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The Festivals of Pesah and Massot in the Book of Jubilees
Prescriptive Recollection of Pesah
The greater part of Jub 49 (twenty-six and one-half of twenty-eight verses)
concerns Pesah, with a particular, indeed what might be considered a polemi
cal, emphasis on its date. The chapter opens with the angel-narrator urging
Moses to remember the commands he had been given regarding the Pesah,
"so that you may celebrate it at its time on the fourteenth of the first month, that
you may sacrifice it before eveningand so that they might eat it at night on the
evening of the fifteenth from the time of sunsef (49U).^6 No such instructions
regarding the pesah appear in the Exodus narrative.^7 Constructed as a pas
tiche,^8 a patchwork of phrases alluding to multiple biblical verses, Jubilees de
rives its prescription from an exegesis that harmonizes conflicting biblical
passages. A paraphrase of Num 9:2-38 accesses "to celebrate/to do" (mtt^V^1 ?/
gbr), a verb that does not appear in the instructions for the Egypt Pesah, but
which is normative phrasing in prescriptions of postexodus commemora
tions (e.g., Exod 12:48; Num 9:2-5,11; Deut 16:1). The basic time frame for the
celebration, however, is derived not from Num 9, but from an intricate play
with phrases in Deut 16:1,4,6. Stipulating no dates, referring only to sacrifice,
and suggesting multiple time frames for the sacrifice, the murky Deuteron
omy prescription permits an exegetical treatment that understands the vari
ous time points as referring to different stages in the pesah rite.
Understanding "in the evening" of Deut 16:4 and "in the evening at
sunset" of Deut 16:6 as contrasting points in time,^9 Jubilees emends the
Deut 16:4 phrase to "before evening" and uses it for the time of the sacrifice.
(A parallel prescription is found in the Temple Scroll [11Q19 xvii 7].)^10 For
6. Italics indicate adoption of a biblical phrase or allusion to a biblical verse.
7. The fourteenth is specified as the date for the sacrifice in the directives for the
Egypt celebration (Exod 12:6), but only "that night" is indicated as the time for the eating
(Exod 12:8). According to J. Milgrom, the phrasing of certain passages where Pesah and
Massot are fused (Exod 12:14,17,18; Deut 16:4) indicates the fifteenth, an exception to the
general rule that the day begins at dawn (Leviticus, 3 vols., AB 3 [Doubleday: New York,
2000], 1967-68). The Jubilees argument is not related to the fusion of the two festivals, but is
developed solely in relationship to the timing of the pesah celebration.
8. On pastiche as a mode of composition, see E. Chazon, "Sacrifice and Prayer in "The
Words of the Luminaries,'" in Scripture and Prayer, ed. J. Kugel (Cambridge: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 2006), 25-41.
9. The exegesis understands "at sunset" as an intrinsic modifier of "in the evening." In
contrast, rabbinic exegesis treats the three phrases in Deut 16:6 as denoting three separate
time points (Mekilta Bo 5; b. Berakhot 9a).
10. The rabbinic prescription has the offering of the pesah precede the evening Tamid
{in. Pesahim 5:1; cf. Josephus, Jewish War 6.423).
