Jubilees: Genesis, Rewritten by an Angel

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer in Judea, probably a priest, writing in Hebrew. He presents the book as dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai by the angel of the presence.

When: About 160–150 BC, a few years after the Maccabean revolt.

Where it fits: It retells Genesis 1 to Exodus 24, from creation to Moses on the mountain, and dates every event in periods of forty-nine years called jubilees.

Which Bibles keep it: The Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Bibles, and no others. The Jews of Ethiopia also hold it sacred. It survives complete only in Ge’ez, the old language of Ethiopia.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Never quoted. The idea that Moses received the law through angels, which Stephen mentions in Acts 7:53, was taught in books like this.

How close it stays to me: Close in hoping for a healed earth with no Satan. Far in Sabbath death penalties and walls against the nations.

If you only read three chapters: Jubilees 2, Jubilees 23 and Jubilees 50.

Words to Know

Jubilee — in the law of Moses, the fiftieth year, when slaves were freed and land went back to its families. In this book, a period of forty-nine years used to count time.

Heavenly tablets — in Jubilees, the record kept in heaven of God’s laws and of everything that will happen.

Mastema — the name this book gives to the chief of the evil spirits, the one your Bible calls Satan. It means hostility.

Ge’ez — the ancient language of Ethiopia, still used in the Ethiopian church’s worship.

The Book in Brief

Moses goes up Mount Sinai for forty days. God tells the angel of the presence to write out for him the whole history of the world from creation, and the angel dictates it.

The angel retells Genesis day by day, adding detail and dates. The angels were created on the first day. The angels kept the first Sabbath in heaven on the seventh day of creation, and it was given to Israel alone. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Enoch, the flood and Noah all appear, with laws attached to each story. Noah’s sons divide the earth. The fallen angels’ children become evil spirits, and God lets a tenth of them stay to serve Mastema, their chief.

Abraham burns the house of idols, rejects the stars, and is tested at the sacrifice of Isaac, at Mastema’s suggestion. Before he dies he warns Jacob to separate himself from the nations and not eat with them. The story of Jacob and his sons follows, with the punishment of Shechem and a law of death for marrying a daughter to a foreigner.

The angel predicts that Israel will go astray, and then a day when children study the law, lives grow long again, and there shall be no Satan. The book ends with the Exodus, the Passover, and strict laws for the Sabbath, under pain of death.

In your Genesis, Abraham never keeps the Sabbath. No one does until Moses. Noah does not keep feasts on set days. Jacob’s sons do not study the law. Jubilees fixes all of that. In this version, the Sabbath was kept by the angels on the seventh day of creation, the patriarchs kept the feasts on the right dates, and the laws Moses received at Sinai were already written in heaven.

The writer lived in the generation after Antiochus tried to wipe out my people’s law. He saw Jews who had grown up wanting to be Greek. His answer was to show them that the law was not a late rule from Moses. It was older than the world.

An angel at Moses’ ear

The book begins at Sinai. God says to the angel: Write for Moses from the beginning of creation till My sanctuary has been built among them for all eternity (Jubilees 1:26). And the angel speaks to Moses: Write the complete history of the creation, how in six days the Lord God finished all His works (Jubilees 2:1).

So everything after that is presented as the words of an angel, written down by Moses. It is a claim of great authority for a book written about thirteen hundred years after Moses lived.

You have seen the same thing in Daniel, Enoch and 2 Esdras: a writer puts his words in the mouth of a hero of the past, so that they will be heard. Jubilees goes further. It puts its words in the mouth of an angel, and lays them over Genesis itself.

Go deeperFound in the caves

For more than a thousand years Jubilees was lost to the West. Greek and Latin writers knew of it, under names like Little Genesis, and quoted bits of it. But the whole book survived only in Ethiopia, translated into Ge’ez from a Greek version. The Ethiopian church kept it in its Bible, and still does. European scholars found it there in the 1800s, and R. H. Charles published the English translation quoted here in 1902.¹

Then came the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the caves near Qumran, beginning in 1947, scholars found fragments of about fourteen or fifteen copies of Jubilees in Hebrew, its original language. Only a handful of books, such as Psalms, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Genesis, were found there in more copies. The community of the scrolls treated it as an authority. Their Damascus Document refers to it by its title, the book of the divisions of the times into their jubilees and weeks.¹

So a book that Catholic and Protestant churches knew only by name and in scraps until the 1800s was, in my own time, one of the most-read books among some of my people.

The Sabbath from the beginning

The heart of this book is the Sabbath.

And He gave us a great sign, the Sabbath day, that we should work six days, but keep Sabbath on the seventh day from all work (Jubilees 2:17). The us is the angels. They kept it first. Then God gave it to one people on earth: he did not sanctify all peoples and nations to keep Sabbath thereon, but Israel alone (Jubilees 2:31).

And at the end, the book returns to the Sabbath and lists what is forbidden on it: work of any kind, a journey, buying and selling, drawing water you did not prepare the day before, carrying anything out of your tent, lighting a fire, riding an animal, sailing, killing an animal, fishing, whoever fasts or makes war on the Sabbaths (Jubilees 50:12). And for every one: The man who does any of these things on the Sabbath shall die (Jubilees 50:13).

The law of Moses already said that whoever works on the Sabbath must die (Exodus 35:2). Jubilees adds to the list.

