Book of Jubilees

The topic of the Jubilee is a significant one, both in size and importance.  In the present paper, I seek to trace its emergence and evolution in the course of Scripture, from Ararat to Sinai, Jericho to Judah, Naboth’s vineyard to Jeremiah’s field, and Nazareth to the new heavens and earth.  The Jubliee is, in a nutshell, a declarative act of restoration.  It is an eschatological peak in Israel’s calendar, and, although it is typically viewed as a priestly abstraction, it actually turns out to be reflected in the ebb and flow of Israel’s history.

In terms of its theological and cultic significance, the Jubilee is grounded in three important principles:  the perfection of God’s plans, the purity of God’s person, and the sovereignty of God over the earth.  The Jubilee cycle is first initiated in the late 15th cent. BC in the aftermath of Jericho’s fall, once the land of Canaan has been divided among the Israelites.  While the land of Israel is a microcosm of God’s new Creation, it is nevertheless part of a fallen world.  As such, it is subject to the normal process of decay, decline, and pollution, and must be ‘rebooted’ (in Yom Kippur style) every seven weeks of years in order to bring the land of Israel back into line with its divine blueprint.  Aside from such reboots, Israel would go the way of the world, as is depicted in Nebuchadnezzar’s colossus.  The land would become progressively polluted, disordered, and removed from Yahweh’s Edenic ideal, until it reached a point of total de-creation and returned to dust.  Grounded in the day of Atonement, the Jubilee provides an antidote to such entropic decline.  But, of course, a reboot can never advance Israel beyond her initial condition.  The notion of a Jubilee ‘cycle’ therefore seems inherently frustrated, plagued by a kind of Qoheleth-like futility.

In the NT, Jesus cranks the notion of a Jubilee up a notch.  For Jesus, the Jubilee is not merely a reset of Israel’s initial conditions;  it is a reversion of all Creation to its initial (Edenic) condition.  As such, Jesus’ Jubilee is inextricably bound up with the defeat of Satan and the release of Israel and the nations from Satan’s dominion.  It is set against the backdrop of a chaotic wilderness, a worldwide day of atonement, and a cosmic showdown with the world’s powers and principalities, all of which notions are latent in ‘the Nazarean pericope’ (Luke 4.16-21), and are inherently connected with the person of Melchizedek and the conclusion of the Jubilee cycle in Second Temple literature.

The Book of Jubilees paints Noah as the first physician and apothecary, who received knowledge of natural medicine from the angels of God so that he could save his offspring from the ailments being inflicted upon them by evil spirits. This article examines this aspect of the Noah tradition in the book of Jubilees and attempts to identify its origins. The study considers the potential textual and ideological impetuses behind this tradition, and proposes that attributing the beginning of medical knowledge to Noah may have served to create a licit category of medicine for the author of Jubilees’ intended audience.

The book of Jubilees is not regarded as part of the Western Biblical Canon, yet, in Ethiopia it is regarded as such. Should Biblical scholars take note of this book? This short introduction provides the reasons why this book should not be ignored by serious students of the Bible.

4Q390 is a document akin to but not identical with Apocryphon of Jeremiah C. It presents the exilic and postexilic era of history of Israel as a period of 70 x 7 = 70 + 7 x 49 + 70 + 7 years of forced theocracy. 4Q390 may partially account for the rise of Messianic expectations in Israel ca. 200-175 B.C. and ca. 103-96 B.C.

Today, thanks in large part to several bestselling books on the subject, a whole new generation has been introduced to the Biblical Sabbath (Shemitah) and Jubilee cycles. All sorts of amazing claims have been made the past couple of years regarding the relevance of these ancient cycles to those of us today. The claims have included predicting stock market cycles, to the timing of the 2nd coming of Christ, and the rapture. In all the sensationalism, an important part of the subject has been overlooked.


•What does the Bible actually say about the Biblical Sabbath and Jubilee cycles?

•Can these cycles be dated with any certainty?

•Are they really relevant to us today?


To answer these important questions, William Struse takes you on an adventure that will forever change your view of the Bible’s chronological record. Building upon a reasonable and defensible rendering of the Old Testament chronology, Mr. Struse identifies and synchronizes two Biblical Shemitah and a Biblical Jubilee cycle with secular chronology.


