The Problem

Jubilees 3:9 says that “after 40 days had come to an end for Adam in the land where he had been created, we brought him into the Garden of Eden to work and keep it. His wife was brought [there] on the eightieth day. After this she entered the Garden of Eden.”Footnote ³ These data provide an etiology for the law on the time of purification after childbirth from Lev 12: forty days for a boy, eighty for a girl (3:10–14; cf. Lev 12:2–5). The narrative next describes the first couple’s life in Eden, which lasted seven years (Jub. 3:15–16). Jubilees 3:17 begins the narrative of their transgression: “When the conclusion of the seven years which he had completed there arrived— seven years exactly—in the second month, on the seventeenth, the serpent came and approached the woman.” This verse puts the entry of Adam into the garden on 2/17, which has been seen to pose a problem. VanderKam describes it well:

From these data John Rook concludes that Jubilees cannot be using the calendar assumed by the majority of scholars.Footnote ⁵ He resurrects a proposal Abraham Epstein made in 1891 that Jubilees knows two calendars: the 364-day calendar described in Jub. 6 and a thirteen-month calendar of twenty-eight-day months for the festivals.Footnote ⁶ Epstein calculated from the Festival of Shavuot, dated in Jubilees to 3/15: counting back seven weeks from this date and presupposing twenty-eight-day months would put the waving of the Omer on 1/22, the day after the first Sabbath after Passover. Jaubert, on the other hand, approaching the problem in the same way but assuming thirty-day months, arrived at 1/26 for the Omer, a date confirmed by the Qumran calendars.Footnote ⁷ Rook concludes that “both are mathematically possible, depending on one’s presupposition concerning the length in days of a month.”Footnote ⁸ The data in 3:9–17 break the tie by providing “unambiguous” evidence that the length of the month is twenty-eight days. “If we follow the suggestions of Jaubert or Julian Morgenstern that the first month has thirty or thirty-one days, then the uncleanness [of Adam] would not end on II/17 as the text demands, but on either II/15 or II/14.”Footnote ⁹ Using a twenty-eight-day month, on the other hand, and counting 1/6 as Adam’s first day, Rook counts forty days through 2/17. He assumes that the “II/17 would not be counted twice in a calendrical calculation,” so that Adam’s entry into the garden actually took place on 2/18.Footnote ¹⁰ “Not only is a careful reassessment of the Jubilees calendar now in order,” he concludes, “but so is the identification of this calendar with those of 1 Enoch and Qumran.”Footnote ¹¹

Critics of Rook argue that the idea of a twenty-eight-day month runs counter to explicit statements in Jubilees and that a twenty-eight-day month is not necessary to account for the chronological data.Footnote ¹² They reject Rook’s dating of Adam’s entry into Eden to 2/18, but they differ on how the data should be read. Baumgarten puts the entry on 2/16, arguing that for the author a complete year begins and ends on the same day, the Jahrzeit.Footnote ¹³ Most commentators, however, think the entry is dated to 2/17. This date, they argue, is forty days plus one after Adam’s creation, assuming the first month has thirty days. To make the count work, however, they have to begin it on the seventh day of creation.Footnote ¹⁴ If, with Baumgarten and Rook, they included the sixth day, the day of Adam’s creation, then the forty days would conclude on 2/15.

Michael Segal takes the discussion in a different direction: “The legal passage in Jub. 3:8–14 stands in tension with the surrounding story with regard to the dating of events. If so, this passage appears to have been composed by a different author than the surrounding, rewritten narrative.”Footnote ¹⁵ This passage becomes part of the evidence for Segal’s larger thesis that a redactor added legal teachings and a chronological framework to existing rewritten biblical stories to produce the Book of Jubilees. VanderKam responds:

What Segal assumes, however, is the consensus view of the Jubilees calendar. In a personal communication, VanderKam clarifies that he accepts the consensus for the book as a whole, but here the author has slipped up and mistakenly taken the first day of creation as 1/1 on the calendar. “It is a mistake that would have been easy to make.”Footnote ¹⁷ This explanation leaves the discrepancy in place and does not foreclose the possibility of a different hand at work.

It seems that either the author momentarily forgot about the calendar he insisted upon so forcefully or a different author was at work in this passage. I will argue that neither is true. Close reading will show that the passage is carefully constructed and the work of one author; the halakah is fully integrated into and supports the narrative. Special attention to the passage’s structure will also help us overcome one of the obstacles to full understanding: the lack of the original Hebrew; only the Ethiopic translation is extant. I will show, first, that the author intentionally dated Adam’s entry into Eden to 2/17 but did so in a way that should forestall the kind of chronological calculations modern scholars make; and, second, that the author had other, nonchronological reasons for adding dates to the story.

