Jubilees
Kufale (Ge'ez); Sefer haYovlim; Hebrew fragments at Qumran
The events of Genesis and early Exodus were always governed by a precise 364-day solar calendar of jubilee cycles, and Israel's true law was revealed to Moses in this expanded, corrected form, not in the shorter account later fixed as scripture.
- Genesis rewritten as expanded revelation to Moses
- a 364-day solar calendar opposed to the later normative lunar one
- extensive circulation among the Dead Sea Scrolls community
- a rival, non-rabbinic strand of Second Temple Judaism
A retelling of Genesis and the early chapters of Exodus, presented as a further revelation dictated to Moses on Sinai by an angel, that fills out the terse biblical narrative with legal detail, angelology, and a precise chronological scheme organized into periods of forty-nine years ("jubilees"). It insists on a 364-day solar calendar against the lunar-based calendar that became normative in later Judaism, a dispute that also appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls community, where Jubilees survives in more copies than all but a few biblical books. Never canonized outside the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which preserves it complete, it offers modern scholars a rare window into a rival, priestly-legal strand of Second Temple Judaism that lost out to the tradition later fixed as rabbinic Judaism.
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