The Book of Jubilees

The author is unknown. The book places its contents in the mouth of an angel speaking to Moses, and that is its literary frame rather than a claim any modern reader need weigh — Moses did not write Jubilees.

What can be said about the date is unusually firm. The Qumran manuscripts establish that the work already existed, in Hebrew, well before the Christian era. James VanderKam's influential study narrowed composition to a range within the 160s to 140s BC; the broader description used here, mid-second century BC, is the safer form for a catalogue and is not seriously disputed.

A Palestinian origin is widely accepted, and the book's preoccupations point that way: the Jerusalem sanctuary, the priesthood, purity, the observance of Torah, the reckoning of the calendar, Israel's separation from the nations, and the ancestral possession of the land. These are the concerns of Second Temple Jewish religious argument, and Jubilees is a participant in it rather than a detached retelling.

Unlike several books in this section, the original language of Jubilees is not a puzzle. Hebrew fragments from Qumran show the work circulating in Hebrew in antiquity, confirming what scholars had long concluded on internal grounds.

The manuscript evidence carries more weight than that, though, and it is worth stating plainly what it settles. It proves that Jubilees existed before Christianity; that it circulated in Hebrew; that it was copied often enough at Qumran to have mattered there; and that the complete Ge'ez text preserves a genuinely ancient composition rather than a medieval one.

That last point is the reason this book can bear more historical weight than most of its neighbours here. When Jubilees and a New Testament passage share a tradition, the question of who could have known what is not speculative — the Hebrew manuscripts are older than the New Testament.

Hebrew: fragments of roughly fifteen copies from Qumran caves 1, 2, 3, 4 and 11. The number alone suggests the book's standing in that community.

Ge'ez: the complete text. Western editors long knew only a handful of Ethiopic manuscripts, but modern manuscript work has greatly enlarged the evidence — Ted Erho documented twenty further Ge'ez witnesses beyond those previously catalogued. This is a living manuscript tradition, not a single late copy.

Greek: the full translation is lost, but portions can be recovered from quotations in Christian writers and chronographers. Latin: about a quarter of the work survives in a palimpsest, valuable because it is many centuries older than the surviving Ethiopic manuscripts. Syriac: fragments and citations.

The usual reconstruction of the chain runs Hebrew original, then Greek, then the Latin and Ethiopic translations, with the Syriac evidence alongside.

Several titles are ancient or well attested, and each says something about how the book was read. Little Genesis in particular is easy to misread: it does not mean an abridgement. In many places Jubilees carries considerably more narrative than Genesis does.

The book opens on Mount Sinai. Moses ascends, God reveals the course of history to him, and an Angel of the Presence is commanded to recount what stands written on the heavenly tablets. Only then does the narrative return to the beginning.

From there it runs through creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Enoch, the Watchers and the giants, Noah and the Flood, the descendants of Noah, Babel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Israel's descent into Egypt, and Moses — ending around Sinai and the Passover rather than carrying on through the Pentateuch.

The effect of the frame is the book's most important literary feature. The reader stands beside Moses receiving an angelically mediated interpretation of Genesis, so that what would otherwise read as later commentary is presented as revelation contemporaneous with the Law itself.

Jubilees 2 is the single most important passage in this book for a catalogue of the heavenly hosts. It expands the first day of Genesis 1 by stating explicitly that God created the spiritual beings then, and by naming their classes.

The list runs far beyond anything Genesis says: angels of the Presence and of Sanctification, and then angels of fire, of the winds, of the clouds and darkness and snow and hail and hoar-frost, of the thunder and the lightning, of cold and heat and the four seasons, of the abysses and of the divisions of the day — and of all the spirits of God's creatures in heaven and on earth. Creation is presented as one cosmos, visible and invisible together, governed throughout by heavenly servants.

Scripture contains the underlying idea. Psalm 103.4 makes God's angels winds and His ministers a flame of fire; Daniel knows angelic princes set over nations; Revelation has angels of the winds, the waters and the fire. What Scripture does not give is the classification. Jubilees expands an authentically biblical conception of creation governed through heavenly servants — it is not a canonical list of angelic offices, and its classes should not be added to the orders the Church received.

Jubilees takes up the Watcher tradition known most fully from 1 Enoch and reworks it for its own purposes. Angels are sent to earth in connection with humanity, transgress their appointed bounds by taking human wives, and father the giants; the giants fill the earth with violence, and the Flood follows.