These synchronizations then allow the reader to see Biblical history in the light of what Mr. Struse calls Prophetic Milestones. Did you know that Sabbath and Jubilee cycles mark some of the most important events in Yahweh’s redemptive plan for mankind? Events like:


•The creation of Adam

•Enoch

•The flood

•The birth and call of Abraham

•The birth of Isaac

•The times of the Hebrew people relative to the times of the Gentiles

•The 70 years captivity

•Daniel 9 and the divine word to return and build Jerusalem

•The death and resurrection of Yeshua

•The destruction of Jerusalem and the temple

•The 41st Jubilee cycle as it relates to our generation

•The 123rd Jubilee cycle (3x41) as it relates to the millennium

•The 144th Jubilee cycle as it relates to the New Jerusalem and the restitution of all things


By the time you are finished The Jubilee Code: Prophetic Milestones in Yahweh’s Redemptive Plan, you will have a whole new appreciation for our Creator’s guiding hand in history working out His Yeshua, (YHWH's Salvation) for all mankind. So, if you love Biblical history and Bible prophecy take a few hours to read The Jubilee Code and see Yahweh’s love for mankind demonstrated in a bold and thrilling new way.

This article proposes to rethink the genealogy and origin of the rabbinical terms Oral Torah and Written Torah. The terms appear for the first time in Tannaitic literature, yet scholars have attempted to ascribe to them an earlier date and to present them as a Second Temple, specifically Pharisaic, distinction. This article problematizes the existing genealogies and considers neglected evidence found in Paul's Letter to the Romans that advances our understanding of the Oral Torah/Written Torah distinction in the first century CE. According to my rereading of Rom 10:5-13 and 3:19-31, Paul has a notion of double-nomos within scripture, and his twofold torah is presented as oral and written. Apart from rabbinic literature, it is only in Paul that we find the use of an Oral Torah/Written Torah distinction. This evidence affects both how the history of the rabbinic terms is understood and how Paul is configured in his Jewish matrix.

Does God test His people? Nicholas Ellis examines the interplay between theological conviction and biblical hermeneutic, starting from the Epistle of James, and opening into a wide-ranging study of ancient convictions and hermeneutics in Jewish and Christian literature.

Abstractum:

Synkretyzm religijny w tekstach chrześcijańskich, hermetycznych oraz papirusach magicznych greckich, na przykładzie problemu genezy zła

Celem pracy jest omówienie problematyki związanej z synkretyzmem religijnym w wybranych dziełach literatury chrześcijańskiej, hermetycznej i greckich papirusach magicznych. Analizie poddane zostały zwłaszcza teksty związane z hermeneutyką demonologii i angelarium, pseudoepigrafy o charakterze eschatologicznym, a także greckie traktaty magiczne. Podstawowe pytanie, jakie stawiam, odnosi się do elementu doktrynalnego religii: w jaki sposób synkretyzm może pomóc określić naturę zła oraz bytów złośliwych? Całość została osadzona w ramach religioznawczych, którego jednymi z głównych zadań są: egzegeza, ukazanie podobieństw pomiędzy doktrynami religijnymi oraz krytyczna analiza porównawcza omawianych tekstów.

słowa kluczowe: synkretyzm, demonologia, angelologia, gnoza, religia, Bóg, bóstwa, magia, anioły, demony, chrześcijaństwo, kultura, antyk, mitologia, mity, polityka, filozofia, religioznawstwo, religiologia, hermeneutyka, geneza, historia, hermetyzm, hermetycyzm, alchemia, czary, ewokacje, inkantacje, Biblia, PGM, lingwistyka, łacina, koiné .



