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Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

Jan 17, 2025, 12:27 PM

One thing about people is that they are pretty curious. Far more so than even their pets.

Whatever people learn, they always seem to want to know more. A while back we covered Jesus’s youth in the Infancy Gospels, because people wanted more info about the baby Jesus than the Bible provided.

And now, we’ll take a peek at the Book of Jubilees, because someone, somewhere, wanted more information about ALL of Genesis, not just Jesus’s childhood.

The Book of Jubilees is sort of a re-telling of Genesis from a different perspective. All the stuff from Creation to Moses’s death, rehashed. Like all of the Apocrypha it’s extra stuff; the Bible can only be so big, you know…so some things had to be left out.

What makes the Book of Jubilees so interesting is its framing and its name. A Jubilee is 50 years, and for whatever reason, it was important to the writer(s) to break history into 50-year chunks. Why? Idk.

It’s organized by 7 “weeks” of years; that is, 7 groups of 7 years, or 49 years, making every 50th year a Jubilee year. That allows the writer(s) to say “X happened in the first Jubilee, Y happened in the second Jubilee, and so on. The author of Jubilees really liked numbers, and dates.

The Book of Jubilees is fairly long, about 50,000 words, in about 50 chapters. Again, 50, and 50. And it’s thought to have been written around 150 BCE, about the time of the Maccabees. That was the brief window when Israel had some self-rule between Greek Seleucid control and Roman control. A time when it was safe to write stuff, without getting killed by your overlords.

So we’ll just muddle through it for a while, stopping off at interesting stuff.

Chapter One tells us why the Book of Jubilees even exists. When Moses was up on Mt. Sinai, God said “grab a pen.”

Jub 1:1
“And it came to pass in the first year of the exodus…in the third month, on the sixteenth day of the month, that God spake to Moses…God taught him the earlier and the later history of the division [Jubilees] of all the days.”

Then God told Moses, “I know you guys are a hopeless case…you’re gonna leave me, take other gods, sacrifice children, and stray in every way possible. So I’m gonna give you to the Gentiles [Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans] as punishment, but you’ll come back to me and eventually I’ll come down to you for eternity.”

So, the first really interesting thing about Jubilees is that it’s predictive. It says “all this will happen” and Genesis says, “this is how it happened.” Jubilees is the early national history of Israel in a nutshell, before Israel was even a nation. And it’s all about disobeying.

Jubilees Chapter 2 covers Creation, in this sequence. It’s slightly different than Gen 1.

Day 1: 7 Creations – Heaven, Earth, Water, Angels, the Abyss, Darkness, and lastly, Light.

Day 2: 1 Creation – the bubble we all live in, separating the water above Heaven from the water below earth.

Day 3: 4 Creations – Dry land, seas, rivers, and The Garden of Eden.

Day 4: 3 Creations – Sun, moon, stars

Day 5: 3 Creations – Sea Monsters & fish, birds, and plants

Jub 2:10
“And on the fifth day He created great sea monsters in the depths of the waters, for these were the first things of flesh that were created by his hands…”

Note that this is in the ‘crafting’ tradition of God working with his hands, like in Gen 2, and not the ‘spoken’ tradition, where God speaks things into existence, like in Gen 1.

Gen 1:20
“And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures…”

Day 6: 4 Creations – Animals, cattle, man, woman.

In case you’ve lost track, that’s 22 kinds of creation. The writer of Jubilees didn’t lose track, and just like he points out 50-year cycles and days of the month like “in the third month, on the sixteenth day”, he itemizes Creation, too:

Jub 2:15
“And there were altogether two and twenty kinds [of Creation]. And He finished all his work on the sixth day…”

Eventually, God picks his favorite people and his favorite day.

Jub 2:19
'Behold, I will separate unto Myself a people from among all the peoples, and these shall keep the Sabbath day…they shall be My people and I will be their God…whoever does any work thereon shall die.”