Jub. 3:9 and 17 in Context

VanderKam divides chapter 3 into four parts: vv. 1–7 (“finding a helper”), vv. 8–14 (“law for a woman after giving birth”), vv. 15–16 (“seven good years” in the garden), and vv. 17–35 (“sin and expulsion” from Eden).Footnote ¹⁸ Though he does not analyze the whole chapter, Segal talks about vv. 8–14 as “the legal section” within a “narrative context.”Footnote ¹⁹ Van Ruiten divides the chapter into just two parts according to the story line: vv. 1–16, life in the garden, and vv. 17–31, “the last 45 days in the garden,” that is, the time between the calendrical dates in v. 17 and v. 32.Footnote ²⁰ Van Ruiten’s first unit should be divided in two: Adam and Eve’s life in the garden does not begin until they enter the garden in v. 9. Everything up to that point takes place outside the garden. Each of the resulting sections corresponds to an episode in the biblical narrative:

Jubilees inverts the first two episodes from Genesis to make clear that creation of the animals and Eve takes place outside the garden. In the second section I would include v. 17a up through the date, which marks the conclusion of the seven years in the garden. I take issue with van Ruiten’s characterization of the last section as “the last 45 days in the garden”: the author is not making a chronological statement at all, as we will see.

The “chronological” data that have caused such trouble come in vv. 9 and 17, so the second section will be our focus. First, however, we need to look at v. 8, which begins the “legal passage” in Segal’s analysis. This verse is better viewed as concluding the first narrative section, providing a summary of the action, and drawing a halakic conclusion: “In the first week Adam and his wife—the rib—were created, and in the second week he showed her to him. Therefore a commandment was given to keep (women) in their defilement seven days for a male (child) and for a female two (units) of seven days” (cf. Lev 12:2, 5). Viewing the verse this way creates an immediate problem for the thesis that the legal passage comes from a redactor; the verse fits perfectly with the narrative to which it is attached. It provides the first “chronological” data of the passage, that Adam was created in the first week and his wife in the second, and the first derived law. The creation of Adam and his wife provides an analogy for the birth of male and female children and thus a hook for introducing the law of impurity after childbirth. We should note the imprecision: Adam was created on day 6, not day 7, and his wife, according to Jubilees, on day 13, not day 14. The simple fact that one was created in the first week and the other in the second is sufficient justification for the author to introduce the law.

Jubilees 3:9, though it continues introducing halakah, begins a new, tightly constructed narrative section that continues through the first part of 3:17, picking up an element from the Genesis story that Jubilees had thus far passed over: Adam is brought into the garden “to work and keep it” (3:9; cf. Gen 2:15), followed by Eve. It also provides the next bit of “chronological” information, which lets Jubilees continue its exposition of Lev 12: Adam enters the garden after forty days, and the woman after eighty days. Cana Werman finds difficulties in the structure of the text here: verse 12a duplicates the end of v. 9, and the statement in v. 12b and the summary of the law in v. 13 seem out of place. She prefers the more linear structure of 4Q265, a text that depends on Jubilees, in which narrative and halakah are neatly distinguished. She attempts a reconstruction following the order in the Qumran text.Footnote ²¹

The received text does appear disjointed and repetitive, but this is because it is composed of parallel units forming a chiasm with the main point, the sanctity of the garden, in the center:

The outer parallel units, A and Aʹ, show that the author clearly intended to date Adam’s entry into the garden to 2/17. We will examine these two verses below. Unit B gives the purpose of Adam’s entry, to work and keep the garden, and Bʹ shows him carrying out this purpose. As VanderKam says, v. 16 shows “the author’s more concrete understanding of what the two scriptural verbs [reproduced in 3:9b] involved.”Footnote ²² Each of the Ethiopic verbs that translate the biblical pair from Gen 2:15 in Jub. 3:9, taqanya and ʽaqaba, reappears more than once in 3:15–16. Further, the scriptural verb pair “have associations with the temple” and thus hint at Jubilees’ view of the garden as a sanctuary.Footnote ²³ This view is advanced by the next pair, C and Cʹ, both of which state the law of the parturient mother from Lev 12:4–5. Here it is the entry of the woman that is used as evidence. Her obedience to the law in C is the warrant for the application of the law to all Israel in Cʹ and again demonstrates that the garden of Eden is a sanctuary, which is the chi around which the whole chiastic structure revolves. Footnote ²⁴

The mistake Werman and others make is to take the introduction of the halakah as the author’s primary purpose and the idea that the garden is a sanctuary as a premise. In fact, the opposite is the case: the halakah is evidence the author uses to demonstrate that the garden is holy. The law is occasioned not by the sanctity of the garden, but by the circumstances of Adam’s and, especially, Eve’s creation and entry into the garden. In this passage, at least, the first of many to use a moment in the narrative as an etiology for a Mosaic law, the halakah also serves the narrative, demonstrating that the garden of Eden is a sanctuary, and not only a sanctuary, but the “holy of holies,” which will become clear when Adam offers an incense offering as he leaves the garden (Jub. 3:27).25 Jubilees will pick up this theme again when Eden falls in Shem’s lot (8:19). The halakah thus has a narrative function in the broader Jubilees narrative. Pace Segal, then, the halakah appears to be fully integrated into the narrative.