Religious Syncretism in Christian and Hermetic texts and in the Papyri Graecae Magicae by the example of the Problem of the Origin of Evil

The purpose of the work is to discuss the problem of the relationship with religious syncretism in selected works of Christian and Hermetic literature and Greek magical papyri. The main subjects analyzed were texts related to hermeneutics of demonology and angelarium, pseudepigrapha and eschatological features as well as the Greek magic treatises. The basic question to guide the strategies taken is: how can syncretism help us to understand evil and malicious entities? The whole was embedded within the cross-section of religion, that some of the main tasks are: exegesis, showing similarities between religious doctrines and critical comparative analysis of the discussed texts.

keywords: sincretism, demonology, angelology, gnosis, religion, God, deities, magic, angels, demons, christianity, culture, antic, mythology, myths, politics, philosophy, religious studies, religiology, hermeneutics, genesis, history, hermetism, hermeticism, alchemy, spells, evocations, incantations, Bible, PGM, lynguistics, lingua latina, koiné.
_____________________________________________
ad.1: artykuł jest fragmentem szerszego tekstu i stanowi część pracy dyplomowej autora.
red. Emilia Żybert-Pruchnicka

Jubilees 3:27-31 explains the command to cover one's nakedness, and the connections with animal speech help to elucidate the reasons for this law. Jubilees implies a sort of equality/solidarity between humans and animals due to their sin/impurity. Even though God does not directly address the serpent with speech, Jubilees portrays animals as more rational than in Genesis, as they originally talked and conversed with each other and apparently also with humans. This shared rationality and identity between all animals results in all losing their speech. Animals are portrayed in Jubilees with more rationality, culpability, and even solidarity with humans than in Genesis. The one exception is that animals are not allowed to cover their nakedness, and yet they still end up in a more positive light than the nations, who are willfully uncovered and in shame.

Was Paul's view of evil based on Adam's fall or a mere reflex of Christology? Tyler A. Stewart argues that, in Galatians, Paul's thoughts about where evil comes from and why it continues are not based on Adam's fall as the background story, but rather the rebellion of angels. Edited PhD Dissertation published with Mohr Siebeck (WUNT 2).

This article examines the dual tenet generally upheld by scholars of Second Temple Judaism that a single concept of impurity existed in that period, and that purity and impurity formed a coherent, unified system of meaning. Herein I will contend that we should turn our focus on the phenomenological aspect of a specific source of impurity, and study this in its broader cultural contexts. Centering on corpse impurity as it appears in a selection of narrative, halachic, and archaeological sources, this article treats purity and impurity as an order of meaning inherently interconnected with that of honor and shame – which was equally dominant in the thought and practices of ancient Judeans – and identifies three modes of relationship between these two orders of meaning: 1) impurity as attached to shame, 2) impurity as attached to honor, and 3) corpse impurity as symbolizing the contrast between human and divine honor. Finally, I argue that the different functions and meanings of impurity, honor, and shame in each of these modes of interrelationship may be explained by the two networks of social relations to which all Judeans in Second Temple times belonged – the kinship one and the cultic one – and which, albeit partly overlapping, need to be distinguished for analytical purposes. The approach proposed here enables us to establish a link between God and the system of ancient Judean ritual purity in a way that suits the preeminence of metonymy as a strategy of representing entities that stands at the core of this order of meaning – especially when the dead are concerned – rather than the metaphoric and symbolic explanations which currently prevail.

Whenever a Muslim is asked whether a story or idea is part of their religion, one of the first sources they reference is the Quran. However, the Quran contains some verses which lack much context and are in need of exegetes to explain them. Typically, the exegetical writings (tafsir) will contain multiple chains of narrations, leading back to the prophet Muhammad or his companions, and give the context through which the verse was revealed, i.e. when, where, or why it was revealed. What strikes the modern Muslim reader, who has been taught that the Quran is different from all other Abrahamic books, as odd is how readily famous Quranic exegetes used israiliyat (biblical stories found only in the Hebrew of Christian Bible but not in the Quran) to give context to vague verses. One such verse that catches the eye is verse 2:102. This paper compares and contrasts the exegetical explanations regarding the angels mentioned in verse 2:102, Harut and Marut, and the fallen angels found in the pseudepigraphic works The Book of Jubilees and The Book of Watchers in 1 Enoch. It will be shown that the earlier Muslim exegetes were open to using biblical stories to explain the Quran, whereas the later scholars became rigidly against adding anything that was not contained in codified Islamic texts, such as the Quran and hadith literature.

Este es el Calendario de Enoc 2017-2018. Funciona para todos los años, sólo deben cambiar la fecha del equinoccio de primavera en Israel, que no es en la misma fecha que el equinoccio vernal, deben buscar el día exacto en páginas de observación astronómica entre el 15 de marzo y 20 de marzo.

