nora
(Nora)
#1
Hindy Najman
But what happens to the aspiration to perfection within a community
that undergoes the destruction of its political and religious institutions, and
that is exiled from its homeland? Is perfection, or progress toward perfec
tion, to be thought of only in terms of restoration and return from exile? Or
are there ways in which perfection, or progress toward perfection, is possible
even in the midst of suffering — perhaps even by means of suffering?
In the case of Jubilees, the idea of a pre-Sinaitic context for Sinaitic
revelation provides a ready instrument for the explanation both of loss and
of the access of a privileged few to the requisites of salvation. Those who
know only what was revealed at Sinai but who are ignorant of its pre-Sinaitic
backdrop do not know how to observe the law properly. This proper obser
vance — heavily but not exclusively focused on the solar calendar — is avail
able only to those who know the traditions revealed first to Enoch, and then
passed on through a succession of worthy individuals. The task of Jubilees is
to set the story straight by putting the revelation at Sinai in its pre-Sinaitic
context, thanks to privileged information about exactly what the angel of the
presence said to Moses at Sinai. Loss of intimacy with the divine turns out to
be part of the story itself, as does the promise of recovery, for some at least.
Thus Jubilees presents itself as revelation that reveals a falling away from rev
elation, as well as the possibility of a return.
I anticipate another kind of resistance to my suggestion. As modern,
post-Enlightenment scholars, are we ready to take any text's self-presentation
at face value? Should we not rather be skeptical or suspicious?
I suggest that we treat Jubilees' self-description as revealed — as Mo
saic and angelic — in just the same way that we treat the self-descriptions of
the books of Jeremiah and Isaiah. In none of these cases, I think, are we in a
situation where we can associate the text decisively with some historical au
thor, and in all of them a complex history of composition and redaction ap
pears to undermine any such attribution. But to decide that these works are
therefore inauthentic is to contrast them with some set of authentic, canoni
cal texts, which is to allow confessional presuppositions to trespass in the
field of scholarship. And to decide that they are forgeries is to employ what I
have argued elsewhere is an anachronistic conception of authorial attribu
tion. In a recent essay, I wrote:
The problems facing those of us who work on pseudepigrapha may
seem insuperable. However, we should not assume that political
contextualization or religious affiliation is the only way of doing history,
or the most important. I want to suggest that intellectual, cultural and