Genesis 6.1–4 supplies the underlying episode — the sons of God, the daughters of men, the Nephilim, the mighty men of old — without the narrative of angelic rebellion that Jubilees and 1 Enoch supply around it.

The book's distinctive contribution is demonological, and it is the reason Jubilees matters so much for the study of unclean spirits. The giants are destroyed, but their destruction does not end the consequences of the rebellion: Jubilees preserves the tradition, shared with 1 Enoch, that the spirits of the dead giants remain as evil spirits. Where Jubilees goes further is in explaining why some of them are still at work after the Flood — and that explanation is Mastema.

Mastema is the principal adversary of this book. The name rests on a Hebrew root of hostility or enmity, and he functions as chief of the hostile spirits, accuser, tempter, and organiser of demonic activity.

In Jubilees 10 Noah prays because evil spirits are leading his descendants astray, and God orders the spirits bound. Mastema protests, asking that some remain under his authority, since without them he cannot exercise his office among men. God permits one tenth to remain and confines the other nine tenths.

The theological shape of that scene is worth noticing. Demonic activity in Jubilees is real, personal and dangerous — and it is bounded, permitted, and numbered by God. It operates only within a limit that God sets. VanderKam calls the divine decision one of the genuine puzzles of the book's demonology.

Mastema is not to be catalogued as a separate demon whose existence the Church attests. Fr Stephen De Young's caution applies directly here: Second Temple texts use Satan, Mastema, Belial and Azazel in overlapping ways across different literary traditions, and reading each name as a distinct supreme demon misunderstands how that literature works. Mastema is an extra-biblical adversarial figure functioning in many respects as Satan does. The name is not an Orthodox name for the devil.

Mastema does not vanish after the Flood narrative; he reappears at the hinges of the biblical story, and each appearance follows the same pattern — a hostile spiritual agent operating inside limits God has set.

In the binding of Isaac, Genesis says simply that God tested Abraham. Jubilees introduces Mastema into the scene, so that the episode takes on the structure later found in Job, where an adversary proposes the testing while remaining wholly subject to God. This does not remove God's role; it makes the unseen dimension of the story explicit.

In the Exodus, Mastema appears as an opponent bound up with Egyptian resistance and with attempts against Moses. The worldview is consistent throughout the book: events on earth and conflict in the unseen realm are the same events. Human tyrants and hostile spiritual powers are participants in one rebellion, not two unrelated stories.

Jubilees shares the widespread ancient Jewish conviction that spiritual beings hold appointed roles in relation to peoples and nations, and here the canonical parallels are unusually direct. Daniel 10 names the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece and sets Michael over Israel. Deuteronomy 32.8–9, in the textual traditions reflected in the Septuagint and at Qumran, apportions the nations according to the sons of God.

Jubilees develops that theology and gives Israel a distinctive place within it: Israel belongs directly to God rather than to any subordinate spiritual ruler. This is the material that underlies much modern Orthodox discussion of the divine council and the nations.

One motif recurs throughout the book: heavenly tablets on which divine decrees, history, appointed times, moral judgments, covenant instructions and the record of human deeds all stand written. The Angel of the Presence narrates from them, which is what gives the whole book its authority within its own frame.

This belongs to a broad ancient tradition of heavenly books with clear canonical relatives — the tablets given at Sinai, the books opened in Daniel 7, the book of Daniel 12, the book of remembrance in Malachi 3, the books opened at the judgment in Revelation 20, and the Book of Life. Jubilees is a witness to how developed that conception already was, not the source of it.

The calendar is not a marginal concern in Jubilees; it is close to the centre of the book's theology. It advocates a 364-day solar calendar, dividing the year into four quarters of thirteen weeks — fifty-two weeks exactly — so that every feast falls on a stable weekday, year after year.

The interest behind this is theological rather than astronomical. Worship must happen at the time appointed in heaven, and a wrong reckoning risks keeping God's festivals at the wrong moment. It is the same conviction that runs through the book's angelology: the earthly order is meant to correspond to an order already established above.

The same conviction explains why the patriarchs in Jubilees keep festivals long before Sinai. If the Torah reflects a structure built into creation itself rather than legislation introduced in Moses' lifetime, then Abraham and Jacob can already participate in what is only later formally revealed to Israel. The book gives particular weight to the Feast of Weeks, which it associates with covenant renewal across the whole of history — historical background for reading Pentecost, and no more than that. Christian Pentecost rests on Scripture and the Church's tradition, not on this book.

This question needs more care here than for any other work in this section, because the honest answer is not the same everywhere.