Click here to see more about the Jewish Annotated Apocrypha, co-edited with Lawrence M. Wills. The first file posted has the TOC and a list of contributors. There is also a flyer posted here with additional information and a 30% discount for direct orders from OUP.

La voluntad de Dios es agradable y perfecta. Romanos 12:2. Y no os conforméis a este siglo; mas reformaos por la renovación de vuestro entendimiento, para que experimentéis cuál sea la buena voluntad de Dios, agradable y perfecta. 

    La voluntad de Dios también es permisiva.  Nos hizo libres. Podemos pecar y hacer cosas contra sus mandatos, pero nos hace responsables (Gálatas 6:7-8).

    La soberanía de Dios es conocida como voluntad decretal (Job 42:2, Efesios 1:11).  Los decretos de Dios son las cosas que quiere que ocurran en su creación.  Al darle libre albedrío a los hombres y los ángeles permite que ciertas cosas sucedan, pero en el momento en que estorban sus planes, interviene. Un buen ejemplo es el de Jonás.  No quiso ir a Nínive a predicar el mensaje de Dios. Fue en dirección contraria. Un gran pez se lo tragó por tres días; oró a Dios y el pez lo vomitó en tierra. Finalmente obedeció, predicó en Nínive y la ciudad se arrepintió (Jonás 1-3). 

    La voluntad de Dios es preceptiva, es sinónimo de su ley (Salmos 40:8, Romanos 2:17-18).  Está expresada en sus preceptos y en la ley inscrita en nuestros corazones (Salmos 40:8). Ordena nuestros pasos y aprueba nuestro camino (Salmos 37:23, Proverbios 3:6).

The chronology of the Hebrew patriarchs is coherently synchronized to external history, matching at multiple points across centuries. This is achieved via recognition that  throughout much of the 2nd millennium BC, Hebrews counted time in 6-month seasons, (summer = 1, winter = 2, summer = 3, etc.). The net effect of this correction is that biblical lifetimes become normal, and the chronology of Genesis through the period of judges is much more compressed than the traditional Ussher chronology. Noah’s flood is presumed to be historical but limited to Mesopotamia, and is matched to the catastrophic Bronze Age Minoan eruption in 1612 BC (see "Astronomy date of the Minoan eruption, part 1"). Three centuries later, Assyrian dominion over Asia during the lifetime of Abraham, (Antiquities 1.9.1) matches the rise of the Assyrian Middle Empire. Three generations later, Joseph, an Asiatic who ruled Egypt (Genesis 45:8) matches the late 19th Dynasty chancellor Bay, who was regent to the child pharaoh Siptah. The oppression of the Israelites following Joseph’s death (Exodus 1:8) matches a political transition to the 20th Dynasty in Egypt. In Manetho’s Exodus account (Against Apion 1:26-28), king Amenophis, rival to Moses, matches late 20th Dynasty High Priest of Amun Amenhotep. References to Philistine control of the road to Canaan (Exodus 13:17) and to the construction of Zoan in Egypt (Numbers 13:22) both place the Exodus in the late 20th Dynasty and are now proven consistent with "true'  Bible chronology (as opposed to Ussher, or 'traditional' chronology).

This study investigates the Ethiopian concept of canon and the place and function of 1 Enoch and Jubilees in it as assessed by scholarly and ecclesiastical works. It also considers the opinions of clergy and laity in Ethiopia and the United States. The study demonstrates that Jubilees was accepted into the canon earlier and more definitively than 1 Enoch, and that the primary significance of the two books in Ethiopian thought has been Christological.

Pre peer-reviewed version of contribution to edited volume on Violence in the Hebrew Bible: Text and Reception, focusing on the nature of violence in the biblical Flood Narrative (Genesis 6-9), also against the background of its dialogue with Mesopotamian worldviews and its reception in 1 Enoch and Jubilees, as well as in the film Noah (2014). All of these stories are more or less intertextually related and take a primeval cosmic imbalance as their point of departure. Despite this fact, their different descriptions of the incentive for the divine violence in the deluge turns out to be of major importance for their views of the nature of this violence and the relations between the divine and human realms. In addition, the reception history of the biblical text shows that serious interactions with the biblical text itself evoke the question of the nature of the relation between these readings and their biblical source.

