In spite of some scholars’ inclination to include the book of Jubilees as another witness to “Enochic Judaism,” the relationship of Jubilees to the apocalyptic writings and events surrounding the Maccabean revolt has never been adequately clarified. This book builds on scholarship on genre to establish a clear pattern among the ways Jubilees resembles and differs from other apocalypses. Jubilees matches the apocalypses of its day in overall structure and literary morphology. Jubilees also uses the literary genre to raise the issues typical of the apocalypses—including revelation, angels and demons, judgment, and eschatology—but rejects what the apocalypses typically say about those issues, subverting reader expectations with a corrected view. In addition to the main argument concerning Jubilees, this volume’s survey of what is fundamentally apocalyptic about apocalyptic literature advances the understanding of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and, in turn, of later apocalypses and comparable perspectives, including those of Paul and the Qumran sectarians.

The early Enoch literature does not refer to the Mosaic Torah or emphasize the distinctively Mosaic laws designed for Israel. But the book of Jubilees gives room to both Mosaic and Enochic traditions within the Sinaitic revelatory framework. What, then, should we make of such differences? / This question and related speculations were on the minds of scholars gathered from around the world at the fourth Enoch Seminar at Camaldoli, Italy, in July 2007. Four tendencies emerged from the discussion at the seminar. Some scholars claimed that Jubilees was a direct product of Enochic Judaism with subordinated Mosaic features. Some suggested that Jubilees was a conscious synthesis of Enochic and Mosaic tradition, yet remaining autonomous from both. Some asserted that Jubilees was essentially a Mosaic text with some Enochic influence. And others questioned the very existence of a gulf between Enochic and Mosaic traditions as competing forms of Judaism at the time of Jubilees. / Gabriele Boccaccini and Giovanni Ibba have carefully collected the countervailing views into this volume. What readers will find here is a lively debate among the most distinguished international specialists, together striving for a better understanding of a puzzling ancient document.

Almost all scholars have viewed the book of Jubilees as the work of a single author, applying to the book methods of analysis determined primarily by its literary genre, Rewritten Bible. This study suggests a new approach, in light of numerous contradictions between the rewritten stories on the one hand, and the juxtaposed legal passages and chronological framework on the other. It is suggested here that the editor of Jubilees adopted extant reworked sources, and added his own legal and chronological framework. This proposed literary-critical method is highly significant for the study of the book’s worldview, as is demonstrated by the analysis of passages in Jubilees that relate to the origins of evil and of law in the world.

This volume brings together a wide range of international scholars of Ancient Judaism, in celebration of the career of Betsy Halpern-Amaru. The essays in the first section, Interpreting Ritual Texts, examine Jewish ritual praxis in late antiquity, highlighting the ways in which text and ritual intersect in the process of interpretation. Mapping Diaspora Identities asks how Diaspora communities came to understand the Bible’s preoccupation with land, and how land was used to figure ancient authors’ depictions of “center” and “margin” in drawing the boundaries of Jewish communities, and of Jewish identity. Finally, Rewriting Tradition explores rewriting of biblical stories in Hellenistic and later Jewish sources, and the ways that authors work through the tradition to reflect their current realities and their hopes for the future.

Enoch, Levi, and Jubilees on Sexuality marks a first stage in William Loader's research on attitudes toward sexuality in Judaism and Christianity of the Hellenistic Greco-Roman era. Loader first discusses the early Enoch literature relevant to the theme, focusing on the impact of an ancient myth on the writings and examining how sexual deeds are not here concerned with sexual wrongdoing. He then examines the weight of such wrongdoing in the priestly instruction of the fragmentary Aramaic Levi Document as a whole. He finally considers Jubilees as a cumulative work, building on both the Enoch tradition and the instruction of Levi, and reveals a range of devices warning against sexual depravity. Loader's aim throughout is to interpret the works from within, examining literary form, context, sequence, and tradition and redaction, reflecting engagement with current research in this area.

Since a fuller range of Qumran sectarian and not clearly sectarian texts and recensions has recently become available to us, its implications for the comparative study of eschatological, apocalyptic and messianic ideas in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the New Testament need to be explored anew. This book situates eschatological ideas in Qumran literature between biblical tradition and developments in late Second Temple Judaism and examines how the Qumran evidence on eschatology, resurrection, apocalypticism, and messianism illuminates Palestinian Jewish settings of emerging Christianity. The present study challenges previous dichotomies between realized and futuristic eschatology, wisdom and apocalypticism and provides many new insights into intra-Jewish dimensions to eschatological ideas in Palestinian Judaism and in the early Jesus-movement.

A large amount of Leviticus material has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet there is surprisingly little secondary scholarly analysis of the role of Leviticus in this corpus. The book of Leviticus survives in several manuscripts; it also features in quotations and allusions, so that it seems to be a foundational source for the ideology behind the composition of some of the nonscriptural texts. Indeed this volume argues that the ideology of the Holiness Code persisted in the communities that collected the manuscripts and placed them in the Qumran Caves.

In this fully revised and expanded edition, Nickelsburg introduces the reader to the broad range of Jewish literature that is not part of either the Bible or the standard rabbinic works. This includes especially the Apocrypha (such as 1 Maccabees), the Pseudepigrapha (such as 1 Enoch), the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of Josephus, and the works of Philo.