Preface When I first read the book of Jubilees (in R.H. Charles’s translation) 30 years ago, it seemed an unusually interesting work. Some time later F.M. Cross informed me that he had for years wanted a student to write a dissertation analysing the biblical citations in Jubilees in light of the new information emerging from the Qumran manuscripts. His suggestion led, quite understandably, to a plunge into the Ethiopic (Ge’ez) language, writing a thesis and, perhaps surprisingly, to a career of working