In the Byzantine Orthodox tradition — Greek, Russian, Antiochian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Georgian — Jubilees is not part of the biblical canon and should not be presented as Scripture.

In the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church the position is different. Jubilees, known as Kufale, has been transmitted in Ge'ez alongside 1 Enoch and holds an unusually authoritative place. Leslie Baynes' study of the two books in the Ethiopian canon notes both that the canon lists commonly contain them and that the Ethiopian understanding of canon does not map neatly onto a modern Western model of a single closed list.

So the accurate formulation is that Jubilees is noncanonical in the ordinary Byzantine Orthodox biblical tradition, while the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserves it within its own broader scriptural tradition. "The Orthodox Church rejects Jubilees" is not an accurate sentence, and neither is "Jubilees is Orthodox Scripture".

The Greek translation was known in early Christianity, and Christian writers refer to the work under titles including Little Genesis. Material associated with Jubilees has been identified in connection with writers including Justin Martyr, Origen and Epiphanius, and with later Byzantine chronographers such as Syncellus.

Each such claim needs weighing on its own, and a general caution applies to all of them. That a Father knew or cited a tradition found in Jubilees does not establish that he regarded the book as Scripture, that he accepted everything in it, or even that the tradition originated there — Jubilees frequently collects traditions older than itself.

The useful classifications are therefore graded rather than binary: direct citation where it can be demonstrated; probable knowledge; shared tradition; possible parallel. This page does not assert dependence beyond what has been shown.

Jubilees plainly belongs to the Enochic interpretive world and takes up its Watcher material, but it is not another Book of Enoch. The centre of gravity is different: Enoch is a patriarch within the story rather than its revealer, Moses supplies the frame, and Torah and the calendar carry a weight they do not carry in 1 Enoch.

The central point is not that the apostolic writers admired this book, but that many of the traditions it preserves belonged to the common Jewish interpretive world of the first century. Some correspondences may indicate direct literary influence; others reflect a shared inheritance. Because Jubilees often collects traditions older than itself, a parallel does not by itself show which way the borrowing ran — or that there was any borrowing at all.

Among contemporary Orthodox writers Jubilees is treated most extensively by V. Rev. Dr Stephen De Young, in a 2019 essay devoted to the book and in a full episode of The Lord of Spirits in May 2024. He regards it as a genuine Second Temple Jewish text, influential in first-century Judaism, valuable for New Testament interpretation regardless of its canonical standing, and unusually informative about angels and demons.

His most useful methodological point concerns what a parallel proves. Jubilees appears to collect and organise traditions already circulating before its own composition, so a tradition surviving first in Jubilees did not necessarily begin there. When the same material later appears in the New Testament, it may come from Jubilees — or both may inherit something older. That distinction is applied throughout this page.

One liturgical observation of his deserves separate mention, and equal care. Noah's prayer in Jubilees 10.3 opens by addressing the "God of the spirits of all flesh", which is strikingly close to the Orthodox prayer for the departed, "O God of spirits and of all flesh". The parallel is real and worth knowing. It does not show that the Orthodox prayer was drawn from Jubilees: the phrase belongs to a wider biblical vocabulary, and Numbers 16.22 and 27.16 address God in almost the same words. Jubilees is best read here as a witness to the antiquity and continuity of the phrase.

It is exceptionally useful for understanding Second Temple Jewish interpretation of Genesis and Exodus; ancient angelology and demonology; the Watcher traditions; the origin of evil spirits; Mastema; the heavenly tablets; the angelic administration of creation; the Jewish calendar disputes; sacred time and covenant theology; Qumran; the traditions circulating in the world of the New Testament; and early Christian familiarity with Jewish extra-biblical material. Because Hebrew manuscripts survive from Qumran, its value as evidence for pre-Christian Jewish belief is on far firmer ground than that of most works in this section.

It cannot on its own establish Orthodox doctrine; official names or a complete classification of the heavenly beings; the biography of Satan; that Mastema is a distinct Orthodox demon; that exactly a tenth of the spirits of the giants are presently at work; that every demon originates from a dead giant; the canonical interpretation of Genesis 6; an Orthodox liturgical calendar; or any obligation on Christians to keep its 364-day year.

Historical importance and doctrinal authority are different questions, and this book is a good place to keep them apart — it is among the most valuable extra-biblical sources for reconstructing the religious world around the New Testament, and it is not a rule of faith. The table below applies that distinction to the claims most often repeated about it.