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Thoughts On The Torah Portion
The Most Important Jewish Text You’ve Never Heard Of
The Book of Jubilees
In 1840, August Dilman, a German scholar traveling in Ethiopia, discovered a text that had been preserved and honored in both the Christian and Jewish communities there for centuries, but had been unknown to the West for nearly two thousand years.
The Book of Jubilees is particularly important for Jews in the study of the holiday of Shavuot.
Jubilees is sometimes called The Little Genesis, or The Book of the Divisions of Time. It is a rewriting of the biblical Book of Genesis and the first part of Exodus, and one of its key concerns is time. It opens with a brief Prologue:
These are the words regarding the divisions of the times for the law and for the testimony, for the events of the years, for the weeks of their Jubilees throughout all the years of eternity as he (God) related them to Moses on Mount Sinai when he (Moses) went up to receive the stone tablets- the law and the commandment-by the word of the Lord as he had told him that he should come up to the summit of the mountain. [1]
The opening phrase “these are the words” are the same as opening Hebrew words (eleh ha’devarim) of the Book of Deuteronomy. The text has a clearly Mosaic outlook…
