Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

The Festivals of Pesah and Massot in the Book of Jubilees

The compositional design of the date-commands is most striking.
With the exception of one command where the fourteenth is specified (Jub
49 :10), no dates are mentioned. Instead date numbers are represented by
terms — "on its day," "at its time," "the time of its day," "the day of its time,"
"its festal day" — that indicate the fourteenth, fifteenth, or both. The date
(or dates) designated by each day-term is revealed through an ingenious sys­
tem of allusions employed in the wording of the command. This system of
allusions has three distinctive features: (a) most importantly, the timing of
events as set forth in the prescriptive, narrative recollection (49:1-6) is pre­
sumed, i.e., the fourteenth is indicated by explicit reference and allusions to
sacrifice of the pesah and the fifteenth by explicit and alluded references to
the tenth plague and/or eating the pesah; (b) the allusions are triggered by
the particular content of a command, by a full or partial citation, by an ab­
stracted biblical phrase, and by one of the date-terms; (c) each date-
command is deliberately composed to point to both the fourteenth and the
fifteenth.

The following table illustrates how this complex system of allusions
functions in the first three commands of the legislation.^21

49:7 Now you remember this day all the days of your lifetime. Celebrate it from
year to year all the days all your lifetime, once a year on its day in accord with all
of its law. Then you will not change a day from the day or from month to
month.
Date(s)
Allusion Source Content Indicated

(1) remember this Exod 12:14 Memory of night of plague 15th (eating)
day...

all the days of your Deut 16:3-4; Phrase from context that relates
lifetime cf. Num 33:3 eating of pesah to memory of day
of exodus

(2) from year to year Exod 13:10 "Keep this statute ... from year to 15th (eating)
year"

Allusion Source Content

Date(s)

Indicated

(1) remember this
day...

Exod 12:14 Memory of night of plague 15th (eating)

all the days of your
lifetime

Deut 16:3-4;

cf. Num 33:3

Phrase from context that relates

eating of pesah to memory of day

of exodus

(2) from year to year Exod 13:10 "Keep this statute ... from year to
year"

15th (eating)

the single reference in that scroll (Y. Yadin, The Temple Scroll, 3 vols. [Jerusalem: Israel Ex­
ploration Society, 1977-1983], 2:76). On the rabbinic treatment of Pesah Sheni, see
m. Pesahim 9:1-4.

21. The analysis of the date- and time-related commands adapts and, at certain
    points, reconsiders material I presented in "The Use of Bible in Jubilees 49: The Date and
    Time of the Pesah Celebration " Meghillot 6 (2007).