I kept the Sabbath. I went to the synagogue on it. And I was attacked all my life for how I kept it. My friends picked grain to eat as we walked through a field on the Sabbath, and I was accused. I healed a man’s hand on the Sabbath, and they began to plan how to kill me.

I said: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). And I asked them: Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm? To save a life, or to kill? (Mark 3:4). They were silent.

The Sabbath is God’s gift of rest. It is the day the slave stops working too. A Sabbath that you must keep or die is not a gift any more.

A jubilee with no freedom in it

The book takes its name from the jubilee, and I want you to notice what it does with the word.

In the law of Moses the jubilee was the fiftieth year. Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee to you; and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family (Leviticus 25:10). Slaves went free. Land that had been sold to pay debts went back to the family that had lost it. It was God’s law against the rich owning everything forever.

In Jubilees, a jubilee is a unit of forty-nine years for counting the history of the world. The book dates everything by it. Only once, at the very end, does it remember what a jubilee was for: in the fiftieth jubilee a whole people comes out of slavery into its own land. But it never uses the jubilee to free a single slave or cancel a single debt.

When I stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth, I read from the scroll of Isaiah: to proclaim release to the captives … to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18–19). That year is the jubilee. I meant it as liberty for real people with real debts. This book turned it into a calendar.

No Satan, and long lives

There is one passage here I love, and it is close to what I preached.

The angel predicts that Israel will go wrong, and suffer. And then: in those days the children shall begin to study the laws, and to seek the commandments, and to return to the path of righteousness (Jubilees 23:26). People’s lives will grow long again, close to a thousand years. And there shall be no old man nor one who is not satisfied with his days, for all shall be (as) children and youths (Jubilees 23:28).

And all their days they shall complete and live in peace and in joy, and there shall be no Satan nor any evil destroyer; for all their days shall be days of blessing and healing (Jubilees 23:29).

That is a kingdom on earth. Not souls rescued out of the world, but the world itself healed, with no Satan and every day a day of healing.

I went through the villages of Galilee healing people and driving out evil spirits, and I said that was what it looked like when God’s kingdom came near. When the woman bent over for eighteen years stood up straight in the synagogue, I asked: Ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham whom Satan had bound eighteen long years, be freed from this bondage on the Sabbath day? (Luke 13:16).

That is the day of healing this book hoped for. I did it on a Sabbath.

Go deeperWho tested Abraham?

In your Genesis, the terrible story of Abraham and Isaac begins plainly: God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1). God himself tells Abraham to sacrifice his son.

Jubilees could not accept that. It tells the story like the opening of Job. The prince Mastêmâ came and said before God, ‘Behold, Abraham loves Isaac his son, and he delights in him above all things else; bid him offer him as a burnt-offering on the altar’ (Jubilees 17:16). The test is the accuser’s idea. When Abraham passes it, the prince Mastêmâ was put to shame (Jubilees 18:12).

Your Bible already does this once. In 2 Samuel, the LORD is angry with Israel and moved David against them to count the people, then punishes them for it (2 Samuel 24:1). When 1 Chronicles retells the same story centuries later, it says: Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to take a census of Israel (1 Chronicles 21:1).

In both cases a later writer looked at an older story where God does something cruel and moved it onto Satan. Jubilees does this more than once. Mastema is the one who tries to kill Moses on the road to Egypt, not the LORD as in Exodus 4:24 (Jubilees 48:2–3).²

My people were thinking hard, in the centuries before me, about whether God could do evil. Jubilees is one of the places where you can watch them doing it.

Where Jubilees and I part

There is one more thing in this book I must name, because it is the opposite of what I did.

When old Abraham blesses his grandson Jacob, he tells him: Separate thyself from the nations, and eat not with them: And do not according to their works, and become not their associate; for their works are unclean, and all their ways are a Pollution and an abomination and uncleanness (Jubilees 22:16).

And later the angel gives Moses a law: if there is any man who wishes in Israel to give his daughter or his sister to any man who is of the seed of the Gentiles he shall surely die, and they shall stone him with stones … and they shall burn the woman with fire (Jubilees 30:7). For this, the angel says, there is no remission, nor any atonement (Jubilees 30:10).

Do not eat with them. Kill your daughter if she marries one.

I ate with everyone. The religious men asked my friends, Why is it that he eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners? (Mark 2:16). I sat at table with a Pharisee, and I stayed in the house of Zacchaeus. I healed a Roman officer’s servant, and I said of his faith, many will come from the east and the west, and will sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 8:11).

Jubilees has Abraham saying of the nations, eat not with them. I said the nations would eat with Abraham.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Leviticus 25:10.

You will find: the real jubilee: liberty throughout the land, everyone returned to their land and family.

Then read Jubilees 50:6–13, the Sabbath laws, and Mark 3:1–6.

The Short Version

• Jubilees retells Genesis, presented as the words of an angel to Moses on Sinai. It is in the Ethiopian Bible and was found in Hebrew at Qumran.
• In it the law, the Sabbath and the feasts were kept from the beginning, and breaking the Sabbath means death. I said the Sabbath was made for man.
• It names its book after the jubilee, but uses it to count years, never to free a slave or cancel a debt.
• It hopes for a healed earth where there shall be no Satan, and every day is healing. That is close to the kingdom I preached.
• It tells Jacob not to eat with the nations. I ate with everyone.