nora
(Nora)
#1
4Q265 and the Authoritative Status of Jubilees at Qumran
The picture that emerges from the above analysis is that the sequence
of frg. 7's content follows closely that of chaps. 2 and 3 of Jubilees. It opens
with a series of laws concerning the Shabbat (in fact, this unit begins in frg.
6), it moves then to describe the election of the yahad (the new "real" Israel)
for observing the Shabbat with God and the angels, and it continues with the
story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the laws of purification af
ter childbirth.
Recognizing the heavy dependence of 4Q265 on Jubilees enables us to
further suggest possible explanations for the inclusion of some of the other
fragments in this scroll, though it should be admitted that these are proposi
tions that can't be proved.
As is well known, Jubilees deals with Shabbat laws twice: first within
the context of the creation in chap. 2, and a second time at the end of the
book in chap. 50. At the beginning of that chapter Jubilees relates not only to
the Shabbat Day but also to the Sabbath of the land — the seventh year and
the Jubilee year: "And I also related to you the Sabbath of the land on Mount
Sinai. And the years of Jubilee in the Sabbaths of years I related to you....
And the land will keep the Sabbaths when they dwell upon it" (50:1-3). The
subject of the previous chapter, 49, is the celebration of the Passover cen
tered upon the paschal sacrifice in the temple. To recall, the subject of frg. 3
is the paschal sacrifice and frg. 5 concerns some agriculture laws that may
very well be the laws of the Shmita (the seventh year): the fragment men
tions "all that is sown in the earth" (1. 1) and the word (makes
bloom) in line 2.
If all this is not mere accident, we may assume that, similar to other re
written compositions, the author of 4Q265 collected the material concerning
the Shabbat from the entire book of Jubilees. It may well be that he started
his task by reviewing the legal material at the end of the book: Passover, sev
enth year, and Shabbat laws. This last issue — the Shabbat law — led him
from the end of the book to its beginning, where he found additional mate
rial on the same subject. While there, he continued with the election of Israel
and the story of the Garden of Eden along with chap. 3 of the book.
1QS 5:13-20: "The Laws of Separatism" and Jubilees 22:16-22
In light of the above discussion, I wish to return to another example of a
similar phenomenon that I dealt with in the past. This example is not as
clear as the one just analyzed; consequently I didn't recognize its full mean-
