Fish the Right

Jubilees

The Book of Jubilees

Outside the Bibles most churches use. Scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (and its sister church in Eritrea); not in Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant Bibles.

About Jubilees

Jubilees is an ancient Jewish retelling of Genesis and the start of Exodus, from the creation to the exodus from Egypt, given as what an angel of the presence dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai. It dates every event by jubilees, periods of 49 years, and by weeks of years, and keeps a calendar of 364 days. It adds to the stories (the names of Adam and Eve’s daughters, the wives of the patriarchs, a chief of evil spirits called Mastema) and has the patriarchs keep feasts the law of Moses would later give, such as the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles. It is also called “the Little Genesis”.

Scholars date it to the second century BC, most often between about 170 and 150 BC; earlier scholars, Charles among them, placed it later in that century. The oldest copy found among the Dead Sea Scrolls was made late in the second century BC.

It survives complete only in Ge’ez, the old language of the Ethiopian church, which kept copying it as Scripture. Hebrew fragments of more than a dozen copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; part of a Latin translation survives, and Greek and Syriac writers quote it.

The translation is R. H. Charles’s, from the Ethiopic, as printed in 1917. It keeps his chapter and verse numbers and his brackets; a key under each chapter says what they mean.

Chapters

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50

The translation

R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, or the Little Genesis (Translations of Early Documents, Series I), with an introduction by G. H. Box. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917. Translated from Ge’ez (Ethiopic); in the public domain in the United States.

From sacred-texts.com’s transcription of the 1917 edition (its pages as the Internet Archive keeps them), checked against the Internet Archive’s scan of the book. Box’s introduction, the footnotes, the editors’ cross-references in the headings and the dates in the margin (years from the creation) are left out.

Text from the Internet Sacred Text Archive: “Scanned at sacred-texts.com, July 2004. John Bruno Hare, redactor. This text is in the public domain in the USA. These files may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this notice of attribution is left intact.” sacred-texts.com