Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

4Q265 and the Authoritative Status of Jubilees at Qumran

or his property." This is because the sectarian author of the Rule of the Com­
munity believed that only the members of the yahad were the true Israel and
therefore everyone else should be considered Gentiles.

Conclusions: The Status of Jubilees in Qumran

The importance of Jubilees for the yahad and its high status in the commu­
nity's library was recognized by scholars long ago.^21 This is evident from the
large number of copies (more than ten) of this book found in Qumran.
Many think the book of Jubilees is explicitly mentioned in the Damascus
Document. CD 16:1-4 relates: "Therefore a man shall bind himself by oath to
return to the Law of Moses, for in it everything is specified. And the explica­
tion of their times when Israel turns a blind eye, behold it is specified in the
Book of the Divisions of the Times into their Jubilees and Weeks? According to
this reading, "the Book" mentioned in CD is Jubilees, and it is being here de­
scribed as the authoritative source for the true meaning of the Torah of Mo­
ses and its details.^22

The findings of the current discussion highlight three aspects of this
special status of Jubilees in Qumran. The first aspect is Jubilees' being sub­
ject to a literary activity resembling the rewriting of the Bible; 4Q265's inte­
gration of a passage from lQS into the narrative that follows Jub 2 and 3
functions in the same way as other compositions from Qumran do in their
rewriting of a portion of the Bible. One of the goals of this rewriting activity
is to incorporate the new sectarian (halakic or theological) stances into the
authorized holy scripture. Thus, for example, the Temple Scroll (66:16-17),

21. For a comprehensive survey of the scholarly debate with regard to Jubilees' origins
    and dating, see J. C. VanderKam, "The Origins and Purposes of the Book of Jubilees," in
    Studies in the Book of jubilees, ed. M. Albani, J. Frey, and A. Lange (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck,
    1997), 3-24. Some scholars tend toward a later dating for Jubilees, and some even think it is a
    sectarian composition authored within the yahad community; see M. Kister, "The History
    of the Essenes: A Study of the 'Animals Vision,' Jubilees and Damascus Document," Tarbiz^G
    (1987): 8-18; C. Werman, "The Attitude towards Gentiles in the Book of Jubilees and
    Qumran Literature Compared with Early Tanaaic Halakha and Contemporary Pseudepigra­
    pha" (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1995), 30-35.


22. Against this reading of CD, see D. Dimant, "Two 'Scientific' Fictions: The So-
    called Book of Noah and the Alleged Quotation of Jubilees in CD 16:3-4," in Studies in the
    Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and Septuagint, Presented to Eugene Ulrich, ed. P. W. Flint, E. Tov,
    and J. C. VanderKam (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 230-49. For a survey and bibliography of earlier
    scholarly publications concerning this issue, see there 242-43 and notes 49-51.