The fact that the Qurʾān made no attempt to introduce the jinn suggests that its initial audience was already familiar with them in some way. Yet it remains unclear as to who this audience was, what preconceptions they might have had, and whence they derived them. Scholarship on this problem has tended to assume that the early audience of the Qurʾān knew about the jinn from pre-existing beliefs held by the polytheistic Arab tribes, as reflected in the so-called pre-Islamic corpus of poetry. Thus, the scholarly debate has focused on the assumed shift from the autochthonous cult of the jinn to the strict monotheistic message of Islam. However, this line of argument is circular, given the fact that the “pre-Islamic” corpus shows signs of subsequent influence and redaction from the Qurʾān itself. If the polytheistic Arab tribes were as familiar with the jinn as claimed by modern scholarship, then this would certainly be reflected in the abundant references to spiritual beings in the epigraphic and apotropaic sources in the Semitic languages that can be reliably dated prior to the Qurʾān. But the opposite is the case: there seems to be no awareness of the jinn as such in these sources. So one must look elsewhere for the pre-Qurʾānic origins of the jinn. By comparing the Qurʾānic profile of the jinn with contemporaneous Jewish and Christian scriptural traditions in the broadest sense, one may recognize a number of thematic continuities with an ambivalent class of spiritual beings presented in certain retellings of the book of Genesis, especially the Book of Jubilees, which was translated into Ethiopic no later than the seventh century CE. Such traditions, whether indirect or direct, were evidently familiar to Ethiopic-speaking Christians around the time the Qurʾān was promulgated, and probably Syriac-speaking Christians as well, although this is less certain. Therefore, it is likely that the Qurʾān was invoking related traditions that must have been familiar to “the People of the Book” and their milieux.

The diverse collection of material related to Jubilees found at Qumran suggests that the work did not have a single textual or literary form in the late Second Temple period. Fragments of manuscripts of a variety of sizes and styles are preserved at Qumran, and from this cluster of Jubilees-related manuscripts, there are several parallels that can be seen in the later lines of transmission. One line of transmission is a coherent book that narrates the events from creation to the Exodus, mostly known through the Ethiopic Jubilees manuscripts. Other lines of transmission, however, do not include the whole book, but only select passages. This paper is an initial attempt to formulate a theory of these different lines of transmission into the various contexts in which they are found today, and further explain the abundance of smaller manuscripts containing text from Jubilees found at Qumran.

This dissertation examines the use of Leviticus 26 in four Second Temple-era Jewish texts: Chronicles, Jubilees, Words of the Luminaries, and the Damascus Document. Prevailing scholarship will cite the fact that these texts review the history of how Israel’s disobedience provoked the covenant chastisements epitomized by exile as proof that Second Temple Jews believed that they had fallen under the curses.  The Chronicler’s views on chastisement have been attributed to extreme (Deuteronomic) doctrines of immediate retribution and human initiated repentance.  A contrasting belief that true repentance, bringing salvation, was only possible through a divinely initiated recreation of the human spirit has been increasingly imputed to the latter three texts.  However, this dissertation argues that Chronicles, Jubilees, Words of the Luminaries, and the Damascus Document texts are all fundamentally oriented to the Leviticus 26 teleological paradigm of chastisement-induced repentance, more than the concept of tit-for-tat retributive cursing generally associated with Deuteronomy 28-29. All four texts read and reference Leviticus 26 for an optimistic, reassuring understanding that the covenant chastisements epitomized by exile are a God-guided experiential process whose telos is their repentance. Israel’s suffering serves a purpose, bringing about a reversal of deliberately-committed ancestral trespass (ma‘al; Lev 26:40-41). In conceptualizing repentance in these texts as a divinely initiated process of inner transformation, this study moves beyond the dichotomy of “human-initiated” and “divine-initiated” repentance assumed by earlier scholarship. The latter three texts draw overt—but by scholars unappreciated and/or actively denied—references to the simple meaning of Lev 26:44-45 promising that God will preserve the people and the covenant he struck with them at Sinai no matter what the people do.