This brings us to the frame of the passage, A and Aʹ, where we find the “chronological” data that have caused such problems:Footnote ²⁶

Verse 17a points (Aʹ) back to v. 9a–b (A) not only by its reference to Adam’s entry into the garden but also by its structure and diction, which parallel the earlier verse. Whatever the underlying Hebrew may have been, the Ge‛ez certainly captures the spirit of the parallelism of the original.Footnote ²⁷ We have what Robert Alter called a “structure of intensification.”Footnote ²⁸ Everything is doubled in the second verse: the idea of completion at the beginning of the sentence, the root for “completion/complete,” the reference to the number of years. The adverb “exactly” and, of course, the date contribute to this intensification, conveying a high degree of precision. The verse dates the coming of the snake to 2/17, but it is clear from the parallel structure that the author intends to attach this date also to Adam’s entry into the garden, the element in v. 9 to which the date stands in parallel. The date serves as a bridge, joining together the last two sections of the chapter. Like the halakah, the date is thoroughly integrated into the structure of the whole passage, strongly suggesting that it is an original feature. Unlike the halakah, however, the date adds nothing apparent to the argument. The author does not need the date to introduce the halakah, or he would have put it in v. 9. The reader has already accepted the halakah on the basis of the time durations alone.

Before we address the question of why the author adds the date to the narrative, I want to make a few more observations about how the “chronological” data are presented. Verse 9 likely begins with a paraphrase of Lev 12:6, “when the days … are completed for a son or a daughter (תבל וא ןבל … ימי תאלמבו),” as Werman’s translation suggests: םוי םיעברא םדאל תאלמבו. The allusion to Lev 12:6 continues in the second half of v. 9. According to Leviticus, at the end of the days of purification, the mother of the child must bring a sacrifice to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting; only after this sacrifice is she clean and able to enter the sanctuary. Jubilees does not have a sacrifice at this point because Eve is not really impure; the author proceeds by analogy only. But there are two stages to Eve’s entry into the garden in v. 9: she is brought to the garden on the eightieth day, and “after this (ʼemdeḫra zentu)” she enters it. The woman’s adherence to the law of the parturient mother occasions the statement of the law, as we saw. Here, however, we notice the relationship of this second half of v. 9 to the first. They are inversely parallel, giving another chiastic structure:Footnote ²⁹

The parallel structure in the Ethiopic suggests a different introductory preposition in the original Hebrew of Jubilees than what we find in Lev 12:6, probably רחא (or ירחא), parallel to the רחא that opens the last clause in Werman’s translation.Footnote ³⁰ The translation would have gone from רחא in the Hebrew to μετὰ τὸ in the Greek to ʼemdeḫra in the Ethiopic, as is the case, for example, with Lev 14:43, in which the Hebrew has both רחא + perfect (once) and ירחא + infinitive construct (twice): in all instances the LXX translates the prepositional phrase with μετὰ τὸ + infinitive and the Ge‛ez with ʼemdeḫra + perfect indicative.Footnote ³¹ The LXX translates the preposition in Lev 12:6 with ὅταν and the Ge‛ez with ʼama.

The change in preposition adds a nuance not found in Lev 12:6. Bruce Waltke and Michael O’Connor report that when used temporally, “b may mark an actual time in, at, or when” and “may also mark an action simultaneous to that of the main verb,” the simultaneous action being in the infinitive.Footnote ³² Jacob Milgrom translates the prepositional phrase that opens Lev 12:6 as “on the completion” and says that “implied is the forty-first and eighty-first day.”Footnote ³³ As we have seen, this is also how

Jub. 3:9 has been interpreted by scholars. “After,” whether רחא, μετὰ, or ʼemdeḫra, does not convey the same immediacy, however, but only a succession of actions. The change in preposition opens up the possibility of a greater temporal distance between the clauses. The text does not say, as VanderKam put it in his statement of the problem above, that Adam entered the garden of Eden “on the next day,” only that the entrance was after the forty days were completed. Jubilees 3:9, then, does not specify or require an exact date for Adam’s entry, only that it happened “after” the completion of the time period prescribed by the law.

In fact, no date is necessary for the author’s argument. Pace Segal, the author does not depend on dates in order to introduce the law.Footnote ³⁴ The analogy the author draws is between time durations, the forty or eighty days the first couple spent outside the garden and the days of purification after childbirth in Lev 12. These durations are not calculated from dates but simply given, drawn from the biblical passage the author began to use already in the first section. The use of the durations would not surprise the reader after the reference to Lev 12 in v. 8. The reader may infer dates, but does not have to in order to understand the verse. The change in preposition makes such an inference more difficult.

