Question
Dear Gramps,
What and where is the “Book of Jubilees”?
Pam
Answer
Dear Pam,
The Book of Jubilees is a 50 chapter ancient Jewish religious work. It was very well known to very early Christians.
Here is a paragraph from “The Reluctant Messenger of Science and Religion,” as found on the internet:
The Book of Jubilees was written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the year of the accession of Hyrcanus to the high priesthood in 135 B.C. and his breach with the Pharisees some years before his death in 105 B.C. It is the most advanced pre-Christian representative of the midrashic tendency, which has already been at work in the Old Testament Chronicles. As the Chronicler had rewritten the history of Israel and Judah from the basis of the Priests’ Code, so our author re-edited from the Pharisaic standpoint of his time the history of events from the creation to the publication, or, according to the author’s view, the republication of the law on Sinai. In the course of re-editing he incorporated a large body of traditional lore, which the midrashic process had put at his disposal, and also not a few fresh legal enactments that the exigencies of the past had called forth. His work constitutes an enlarged Targum on Genesis and Exodus, in which difficulties in the biblical narrative are solved, gaps supplied, dogmatically offensive elements removed, and the genuine spirit of later Judaism infused into the primitive history of the world.
Gramps
