Jubilees

The Hermeneia Translation

James C. VanderKam

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

JUBILEES

The Hermeneia Translation

Copyright © 2020 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email copyright@1517.media or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover design: Kristin Miller

Print ISBN: 9-781-5064-6703-0

eBook ISBN: 9-781-5064-6704-7

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations and Sigla

Introduction

Contents of the Book of Jubilees

Themes of the Book of Jubilees

Translation

Bibliography

Translation of the Book of Jubilees

Preface

The book of Jubilees is a narrative work by a Jewish author who composed it in Hebrew around the middle of the second century bce. In it he reframed and rewrote the book of Genesis and the first parts of the book of Exodus. His second edition, as it were, of the stories from creation to Sinai has the distinction of being the oldest sustained commentary on the Genesis-Exodus narratives. It was probably written before there was a separated community of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it was influential for that group and eventually for some other Jewish and Christian writers.

The translation of Jubilees that appears in the present book is the one found in my Jubilees: A Commentary in Two Volumes (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2018). That translation is, in turn, a revision and updating of the one I published in The Book of Jubilees (2 vols., Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 510–11, Scriptores Aethiopici 87–88; Louvain: Peters, 1989), vol. 2. Most of the Hebrew fragments of Jubilees from the Qumran caves were published after the appearance of the 1989 volumes; the evidence from those copies was incorporated into the translation in the 2018 commentary. The only changes to the translation in the commentary that I have introduced here—and there are very few of them—involve matters of punctuation, apart from replacing one word in 39:10 (bolt instead of door) and altering some paragraphing to accommodate insertion of titles for each chapter and subheadings within the chapters. (In the two-volume commentary itself, the subheadings appear in the commentary proper, not in the translation.) A couple of subheadings in chapter 32 were also changed. The textual notes in the present volume, which were purposely kept to a minimum, are a small selection from and rewriting of ones in the commentary. They draw attention to noteworthy differences between the early witnesses and offer brief explanations of problems in the text.

I wish to express thanks to the editorial board of Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible for permission to publish the translation in this format. I am grateful to Sidnie White Crawford, a board member, for encouraging the project and to Fortress Press, especially Will Bergkamp, for ...