The imprecision in v. 9 is in stark contrast to the precision in v. 17. Verse 9 does not provide a precise date for Adam’s entry into the garden. Verse 17 gives a precise date to this event, 2/17, but only long after the fact and long after it would have made a difference to the author’s halakic argument. Giving the date in v. 9 along with the time duration would certainly have invited a calculation, which might have interfered with the halakic argument if the calculated duration and given duration did not coincide. As we saw, the fact that these durations do not coincide when the Jubilees calendar is presupposed is the source of the problem posed by modern scholarship. It is hard to avoid the impression that at least part of the author’s purpose in choosing the introductory preposition in v. 9 and delaying the introduction of the date until well after the discussion of the halakah was to forestall the kind of chronological speculation in which modern scholarship has engaged. This impression would be strengthened if we knew why the author introduced the date even though it was not necessary to the argument and might call into question the author’s preferred calendar. That is the question to which we now turn.

The Typological Significance of Calendar Dates

Thus far, most have assumed that whoever wrote Jub. 3:17 introduced the date of 2/17 to make a statement about world chronology. Van Ruiten, for example, says that this date and the following, when Adam and Eve leave the garden on 4/1 (3:32), underline “the importance of chronology to the author of Jubilees.”Footnote ³⁵ VanderKam and Werman in their commentaries both assume that the date signifies the forty-seventh day of world history.Footnote ³⁶ It is little wonder that scholars make this assumption: authors have been using these data for chronological purposes for a long time, at least since the ninth-century Byzantine chronographer Syncellus, and probably long before.Footnote ³⁷ Chronographers were by definition interested only in what Jubilees’ dates might add to world chronology and so were engaged in the same type of speculation as modern scholars have been.

In a recent groundbreaking study, Betsy Halpern Amaru attempts a “systematic analysis of [calendar dates’] use and function within the Jubilees narrative.”Footnote ³⁸ She suggests four uses for these dates: 1) for festivals, 2) as memorial days, 3) to set up time frames, and 4) to track time.Footnote ³⁹ She assigns the dates from the Eden story to the fourth category, arguing that the author both here and in the flood story intended a “symmetrical design” in which time periods of equal length frame the central event of the story.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, the framing intervals are from the creation of the garden to the entry of Adam on 2/17 and from the sin on 2/17 to the departure from Eden on 4/1. Beginning the first interval with the creation of the garden is arbitrary, however, and Halpern Amaru still depends on a thirty-day third month (there are 31 days in this month in the consensus view of the calendar) to make the second interval equal the first.Footnote ⁴¹ Her second example is even less convincing. The intervals around the flood are the extra ten days Jubilees appears to add to the implied date of the beginning of Noah’s entry into the ark in Gen 7:1–4, a date Jubilees otherwise ignores, and the ten days between the earth being dry on 2/17 and the departure of the animals from the ark on 2/27. The count of both intervals is arbitrary: Does the author really understand 2/10 as the date Genesis assigns to the entry into the ark, and not the explicit date of 2/17 from Gen 7:13? And why begin the period of the flood from the hypothesized date of 2/10 and not the onset of the rain? Why end the second interval with the disembarkation of the animals and not with Noah’s, assigned by Jubilees to 3/1? Elsewhere in her article Halpern Amaru suggests there is something about the character of the date of 4/1 itself that imparts meaning to the event, which would make the choice of date understandable and call into question whether the author used the calendar to track time at all. We will return to this possibility below.

Baumgarten suggests another purpose for the date of 2/17: the author of Jubilees found the date in the Genesis flood story and used it typologically, that is, to connect the two stories.Footnote ⁴² Segal accepts typology as the original author’s “exegetical motive for dating the entry into the Garden” to 2/17.Footnote ⁴³ It was the redactor who then made the calculation, introducing the forty days before Adam’s entry and using them as the hook to introduce the halakah. But as we have seen, the hook for the halakah was already set in Jub. 3:8 with the creation of Adam in the first week and Eve in the second week. There was no need for calculation. The use of a biblical date, moreover, opens up the possibility that the author was not making a chronological calculation at all. And if the date in 3:17 was selected and not calculated, it is even clearer that the time periods in 3:9 were asserted and not calculated. It is this suggestion that I will explore in the remainder of this section.

Noting that the seventeenth of the second month is the date the flood begins in Gen 7:11 (a date repeated in Jub. 5:23), Baumgarten suggests the following typology:

Segal picks up this suggestion, arguing that the coincidence of dates “appears to link the first sin in history with the most severe punishment in history.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, James Kugel calls 2/17 “an ill-starred date, the same day on which the flood waters began to fall.”Footnote ⁴⁶ VanderKam’s assessment of Segal’s argument would apply to Baumgarten’s and Kugel’s as well: “[T]he parallel would be more convincing if the expulsion (=punishment) and the beginning of the flood (=punishment) coincided, not the first transgression and the inception of the deluge. The deluge was not a punishment for the sin of the first couple (there is no concept of original sin in Jubilees or of the transgressions of the first couple as ‘paradigmatic’), and Jubilees draws no connection between the two events apart from the shared date.”Footnote ⁴⁷ A specific critique of Baumgarten is that Genesis does not connect anything with the date 2/16. In Jubilees, 2/16 is the date Noah and company finish entering the ark (5:23), but that date would not yet be available to the implied reader. In any case, Jubilees dates Adam’s entry not to 2/16 but to 2/17, as we saw.

