The Book of Jubilees and Early Jewish Mysticismare following Scholem's lead. While the comments on the religious character
of merkabah mysticism scattered through the second chapter of Major
Trends are still of interest despite advances in the more than sixty-five years
since he wrote, Scholem did not spend much time on a theoretical discus
sion of the nature of early Jewish mysticism; the discussion of the nature of
mysticism in the first chapter of Major Trends is concerned primarily with
kabbalah, the classical form of Jewish mysticism that emerged in the Middle
Ages.^3 Scholars since Scholem have given rather little attention to defining
the mysticism of the early Jewish mystical tradition as a religious phenome
non in terms that could be used for comparative purposes.^4 A recent excep
tion to this generalization is Philip S. Alexander's Mystical Texts, in the Com
panion to the Qumran Scrolls series, which treats the Songs of the Sabbath
Sacrifice and other texts from among the Dead Sea Scrolls.^5 Two features of
Alexander's discussion are particularly noteworthy, his claim that praxis is
central to the definition of mysticism, and his challenge to Scholem's view
that the merkabah tradition did not involve unio mystical This is not the
place for an evaluation of Alexander's valuable but problematic work; in my
view, many aspects of Alexander's readings of the texts are quite persuasive,
but I am skeptical about the claim that the scrolls reflect a mystical practice
and unio mystica.
Further, while the benefits of a clear definition of mysticism are evi
dent for the purposes of cross-cultural comparison or even for exploration
of the problem of continuity from early Jewish mysticism to kabbalah, in
this paper I make use of a motif-based description of a tradition instead. The
question of interest for this paper is not whether Jubilees truly belongs to the
phenomenon of "mysticism" — if mysticism demands praxis, much less
unio mystica, then surely it does not — but rather how Jubilees relates to a
body of texts that share a constellation of motifs. The history of scholarly
discussion of these texts makes "early Jewish mysticism" a convenient way to
refer to them. While the results may not tell us much about the phenomenon
- Scholem, Major Trends, 1-39 (chap. 1, "General Characteristics of Jewish Mysti
cism"), 40-79 (chap. 2, "Merkabah Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism"). - On this point, see E. R. Wolfson, "Mysticism and the Poetic-Liturgical Composi
tions from Qumran: A Response to Bilhah Nitzan," JQR 85 (1994): 184-202; Michael D.
Swartz, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and Later Jewish Magic and Mysticism," DSD 8 (2001): 182-90. - Philip S. Alexander, Mystical Texts, Companion to the Qumran Scrolls 7, Library of
Second Temple Studies 61 (London: T. & T. Clark, 2006). - Alexander, Mystical Texts, 7-10, 93-120, 136-38. Scholem asserts reservations, very
briefly, about the centrality of unio mystica in mysticism, Jewish and other; Major Trends, 5.