Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

The Concept of Covenant in Jubilees

William K. Gilders

I. Covenant in Jubilees: The Evidence of Jubilees 1

Covenant is a key category in the book of Jubilees.^1 Indeed, Jubilees is funda­

mentally a covenantal document.^2 In the present form of the work, the con-

1. This paper draws on and is in dialogue with several studies that focus in some way
   on covenant in Jubilees: A. Jaubert, La Notion d'Alliance dan le Juda'isme aux abords de L'Ere
   Critienne (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), esp. 89-115; B. Halpern-Amaru, "The Meta-
   historical Covenant of Jubilees!' in Halpern-Amaru, Rewriting the Bible: Land and Covenant
   in Postbiblical Jewish Literature (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1994), 25-54; E. Juhl Christiansen,
   "Covenant Consciousness in the Book of Jubilees," in The Covenant in Judaism and Paul: A
   Study of Ritual Boundaries as Identity Markers, AGJU (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 67-103; J. C.
   VanderKam, "Covenant and Biblical Interpretation in Jubilees 6," in The Dead Sea Scrolls
   Fifty Years after Their Discovery, 1947-1997: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20-25,
   1997, ed. L. H. Schiffman, E. Tov, and J. C. VanderKam (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Soci­
   ety, 2000), 92-104; J. van Ruiten, "The Covenant of Noah in Jubilees 6.1-38," in The Concept of
   the Covenant in the Second Temple Period, ed. S. E. Porter and J. C. R. de Roo, JSJSup (Leiden:
   Brill, 2003), 167-90. See also my essay "Blood and Covenant: Interpretive Elaboration on
   Genesis 9.4-6 in the Book of Jubilees," JSP 15 (2006): 83-118.


2. Pace J. M. Scott, who asserts that "Jubilees is not so much a covenantal book as an
   apocalypse with a covenantal setting that inherently lends it authority" ("The Chronologies
   of the Apocalypse of Weeks and the Book of Jubilees," in this volume), covenant is not sim­
   ply the context for the revelation to Moses but an essential element of its content. What is re­
   vealed to Moses clarifies the significance, nature, role, and place of covenant in God's dealing
   with the world and with Israel. As VanderKam emphasizes ("Covenant and Biblical Inter­
   pretation," 92), "Jubilees is a covenant book in its structure and in its content."