Pace VanderKam, a shared date is a sufficient connection for the reader familiar with the Genesis flood account to infer some meaning. The modern interpretations of it, however, have been superficial. The parallel statements in 3:9 and 3:17 and the emphatic “seven years exactly” in the latter verse show that the author wants to connect the date, first of all, not with the sin but with Adam’s entry into paradise, which cannot be construed as a bad thing.Footnote ⁴⁸ The beginning of the flood is not the only thing that Genesis dates to 2/17: “on the very same day Noah with his sons … and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons entered the ark,” along with all the animals (Gen 7:13–14). Van Ruiten notes that, in its rewriting of the Genesis account of God putting Adam into the garden, Jubilees does not use either of the biblical words for put (חונ in Gen 2:15, םיש in 2:8) but substitutes the causative of “to enter” (Eth.: ʼaboʼa). He is surely right that the author is influenced here by the use of “enter” (אוב) in Lev 12:4, of the woman’s entering the sanctuary after her purification, and that the author is thinking of Eden as a sanctuary.Footnote ⁴⁹ But perhaps the author also has in mind the use in Genesis of the same verb for the entry of Noah and his family into the ark. Readers familiar with the Genesis flood narrative would note a further resonance with that story: Adam’s first act on leaving the garden is the offering of incense (3:27), just as Noah offers a sacrifice as soon as he leaves the ark (Gen 8:18–20; cf. Jub. 6:1).

Such associations, prompted by the common date, would be available to the reader familiar with Genesis, but the typology is not complete until the reader gets to Jubilees’ treatment of the flood. Typology builds forward: events the reader has already encountered in a text inform later events placed on the same date when the reader encounters them. In the flood account, Jubilees reverses the order of events Genesis connects with the date 2/17 (Jub. 5:23–24): first comes the entry, then the opening of the floodgates. Actually, the entry, in which only Noah is named (“Noah and all that we brought to him”) takes place from 2/1 until 2/16. What is specifically associated with 2/17 in Jubilees is God closing the door to the ark from outside (5:23; cf. Gen 7:16), thus demonstrating God’s care for Noah by sealing all those inside from the deluge that follows (5:24). The reader, having read about Adam’s entry into Eden on 2/17, would recognize Noah as a new Adam, the ark as a new Eden, and the flood story as a new beginning. This understanding will be reinforced when the reader later learns that the inauguration of the flood story, when God orders Noah to build the ark (narrated in 5:22), took place on the first day of the year, 1/1 (6:25). This is the first story event after Adam’s departure from the garden that is given a calendrical date.

The second date in the Eden story, 4/1, the date of the first couple’s departure from paradise, is also used typologically. The date also appears in the Jubilees flood narrative as the day the water sources were closed, that is, when the flood had reached its maximum depth (Jub. 6:26; cf. 5:29: “fourth month”). In both instances the date has caused difficulties for those who wish to put it into a chronological framework. In the creation story, no time appears to lapse between the sin on 2/17 and the expulsion on 4/1. All the time indicators in the verse that describes Adam’s sacrifice on leaving the garden, Jub. 3:27, seem to point back to 2/17. The reader is not informed until a few verses later that the date of Adam’s departure was actually 4/1 (3:32). VanderKam follows Kister and Werman in suggesting that “it may be … that the writer of Jubilees has combined two conflicting traditions without trying to reconcile them.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, in the flood story, though Jubilees repeats the datum from Genesis that the rains lasted forty days (5:25), the date it assigns to the closing up of the water sources, 4/1, would yield a duration of forty-four or forty-five days from 2/17. VanderKam notes that this discrepancy is corrected in 4Q252, a chronology of the flood dependent on Jubilees that puts the end of the deluge on 3/26.Footnote ⁵¹ Halpern Amaru, as we saw, unconvincingly suggests that the author wants to match the post-flood duration to that which preceded the flood.

Halpern Amaru also notes, however, that 4/1, a memorial day,

This is an example of typology building forward throughout the book. The common date establishes a typological relationship among the various events, imbuing them and the date with meaning. With each successive event, the transitional—I would add ambivalent—character of the date comes into fuller focus. The departure from paradise is a negative event, though perhaps mitigated by Adam’s incense offering on that date. The end of the rain might be seen as negative, the flood at maximum depth, or positive, the beginning of the end of the flood. The announcement by the angels of the imminent birth of Isaac is positive, but the destruction of Sodom that takes place in the same month is negative (16:5). Levi and Simeon’s vengeance on Shechem also takes place in the fourth month (30:1–4), though for Jubilees this is a positive event that leads to Levi’s ordination as priest (30:18). By the time readers encounter it as the date of Israel’s entry into Egypt, 4/1 carries for them a sense of loss and danger, recalling the expulsion from Eden, but also the hope of the reunion with Joseph and of the promises made to Jacob on the eve of his departure (44:5–6).

