The Book of Jubilees and Early Jewish Mysticism
Martha Himmelfarb
Does the book of Jubilees belong to the history of Jewish mysticism? Jubilees
contains neither a vision of the merkabah, the chariot throne of God from
the book of Ezekiel, nor ascent to heaven, the features central to the Jewish
mysticism of antiquity as delineated by Gershom Scholem in his pioneering
work, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.^1 Yet Jubilees shares other significant
features with other texts of the second temple period that are often associ
ated with early Jewish mysticism such as the Book of the Watchers (1 En 1-
36) and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, as well as with the hekhalot texts,
the literature of the fully developed merkabah mysticism of late antiquity.
And while scholarly literature on early Jewish mysticism has in general paid
little attention to Jubilees, it figures prominently in Rachel Elior's recent
book on early Jewish mysticism, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of
Jewish Mysticism, which I discuss below.^2
As my discussion already suggests, scholars have tended to treat early
Jewish mysticism as a textual tradition defined by the presence of several in
terrelated motifs and ideas, most prominent among them the vision of the
merkabah and ascent to heaven noted in the previous paragraph. In this they
- G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1961; 1st ed.
1941), 1-39; on early Jewish mysticism, 5. - R. Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, trans. David
Louvish (Oxford and Portland, Oreg.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004). The
Hebrew original is entitled Temple and Chariot, Priests and Angels, Sanctuary and Heavenly
Sanctuaries in Early Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2002).