The bulk of Jubilees most immediately retells the narrative history of Genesis, and much of the scholarship on Jubilees has focused on the re-presentation of that material. Halpern-Amaru's topic—the exegesis and rewriting of Exodus narrative and law in Jubilees—is one that has been underresearched, and therefore a worthy endeavor from the outset. Her concentration on Exodus material provides a narrow set of case studies that imbue this book with a tight structure and focus. The case studies themselves cover a wide range of issues for the study of Jubilees. Above all, they show how the handling of material from both Genesis and Exodus are part of a coherent literary effort sustained across Jubilees as a unity.
The first chapter treats the exegesis, rearrangement, and reworking of Exodus 19, 24, and 34 in the Prologue and Jubilees 1, unpacking both the literary/exegetical decisions behind the construction of Jubilees's text and how they serve to further construct the Mt. Sinai setting that “remains the constant present time throughout the angel narration” of Jubilees 2–50 (19). Chapters 2–5 focus on the representation of the “Egyptian epoch” (Exodus 1–15) in the narrative of Jubilees 46–49, each proving a different way in which Jubilees presents the “Genesis-Exodus past as a single continuous story” (21). Chapter 2 shows how the reworking of Exodus 1 in Jubilees 46—mainly, the “exegetically-rooted” “created epoch” of Amram at Hebron—fits into a larger scheme of periodization that encompasses the reworked material from Genesis in earlier chapters. (An intriguing segue explores the influence of 4Q Visions of Amram on Jubilees.) Chapter 3 shows how “scriptural material is manipulated” to create a “biography” of Moses matching the same “ideal leader typology” developed in Jubilees's construction of “the personal histories of the antediluvian notables and the founding fathers of Israel” (49). Moses's biography echoes these earlier Genesis-era accounts, down to such details as the “danger-from-birds motif” signaling “the specter of Mastema's agency” (55). Discussion of divine, demonic, and human agency continues into chapter 4, which highlights how the representation of the plagues and liberation in Egypt “discloses the [divine] events ‘behind the scenes’” of the Exodus text and Moses's personal human experience. Whereas Michael Segal “treats all passages that attribute the same activity to Mastema and to God as evidence of two stages of composition,” Halpern-Amaru shows how Moses, Mastema, and the angels all “collaborate” and “contribute to the advancement” of God's providential redemption of the people (72, 79).
Halpern-Amaru's implicit point—that the text's nuanced depictions of agency have been mistakenly labeled conceptually inconsistent—is an important one. For this reason, one would have expected engagement with Segal's source criticism beyond the footnotes. Similar assumptions regarding the mutual exclusivity of divine and human (and demonic) “agency” also fuel prevailing source-critical treatments of, for example, the Damascus Document (and, it may be noted, seem to characterize recent treatments of repentance in Jubilees in works by David Lambert and Ari Mermelstein). Had Halpern-Amaru been more direct with this point (or revisited it in a conclusion), its broader significance for the study of Jubilees and Second Temple literature would have been obvious.
Chapter 5 looks at the narrative celebration of Pesaḥ/Maṣṣot and the effort to clarify and distinguish the eternal and one-time (Egypt-specific) nature of the holiday(s). Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Jubilees's reworking of Exodus legislation for Passover and the Sabbath, respectively. With these succinct but scrupulous treatments of legislation and “allusive exegesis,” Halpern-Amaru conveys a fundamental truth about Jubilees, which I would paraphrase as follows: Jubilees not only reflects biblical exegesis (prior to composition), it demands its own serious exegesis and is meant to be studied. “[T]he wordiness, repetition and opacity” of a particular passage of legislation “are a direct consequence of the allusion exegesis operating within each command. ‘Reading’ the statute requires identification of the allusions and analysis of their exegetical functions” (101).
The book has no formal introduction or conclusion. While the first chapter usefully folds a functional introduction into a direct (body-chapter) treatment of the Prologue and Jubilees 1, the eighth and final chapter of Halpern-Amaru's work does not so neatly tie together all the threads introduced in the intervening chapters. The concluding discussion of “circular closure” notes how the presentation of Sabbath law in Jubilees 50 continues and completes the Sabbath legislation in Jubilees 2. While James Kugel identifies the laws in Jubilees 50 as a third hand's addendum, Halpern-Amaru notes that Jubilees 3–49 provide an “illusion of context” that seemingly splits a single event—the revelation of Sabbath law at Sinai—in two. This splitting “is a literary strategy … that places the date-focused narrative spoken by the angel within a legislative envelope that acknowledges no passage of time” (160). With this final sentence Halpern-Amaru poses another thought-provoking point that touches on the ultimate message, framework, and purpose of Jubilees as a literary whole, but which is, again, left unpacked and relatively ambiguous. (The quotation ends the book.) I was left wanting a more formal conclusion in its wake, especially since here her reasons for rejecting the alleged interpolation identify wider assumptions and problems affecting the field of ancient Jewish literature (e.g., the Damascus Document) more broadly. By relegating these points mostly to footnotes and providing no concluding reflections on their broader implications, Halpern-Amaru undersells the significance of her work.
Halpern-Amaru's meticulous footnotes thoroughly engage the manuscript evidence, acknowledging when she must (propose and) rely on a reconstruction of the Hebrew based on a particular medieval Ethiopic reading. She transliterates and translates the Ge'ez, but often leaves Hebrew untranslated, a logical and handy approach for most scholars of ancient Judaism. Halpern-Amaru juggles so much linguistic, literary, and exegetical data that her arguments would be obscured (and her book too lengthy) if she consistently rendered things intelligible for those who cannot read Hebrew. But this obviously limits accessibility for scholars more skilled in New Testament literature that, like Jubilees, is similarly saturated with representative allusions and implicit exegesis.
Halpern-Amaru's willingness to engage and consider Jubilees as “a unitary text that may reflect the work of a single author or the hand of a final editor” (21) allows her to see and account for nuanced details of biblical exegesis, theology, and literary expression that the source-critical approaches of other scholars have missed. This holistic “literary approach” to the text (20) provides a model not only for future work in Jubilees, but, in the eyes of this reviewer, for study of 1–2 Chronicles, the Damascus Document, and other works of Second Temple literature. In both substance of argument and method of approach, Halpern-Amaru consistently and convincingly conveys what the author of Jubilees is doing (that is, what goes into and is conveyed by the composition) and how we, as scholars, should talk about it—at the micro level of a particular passage of narrative or legislation, at the macro level of the more prolonged literary efforts sustained across the book as a unity, and at so many intervening loci where such micro and macro efforts converge.