It may be that 4/1 already held meaning for the author’s intended audience. Van Goudeover thinks the fast of the fourth month from Zech 8:19 might be in the background.Footnote ⁵³ In any case, the author uses the date to make a contrast between Adam’s offering on leaving the garden on 4/1 and Noah’s on leaving the ark on 3/1 (Jub. 6:1–10). Adam’s offering confirms his priesthood but is tinged by the loss of paradise. Noah’s sacrifice makes atonement for the earth and leads directly to the making of the covenant. For Jubilees this is the unique covenant that will be renewed by Abraham and again by Moses after it has been corrupted (6:18–19). Two other events are dated to 3/1: the vision Abram has before the covenant of the pieces (14:1), and the beginning of Jacob’s journey toward his reunion with Joseph (44:1). In all cases, 3/1 is associated with the covenantal promises, beginning with Noah’s sacrifice. In contrast with the ambivalence of 4/1, the date of 3/1 is wholly positive, signaling the promise of renewal.

Typology and Calendar

Support for the idea that Jubilees uses calendrical dates typologically may be found in the way it uses the annual festivals. It is universally recognized that the Festival of Weeks/Firstfruits holds special significance as the date of covenant making/renewal; the author attaches all instances of covenant renewal to that date.Footnote ⁵⁴ As many have noted, the author has shaped both instances of Passover/Unleavened Bread to be closely parallel.Footnote ⁵⁵ Both are a defeat or “shaming” of Mastema. And both instances of Booths are made into a thanksgiving for deliverance.Footnote ⁵⁶ It might be objected, however, that the festivals as communal events carry socially constructed meanings that lend them to typological use and make them different from ordinary calendar dates. In response, we first note that dates may acquire meaning in several ways. Rituals are not the only repository of cultural heritage. As we have seen, the biblical text is also a source for meaning, as in the case of the dates of the flood. And because calendrical dates recur, the author can give them meaning by assigning more than one event to them, as with 4/1. Taking these dates along with the festivals may suggest that the author has a penchant for using calendrical dates typologically. But because 2/17 and 4/1 are the dates we wish to show are used in this way, we would need to find other examples. The first of the third month, the date of Noah’s sacrifice and Abraham’s vision, may suffice.

Second, however, and more significant, the author’s use of the festivals points to a deeper connection between calendar and narrative. Sociologists and anthropologists have shown how communities use such rituals to divide the ongoing processes of communal labor into temporal cycles like the year.Footnote ⁵⁷ Mikhail Bakhtin has shown that the same processes of communal labor that constitute a community’s time also provide the basic building blocks of narrative: with agricultural society “was first constituted that feeling for time that had at its heart a taking apart and putting together of social everyday time, the time of holidays and seasons of the year, the periods of the days, the stages in the growth of plants and cattle. And here we get, in the oldest motifs and plots, a reflection of such time consolidated in language for the first time.”Footnote ⁵⁸ These plots revolve around “a collective battle of labor against nature.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The common origin in the processes of labor of both story and calendar means that any date in the calendar can represent a moment in the story. This interrelatedness, along with the cyclical nature of both the agricultural processes and the calendar they engender, is the basis for calendrical typology.

Bakhtin calls the literary representation of time-space relatedness that emerges with agricultural society the “folkloric chronotope.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Jubilees provides an excellent example of such a chronotope in Jub. 11:18–22: birds threatened the harvest by eating the seed (zar’a) at the time of planting. Abram overcame the threat by driving away the birds. At the harvest, the people “ate and were filled” (cf. Deut 8:10). Jubilees sets the natural story in a dualistic cosmos and credits Abram’s faith for his success. The birds, we are told, were sent by Mastema, chief of the evil spirits (11:11). Abram was able to drive off the birds, it is implied, because he had earlier separated from his father’s idolatry and turned to God in prayer (11:16–17). There are two indicators of calendrical time in this brief story: the main action takes place in the “time of planting,” and the conclusion, “they ate and were filled,” recalls the ritualization of the Festival of Firstfruits of Wheat, “eating and drinking and blessing the Creator,” which is built on Deut 8:10 (cf. Jub. 22:6, where Deut 8:10 is used both to describe the ritual and in Abraham’s prayer).Footnote ⁶¹ This brief story, along with its calendrical indicators, becomes the model for the remainder of the Abraham cycle: after Abram learns to trust God for the seasonal rain, on 7/1 (the beginning of the rainy season, which coincides with the time of planting;Footnote ⁶² Jub. 12:16–17), he is promised land and descendants (zar’a, seed: 12:24), a promise reiterated on two Festivals of Firstfruits (14:5, 15:9–10). The first of this seed, Isaac, is born on another Festival of Firstfruits (16:13). Isaac’s birth is celebrated at the Festival of Booths, the last festival of the harvest season, at which Abraham rejoices that from Isaac would come a “holy seed (zar’a)” (16:17) and “a righteous plant for the history of eternity” (16:26).Footnote ⁶³ Abraham must defend his seed from the machinations of Mastema, which he does through an act of faithfulness, the binding of Isaac, at Passover/Unleavened Bread (17:15–18:19). The “harvest” thus ensured is realized at the next recorded celebration of Firstfruits, when on the day of his death Abraham recognizes in Jacob the fulfillment of the promise of a holy seed from Isaac (ch. 22).

