Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees
nora
(Nora)
#1
Jonathan Ben-Dov
Jubilees: it is the festival of weeks and it is the festival of firstfruits. This
festival is twofold and of two kinds
Temple Scroll: for it is [the feast of w]eeks and a feast of first fruits, a me
morial for ev[er
Was the author of Jubilees aware of the "pentacontad" day count? Baum
garten thought he was aware of this concept but chose to ignore it because he
had found it incongruent with other aspects of the 364DCT.^31 Ravid, in con
trast, claims the author had an altogether different conception of the feast of
Sevu'ot, deliberately avoiding the pentacontad count.^32 VanderKam suggested
a way to bypass the problem: "In all cases in which Jubilees mentions a festi
val, it is named explicidy in the section of the Torah covered by the narra
tive.... This entails that the absence of a religious holiday from Jubilees
means only that the writer saw no warrant in Genesis-mid-Exodus for posit
ing that it was known and practiced by the fathers."^33 This statement by
VanderKam is a worthy warning against an argument from silence, especially
in a sensitive text like Jubilees. This hermeneutic principle allowed
VanderKam to conclude that the calendar in Jubilees is quite similar to that of
T. However, in the present case we see, pace VanderKam, that the author was
concerned about the harvest festivals not once but twice in his book (chaps. 7
and 32). In these two points the author opted for fixing the harvest festivals
on the line between the agricultural seasons (32:12) and more specifically the
"memorial days" (7:1-2). We must therefore conclude that the author of Jubi
lees had been aware of the harvest festivals according to T, but he chose to re
fashion this law according to his calendrical preferences or literary restraints.
To sum up the present section, Jubilees betrays an ambiguous attitude
toward the septenary aspect of the 364DCT. On the one hand, long-term
time reckoning was organized in septenary units that bring to mind the bib
lical jubilee count. In addition, Jub 6:29-30 defines the year in terms of the
count of weeks. On the other hand, Jubilees deviates from the "sabbatarian"
norm in a series of matters.
Even where the author of Jubilees does commit to the septenary time
count, he does so in a genuinely original way, diverging from the so-to-say
"mainstream" of the 364DCT. Thus, whereas the reference to Enoch in Jub
4:17 is loyal to the original spirit of AB and AW, Jubilees carries the septenary
- Baumgarten, "Calendars," 75.
- Ravid, "The Book of Jubilees," 378-79.
- VanderKam, "The Temple Scroll," 221.
