Aharon Shemesh
while rewriting the biblical list of illicit unions, incorporates into it the sec
tarian prohibition against marrying the niece: "A man is not to take his
brother's daughter or his sister's daughter because it is an abomination"
(113 TIN IK VnS M m np' S^1? imns). This is exactly what 4Q265 is
doing by integrating the passage from lQS into frg. 7. The result of this inte
gration is a new retelling version of Jubilees, which has the yahad as the cho
sen people instead of the "seeds of Jacob" as in the original.
The second aspect of Jubilees' status as scripture in Qumran is its use
as a source for halakah. One example of this role of Jubilees in Qumran is
the "laws of separatism" discussed above. In order not to repeat myself, let
me here offer another example. The halakic scrolls mention a few times the
prohibition not to draw water from a well on the Shabbat. Thus CD 11:1-2,
'hO *7D 'JS VKl VTaii? "?» 7\T\W ("let him drink where he stands, but
let him not draw [water] into any vessel"). Likewise in 4Q241, n, 3: 113 [V
[T\2W]2 U»a 3S»' "?» n3in 7\W ("[and if by the well he is camping let
him not draw from it on t[he Shabbat]").^23 There is no reference to such a
prohibition in the Torah; its origin is in Jubilees, where it is mentioned twice
(2:29; 50:8).
There is yet another expression of a book's canonical status. In my arti
cle on 4Q2511 showed that the scroll's editor used Exod 21-23 (the book of the
covenant) as a skeleton to hang upon it and to arrange along it the halakic
material he had at his disposal. The scroll is a collection of passages of diverse
genres: some of them are abstract rulings in the style of the Damascus Docu
ment; others are pieces of rewritten passages of the Torah. This fact strength
ens the assumption that most of the scroll's passages weren't composed in
their current context but were collected by the editor from various sources. It
was the editor's close knowledge of Torah and his familiarity with the biblical
text that made it a natural medium for arranging the extra material he had.
It might very well be that 4Q265 exhibits the same phenomenon, but
this time with regard to the book of Jubilees. At the outset of this article I
emphasized the diverse literary nature of the scroll's fragments. It includes
law and narrative, pesher and admonition. If the analysis I offered in this ar
ticle proves to be true, then Jubilees functions here in a very similar way to
the function of Exodus's portion in 4Q251, and this testifies to the close fa
miliarity of the scroll's editor with the text of Jubilees and to its canonical
status in Qumran.
- The reading is from V. Noam and E. Qimron, "A Qumran Composition on the
Laws of the Sabbath and Its Contribution to Early Halakhic History," Tarbiz 74 (2005): 513.