With this presentation of the Abraham story, the author appeals to the ritual and economic experience of the audience.Footnote ⁶⁴ The folkloric chronotope is not unique to Jubilees, of course. Whatever the remote origins of the Jewish festivals might have been,Footnote ⁶⁵ it is clear that in their biblical expression they are associated with the agricultural economy. Taking all the annual festivals as a ritual complex, Tamara Prosic, without reference to Bakhtin, observes that “the whole cycle … comes from a religion whose worship attention was on marking seasonal events rather than historical and whose idea of salvation was more related to a good and plentiful harvest than to liberation from slavery.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Prosic describes how a community dependent on subsistence farming would have experienced the festivals. Jubilees appeals to the same experience but gives its own specific meanings to the festivals.

For Prosic, the ritual complex is oriented toward the whole harvest season. Jubilees’ cycle is oriented to the first part of the harvest and specifically the Festival of Firstfruits of Wheat, which it makes the festival of the covenant, conveying both promise and fulfillment. The last festival of the harvest season, Booths, becomes an echo of the Festival of Firstfruits, a time of thanksgiving for and reiteration of the promises. Prosic finds that within the festival complex, Passover has apotropaic significance as the removal of the final threat to a plentiful harvest, the lingering rains.Footnote ⁶⁷ For Jubilees, Passover is also apotropaic (cf. 49:15) but specifically means the defeat of Mastema. Jubilees assigns narrative significance not only to the festivals but also to the seasons of the agricultural cycle: the season of planting and rain in particular is a time of danger and preparation.Footnote ⁶⁸

As elsewhere, the ritually founded calendar based on the agricultural cycle was accommodated to the “scientific” calendar based on astronomical observation or, in the case of Jubilees, the ideal 364-day calendar.Footnote ⁶⁹ The festivals are assigned fixed dates. The seasons are aligned with the quarter-years. The four memorial days that begin the quarters are also called “days of the seasons” (ʽelatāta gizē, 6:23). The “rainy season” begins on the 7/1 memorial day rather than after the last harvest festival, as one might expect.Footnote ⁷⁰ The narrative importance of the quarterly/seasonal structure becomes clear when the author lays out the calendar’s structures in the flood story (Table 1). Both the beginning and the conclusion of the story take place in the first quarter. During the remaining three quarters, beginning with 4/1, the flood plays out its course; the only dates not in the first quarter are the quarterly memorial days that mark the stages of the flood.

Table 1:

Quarterly Structure of the Flood Story

The first quarter, which coincides with both beginning and end of the narrative structure, is what anthropologist Roy Rappaport would call an “interval,” a ritually constituted “time out of time” or “sacred time” that divides duration into “periods” of “mundane time,” countable temporal units, in this case the year, which is the basic unit of Jubilees’ chronology. In the ritual experience of the audience, the “liturgical order” that constituted this sacred interval, which Rappaport says “may be confined within boundaries of single rituals, or … may be more protracted, beginning and ending with distinct rituals,” would have included everything from the 1/1 memorial through Passover to Firstfruits of Wheat, the ritual complex by which the promised harvest of agricultural labor began to be realized. The memorial day that begins the second quarter, 4/1, is transitional, as Halpern Amaru observed, marking a transition from sacred time to “mundane” time.Footnote ⁷¹

The 4/1 memorial marks the same transition for the first couple as they leave the garden to begin their life in the world. We saw that the date of 2/17 establishes a typological relationship between Adam and Noah. Now we see that both it and 4/1 are part of a larger structure based on the calendar; that is, both derive meaning from their location in the annual cycle. The author gives no calendrical dates between the 4/1 that marks the beginning of the first couple’s mundane existence and the command to build the ark, which takes place on 1/1, the beginning of the next sacred interval. The narrative connecting these two stories presupposes the same quarterly structure as the flood narrative and has the same structure that we saw in the Abraham story: promise, demonic threat to promise, fulfillment of promise (Table 2). The promise here is of the people God will set apart for himself (Jub. 2:19–20), and the fulfillment is the covenant with Noah, which begins the process of selection that will culminate in Israel. The threat to the promise comes from the corruption of humanity brought about by the Watchers (4:22–24; cf. 7:21–25), an adaptation from the Enochic narrative. Temporally, the story moves from creation to the “first end,” to use the Enochic term (1 En. 93:4), which is also a new beginning. Spatially, the action moves from the garden of Eden to the ark as a new Eden. Here we can clearly see the heuristic value of applying Bakhtin’s chronotope to Jubilees. Thus far we have been concerned with the “chronos,” the temporal element, as is appropriate to our topic. But Jubilees clearly also has a corresponding “topos,” a sacred place for its sacred time: paradise, the ark, and ultimately the promised land, where the seed will attain fruition (cf. Jub. 50:1–5).