Jub 2:30
“…we kept Sabbath in the heavens before it was made known to any flesh to keep Sabbath thereon on the earth. And the Creator of all things blessed it, but he did not sanctify all peoples and nations to keep Sabbath thereon, but Israel alone.”

Jubilees talks a lot about the Sabbath, which makes me think that when it was written, people must have been pretty lax observing it. Like with most things, you only need a rule if someone isn’t doing what they are supposed to be doing.

In Chapter 3, we back up just a bit in time. Before God picks his favorite people, there have to be people. And right now, there’s just Adam. First, Adam gets to name all the beasts, male and female.

Jub 3:1
“And on the six days of the second week we [angels] brought, according to the word of God, unto Adam all the beasts… Adam saw all these, male and female, according to every kind…”

Adam realized that cows and fish have mates, but (Lilith aside) he doesn’t. God fixes that oversight with Adam’s rib, and the first thing Adam does with his new gift from God is get it on…

Jub 3:6
“And [in the second week of existence, God] awaked Adam out of his sleep and on awaking he rose on the sixth day, and [God] brought her to [Adam], and [Adam] knew her…”

God’s gift to Adam.

Then there’s a bit of a plot twist. Something that’s not in the Bible. Because although God made Eden on day three, he didn’t put Adam and Eve there right away. They lived somewhere else first, which we’ll get to later.

Jub 3:9
“And after Adam had completed forty days in the land where he had been created, [God] brought him into the garden of Eden to till and keep it…but his wife they brought in on the eightieth day, and after this she entered into the garden.”

So Adam and Eve transplanted to Eden, where they had to work tilling the soil. Yuck! And apparently, the difference in timing between men and women getting into Eden has to do with certain technical requirements in the commandments regarding cleanliness and birthing, etc.

Jub 3:10
“And for this reason the commandment is written in regard to her that gives birth: 'if she bears a male, she shall remain in her uncleanness seven days according to the first week of days, and thirty and three days shall she remain in the blood of her purifying…”

All that juicy fruit in Eden doesn’t come for free, either.

Jub 3:14
“And in the first week [7 years] of the first jubilee, Adam and his wife were in the garden of Eden for seven years tilling and keeping it, and we gave him work and we instructed him to do everything that is suitable for tillage.”

Despite the hard labor of running a farm, things seem pretty good for Adam and Eve so far. But you know who’s coming. That old Serpent. And that’s where we’ll pick up next time in the ‘other’ Genesis, the Book of Jubilees.

Lilith, Adam’s first wife according to some Jewish traditions. He left her because she was too headstrong and not subservient enough – and she ran away with Satan. What man is going to put up with that?

Till next time, hot chicks.

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Re: Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

>“'if she bears a male...
>So what happens if she has a female?

The short answer is, everything is doubled for women. Why? No one seems to know.

As 'extra' information, Jubilees spends of lot of time explaining why Jews did the things they did, culturally. Sometimes the answer is as easy as, "God said to do it that way." But where there is confusion, Jubilees tries to give answers. This passage is a tie-in to Leviticus 12, which covers birthing rules and purification of women in the Law.

Lev 12:1

"The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Say to the Israelites: ‘A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period.

3 On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. 4 Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over.

5 If she gives birth to a daughter, for two weeks the woman will be unclean, as during her period. Then she must wait sixty-six days to be purified from her bleeding."

So, for boys, the unclean woman time is 7+33=40, and for girls it's 14+66=80. Double.

A couple of reasons given in other scriptures and commentary are the extra mourning time needed for birthing a girl instead of a boy (lol), or that males are simply a 'double portion' compared to females, so their purification process only requires half as long.

In this specific context in the Jubilees creation story, Leviticus is called into play to help explain why Adam was allowed into Eden after 40 days, and Eve had to wait 80 to enter. Basically, because women take twice as long to do everything. And, if getting ready for an evening out is any indication, that's pretty spot on.

Lilith is a fictious character imagined by those who let their imaginations...

Re: Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

Re: Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

Re: Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

Re: Religious Pron: The Book of Jubilees, 1 of ?

Lilith is a fictious character imagined by those who let their imaginations...

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