was not generally used of com-
munal buildings in the land of Israel in the Second Temple period, but
one exception suggests that the same notion was possible there too.