Table 2:

Calendrical Structure, Creation to Flood

It seems obvious but needs to be said that the chronological distance from creation to the flood is much longer than a year. The structure resembles a year through the strategic placement of calendrical dates. In using these dates the author is not interested in time as such but only in the story inherent in the same communal processes of labor that constitute the calendar. This is not the only instance of this calendrically inspired narrative pattern: each ending is a new beginning. The covenant with Noah starts the pattern again. Noah’s grandchildren are led astray by Mastema, chief of the Watchers’ descendants (10:1–11:6), which requires that the covenant be renewed with Abraham at the next recorded Festival of Firstfruits (ch. 14). Though we cannot explore it further here, the pattern recurs throughout the book and is one of its main structural features.

Calendar and Chronology

If calendrical dates are being used typologically, efforts to milk them for chronological significance will be futile and may obscure the meanings the author intended for them. To illustrate this point I will provide one more example from later in the book: the story of Jacob’s flight from Laban (Jub. 29:1–7), which contains three dates. Jacob arrives in Gilead on 1/21 and Laban overtakes him on 3/13 (29:5), after which they make a pact on 3/15 (29:7). VanderKam, thinking that the dates provide chronological information, argues that the first date must be wrong since “even in the unlikely circumstance that [Laban] and his men … journeyed at the same pace Jacob did, they would have arrived only a few days later, not some two months later. Consequently, it is reasonable to suggest that Jacob and his caravan reached Gilead several days before Laban did, that is, they would have been in Gilead on perhaps 3/10 and no earlier.”Footnote ⁷² This judgment is not based on textual considerations, since the only variant reading is 1/22,Footnote ⁷³ but on the assumption that calendrical dates in Jubilees show the passage of time, that is, chronology. But as we have seen, the author uses calendrical dates not as an adjunct to his chronology but as a way to confer meaning on events. Van Goudoever notes that 1/21, when Jacob arrives at Gilead “after he had crossed the river” while fleeing from his father-in-law Laban (29:4–5), is the last day of Unleavened Bread and suggests that the date makes Jacob’s flight a type of exodus: “The Crossing of the River (Euphrates) seems to be a type of the Crossing of the Red Sea, which event also took place on the last day of Unleavened Bread.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The allusion to Unleavened Bread conveys the idea of deliverance and safe passage. Readers of the book will have already encountered this significance the first time the festival is mentioned in Jubilees as a commemoration of “the seven days during which he [Abraham] went and returned safely” from the mountain on which he was to have sacrificed Isaac (18:18). This meaning would certainly also have been included in their experience of the festival as commemoration of the exodus. Here the date forms part of a larger structure: Just as Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea leads to the renewal of the covenant at the Festival of Weeks, so Jacob’s crossing of the river leads to reconciliation with Laban on the Festival of Firstfruits of Wheat.Footnote ⁷⁵ In contrast with this pact with Laban is Jacob’s temporary reconciliation with Esau, which takes place on 9/11, in the inauspicious third quarter (29:13). The flight from Laban is for Jubilees an exodus story in nuce and also displays Jubilees’ recurring pattern of history.

When dates are used typologically the author is relying on that quality of the calendar that is least like chronology, its recurrence or cyclicity. Chronological time is linear: in whatever unit time is measured—days, weeks, months, years, jubilees—one unit succeeds another without repetition; the count moves in one direction, growing from one unit to the next. Rituals, however, are by their nature recurrent, as are the social processes they regulate and the temporal structures they found.Footnote ⁷⁶ The calendar with its recurring festivals is a cycle. Each cycle should be like every other cycle. It is the identity of each year with every other year that Jubilees finds important. The author insists that the calendar have exactly 364 days, not to measure time but so that Israel “will neither omit a day nor disturb a festival” (Jub. 6:32). Every year should be the same so that Israel not “forget the first of the month, the season, and the Sabbath” and “err with respect to the entire prescribed pattern of the years” (6:34).

For Bakhtin, “cyclicity” is a negative quality of the folkloric chronotope, because “time’s forward impulse is limited by the cycle” and therefore cannot “achieve an authentic ‘becoming.’ ”Footnote ⁷⁷ When “cyclicity makes itself felt with particular force,” the story is “separated from the progressive forces of history and even opposed to them.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Jubilees overcomes this drawback of its basic chronotope in two ways. First, as we have seen, the author removes the annual cycle from its calendrical boundaries, stretching it to cover larger periods of time than a single year. The repetition of these calendrically inspired units gives structure to the narrative and provides a periodicity to Jubilees’ account of history that deserves further study.

Second, the author pairs the calendar with a true chronological system. The calendar and the chronology complement each other. Chronological dating of events shows the temporal distance between them; calendrical dating, their typological proximity. The author dates events using the chronological system to show the inexorable advance of history “from the beginning of creation until the time when [God’s] temple is built among them throughout the ages of eternity” (Jub. 1:27). The author assigns calendrical dates to events to show the patterns and inner meaning of history.