The Book of Jubilees is one of the oldest and surely one of the most important of those Jewish texts which are now called Pseudepigrapha. Though it is a Jewish work, it appears never to have achieved any sort of widely accepted authoritadve status in Judaism. Rather, its greatest esteem and popularity were to come in Christian circles where chronographers of the early biblical history found its expansions of Genesis and Exodus to be well worth preserving. As nearly as one can now discern, however, it achieved canonical status only in the Abyssinian or Ethiopian Church. It appears that in this country alone were complete copies of the book continuously available from the early years of Christianity there until modern dmes. Modern Western scholars became aware of the text of the book when copies were brought from Ethiopia to Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Two of the finest Ethiopicists of Europe were to turn their scholarly attention to editing the text. August Dillmann, whose grammar and lexicon remain fundamental tools in study of the Ethiopic language, produced the first edition in 1859. Later, in 1895, Robert Henry Charles, the greatest expert on the pseudepigraphic texts in the Englishspeaking world, produced the edition that is still used whenever the Ethiopic text of Jubilees is under discussion. It hardly needs to be said, however, that much has happened in this field since 1895. Many more Ethiopic copies of Jubilees have become available, citations in Syriac have been found, and among the myriad fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, parts of 12 or 13 copies of the book have been identified. Jubilees, with its close ties to the thought of the Qumran community, has, as a result of this great find, now taken a central place in the enthusiastic and voluminous study that the Qumran documents have engendered. The extensive amount of new textual information for the book and the great current interest in it make it imperative that a new edition of Jubilees be produced.
This critical edition and translation of the Book of Jubilees has been in preparation for a number of years. My interest in Jubilees began during graduate student days and has continued throughout the intervening years. After writing a dissertation on Jubilees, I began to collect films of manuscripts with an eye toward producing a new but minor
AS500L
VI PREFACE
edition of tiie book and a contemporary English translation of it. There seemed to be no need to work on a full edition because W. Baars and R. Zuurmond had announced more than a decade before that they were preparing a major edition. In 1979, however, I met Zuurmond who indicated to me that he and Baars would not be pubhshing their proposed work at any dme in the near future. We corresponded about the project a number of times, and in 1981, in a meeting with Baars and Zuurmond in Leiden, these two scholars agreed to turn over their materials to me so that I could begin producing a full critical text of Jubilees. It is difficult to say enough about the generosity of these men who had devoted much time to the project and had identified and obtained copies of many new manuscripts of Ethiopic Jubilees. By making available to me both their copies and the results of their work with them to date, they saved me an incalculable amount of time. It is only right, though an inadequate way of thanking them, that this edition be dedicated to them. I should add that though I have discussed my work especially with Zuurmond, I alone remain responsible for the present edidon.

The purposes of the introduction to this volume of texts and apparatus are to list the extant witnesses to the text of the Book of Jubilees, to describe the procedures used, and to explain the abbreviations that are employed in the apparatus of variants to the critical text. The introduction to volume two contains more detailed information about the individual copies of the textual evidence and also about the interrelations between the manuscripts of the Ethiopic version.
I. THE TEXTUAL WITNESSES
The only language in which the Book of Jubilees has been preserved in full is Classical Ethiopic or Ge'ez. It is now generally accepted, however, that the book was written in Hebrew, translated from Hebrew into Greek, and from Greek into Latin and Ethiopic. There may also once have been a Syriac translation. Some evidence from each of these languages survives, but large percentages of the text are available only in the two granddaughter versions Latin and Ethiopic. Whereas the Ethiopic preserves the full text, the one extant Latin manuscript contains only about one-third of it. The evidence for the Ethiopic version is far and away the most plentiful and the manuscripts of it are necessarily the basis for a critical text, even though, from a chronological perspective, they are the latest. In the following section, the textual evidence will be presented in the chronological order of the versions, insofar as it can be determined.
A. The Hebrew Version
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, no copies of the original Hebrew version of Jubilees were known. The caves of Qumran have, however, yielded fragments of 13 manuscripts of Jubilees, though even after all these years only a fraction of the material has been pubhshed. The fragments which are available are the following:
X INTRODUCTION
E. The Ethiopic Version

