Jubilees, Sirach, and Sapiential Tradition
Benjamin G. Wright III
At first blush Jubilees and Jewish wisdom literature would appear to have lit
tle in common. Wisdom and wisdom language do not appear in Jubilees,
whose primary concern seems halakic. As a rough indicator, one need only
scan the margins of Orval Wintermute's OTP translation of Jubilees, where
he notes related passages in biblical, early Jewish, and Christian texts. Of the
dozens of passages listed there, maybe three or four come from the corpus
usually identified as wisdom. By contrast, 1 Enoch, which Jubilees knows,
displays quite a number of similarities to Jewish wisdom.^1
Yet content and genre might be less important considerations for
thinking about Jubilees and Jewish wisdom than the strategies they adopt to
solve common problems. Looking at Jubilees and Jewish wisdom together
bears some potentially significant fruit. Jubilees, for example, employs some
aspects of wisdom discourse, particularly in the final speeches of its major
patriarchal figures to their sons, that function to convince the reader to
adopt the book's values and ideology. In such contexts of passing down in
struction from a father (and in Jubilees a mother in one instance) to a son,
common discursive elements with wisdom do not surprise, even if the con
tent in Jubilees does not always look very wisdom-like.
One particular complex in Jubilees, however, highlights some broader- See G. W. E. Nickelsburg, "Enochic Wisdom: An Alternative to the Mosaic Torah?"
in Hesed ve-emet Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs, ed. J. Magness and S. Gitin, BJS 10
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 123-32.