Heavenly writing and the authority of rewritten scripture: Reevaluating explicit references to the Pentateuch in Jubilees

Abstract

Interpreters commonly designate two phrases in Jubilees, “the book of the first law” (6:22) and “the words of the law” (30:12), as explicit references to the already written Pentateuch that thus transparently acknowledge the historical context of its own production. However, these supposedly earthly writings are penned by the angel, and interpreters identifying them as already existing Torah seem to equivocate about whether they belong to an earthly or heavenly corpus. Supplementing the work of David Lambert, this article argues that the phrases can be coherently construed as references to heavenly writing, the archetype based on which Moses writes Torah. They therefore harmonize with the putative context of Sinai revelation, rather than compromising it. And the resulting absence of any explicit reference to the Pentateuch can be comprehended in light of Jubilees’s strategies for claiming authority. Determining the referents of these two phrases is consequential for our understanding of Mosaic pseudepigraphy more broadly.