Some Pseudepigrapha  and other Ancient Works +
Other Syriac and English , Arabic , Greek works listed below I myself can obtain if you message me !
Table of Contents
1. The Life of Adam and Eve (Apocalypse of Moses) (Arabic)
2. The Testament of Adam (Syriac and Arabic)
3. The Cave of Treasures (Syriac and Arabic)
4. The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan (Arabic)
5. ​The Book of Adam (Codex Nazaraeus; Mandean Fragment) (Syriac)
6. Life of Abel, by Symmachus (Syriac)
7. Syriac Book of Seth (Syriac)
8. 1 Enoch (Syriac)
9. Apocalypse of Enoch (Syriac)
10. Tractate of Shem (Syriac)
11. The Testament of Abraham (On the Death of Abraham) (Arabic)
12. History of Melchizedek (Syriac and Arabic)
13. Joseph and Asenath (Recension Two) (Syriac)
14. History of Joseph (Syriac)
15. History of Joseph, Son of Jacob [Version A] (Arabic)
16. History of Joseph, Son of Jacob [Version B] (Arabic)
17. History of Joseph (Arabic)
18. Dormition of Joseph, the Son of Jacob (Arabic)
19. Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (Syriac)
20. The Names of the Wives of the Patriarchs (Syriac)
21. The Conversation of Moses with God (Syriac and Arabic)
22. The Book of Jubilees (Syriac)
23. The Life of Moses (Arabic)
24. Instruction of David to Solomon (Arabic)
25. The Palace of Solomon (Arabic)
26. Questions of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon (Syriac)
27. Testament of Solomon to Rehoboam his son (Arabic)
28. The Final Counsel of Solomon (Arabic)
29. The Death of Solomon (Arabic)
30. Aphikia (2 Recensions) (Arabic)
31. History of the Rechabites (Syriac and Arabic)
32. History of the Prophet Elijah (Arabic)
33. ​History of the Prophet Elijah and the son of the Widow (Arabic)
34. ​​History of the Prophet Elijah and his Ascension (Arabic)
35. ​​Sermon of Elisha the Prophet on Sinners (Arabic)
36. ​​​Sermon of the Prophet Elisha on the necessity of purification (Arabic)
37. ​​​Prayer of Manasseh (Syriac and Arabic)
38. ​​​Prayer of Manasseh (Cited from the Apostolic Constitutions) (Syriac and Arabic)
​​​​39. Prayer of Manasseh (from the Byzantine Horologion) (Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Syriac)
​​​40. ​4 Esdras (The Apocalypse of Ezra) (Syriac and Arabic)
41. ​​​​​The Apocalypse of Ezra on the reign of the Arabs (Syriac)
42. ​History and Wisdom of Ahiqar (Syriac and Arabic)
43. ​​5 Maccabees (Syriac)
44. ​​History of St. Shamuni (Arabic)
45. ​​Syriac Apocryphal Psalms (Syriac)
46. ​​Odes of Solomon (Syriac)
47. ​​History of Job (Arabic)
​48. ​Psalms of Solomon (Syriac)
49. ​​The Lives of the Prophets (Syriac and Arabic)
50. ​​The History of Jonah (Syriac and Arabic)
51. ​​Habakkuk Apocryphon (Arabic)
​​52. History of Isaiah the Prophet (Arabic)
​​53. Apocryphon of Jeremiah on the Captivity of Babylon (Arabic)
​54. Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (2 Baruch) (Syriac and Arabic)
55. Epistle of Baruch (Syriac)
​​56. Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (Syriac and Arabic)
​​​57. On our Lord and on the end written by the youth Daniel (Syriac)
​​58. ​ Fourteenth Vision of Daniel (Arabic)
​​​59. Apocalypse of Daniel (Arabic)
60. On Daniel and the boy Caleb (Arabic)
61. Conversation of Joseph and Nebuchadnezzar (Arabic)
​​​​62. The Tiburtine Sibyl (Syriac and Arabic)

“The influence of 1 Enoch on the New Testament,” writes the celebrated pseudepigrapha scholar R. H. Charles, “has been greater than that of all the other apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books taken together.” If the number of publications comparing Enochic and biblical literature is an adequate litmus test, then Charles’s claim has been substantiated with respect to the New Testament at large and the Synoptic Gospels in particular. The flurry of studies reading the New Testament in tandem with 1 Enoch continues unabated. As a result, more attention has recently been given to how 1 Enoch 1–36, known as the Book of the Watchers, influences readings of demonological pericopes in the Synoptic Gospels. It is becoming increasingly evident that the demonological framework presented in the Book of the Watchers influences the perspective that the synoptic authors work from. Without knowledge of the former we cannot fully comprehend the latter.

In this paper I take this claim as axiomatic for Mark 1:21–27. I argue that the tradition about the watchers and their offspring stands behind the account of the man with an unclean spirit in the Capernaum synagogue. I further contend that Mark has constructed this account as an intercalation that becomes intelligible once the framework from the watchers tradition is registered. The central portion of the “sandwich,” Mark 1:23–26, presents the content of Jesus’s teaching mentioned in the outer frames, Mark 1:21–22 and Mark 1:27. Contrary to several recent interpretations, I argue that Jesus’s teaching in the synagogue and his exorcistic activity are one and the same. Jesus’s pedagogy is “not like the scribes,” insofar as he does not act as a “text broker” in the synagogue, mediating written traditions to the illiterate masses. Nor is his authority over unclean spirits dependent on the technology of writing, as is the case with the apocalyptic intermediary Enoch, whose prestige is rooted in his scribal attainments. Rather, according to Mark 1:21–27 Jesus is qualified to teach and exorcise demons in synagogues because he mediates directly between the deity and the spirit world.

ABSTRACT

In general the interest of the other-worldly realm on the part of the author of the Book of Jubilees has been played down in scholarly literature. Although no heavenly journey is described, the narrative frame is an angelic discourse directed at a human taking place on Mount Sinai. When analysing Jubilees’ geographical passages within the larger structure of the narrative and in conjunction with texts such as 1 Enoch, it is evident that the geography of Jubilees also displays a very clear vertical direction. The concept of the axis mundi applies undeniably to the cosmic mountains of Sinai, Zion, and the Temple Mount. Together with the equation of Zion and the Garden of Eden, the interest in both a heavenly and earthly Temple service, and the navel of the earth, the geography attains very strong theological and apocalyptic overtones and, moreover, reveals a strongly Temple-oriented focus. This is especially born out by the prominent place of Jubilees at Qumran and its relationship to other Temple related texts unique to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Already the Book of the Watchers attempts to develop a certain type of demonology in which the adversaries of humankind are envisioned as disembodied spirits who are able to function inside human bodies and souls.125 In the Book of the Watchers, this conceptual move is closely connected with the Giants’ story, whose hybrid anthropology in which angelic and human were once mingled together opened a door to a novel psychodemonic synthesis.

This paper examines how the chronological contradiction in Abraham’s departure from Haran (Gen 11:26, 32; 12:4) has been explained in the history of biblical interpretation, especially in Rewritten Scripture from Qumran (4Q252 and Jubilees), Josephus, and rabbinic literature (Genesis Rabbah), including the lost Jewish tradition preserved by Jerome. According to Ben Zion Wacholder, who dealt with a different case of chronology in Genesis, the rabbinic and the Qumranic views are too different to be reconcilable, whereas the Graeco-Jewish writers and Qumran literature present similar views. This study, however, demonstrates that rabbinic interpretation on Abraham’s departure share some important ideas both with Qumran literature and Josephus.

The only Priestly pre-Exodus narrative to be framed in explicitly chronological terms is the Flood account. Here, in light of a recently published Akkadian text from Ugarit (RS 94.2953) and Berossus’ version of the Flood story, I suggest that in this unique case P may be based on earlier models that were in possession of a precise temporal framework.

An unlikely, yet crucial, witness for the study of the Late Antique afterlife of the Jewish pseudepigraphical Book of Jubilees (2nd century BCE) is the Anonymous Syriac Chronicle to the Year 1234. This chronicle not only preserves extensive fairly literal excerpts from this work, but also adaptations of some of its traditions, which reached the anonymous chronicler via the Book of the Cave of Treasures and (a) Syriac chronographic source(s).

In this paper, which I presented in Oxford in 2013,  I investigated the origin of these adaptations, which lead us to the Greek chronicles of Hippolytus of Rome (3rd century) and Annianus of Alexandria (5th century), and the Syriac chronicle of the enigmatic Andronicus (6th century).