Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha

While scholars have acknowledged the literary dependence of Jubilees 31 (the blessing of Levi and Judah) on Genesis 48 (the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh), little work has been done to understand the purpose of this intentional intertextuality. This article examines the literary influence of Genesis 48, the effect of its absence, and the altered roles of Levi, Judah, and Joseph in Jubilees in order to determine why the author made the literary decision to pattern one scene of blessing after the other. This article suggests that the author's decision to omit Genesis 48 and to present not one but two similar scenes of blessing in its place is part of a larger strategy to negotiate the interpretive problem of the prominent status given to Joseph's sons in Genesis 48. By replacing Ephraim and Manasseh with Levi and Judah, but allowing Joseph to receive the double portion of land, the author of Jubilees reflects an interpretive tradition, also found in the Targums, Genesis Rabbah, and the Testaments of the Patriarchs, that understands the inheritance of Jacob to be threefold and distributed three ways—the birthright to Joseph, the priesthood to Levi, and the kingship to Judah.

This article notes the disparities between the way Josephus depicts the extent of the borders of the Land of Israel in his different works, and shows the connection between the view of the borders he offers in each work to that work's nature, goals, and historical context, as well as to the author's personal life. When he wrote The Jewish Wars, Josephus sought to minimize Jewish territorial aspirations, but later, in Jewish Antiquities, Against Apion, and his autobiography, The Life, he expressed large-scale territorial hopes and visions. This article proposes that the different depictions of borders reflect changes, taking place over a lifetime, in the way Josephus viewed himself and his surroundings, as well as the political constellation under which he found himself at the time he composed each work.

This article examines the Testament of Job as a literary work within the genre of ancient Jewish novel. It explores the function of clothing changes for the two central characters of Satan and Sitis as providing both entertaining and critical narrative cues for character perception and development. This study is organized into two main sections. The first part examines the figure of Satan and his respective forms and disguises, with appropriate analogues to Apuleius's Metamorphoses. The second part examines Sitis's clothing and its function within the narrative, followed by a brief comparison to Joseph and Aseneth and Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe. This article contends that clothing is an important literary motif for the Testament of Job much like the popular ancient stories of Joseph and Aseneth, Chaereas and Callirhoe, and Metamorphoses. The contention is that a character's exterior clothing often indicates his/her inward character, or depicts a character's transformation within the narrative. In this sense, Sitis's clothing signals both her fall and eventual vindication, and Satan's disguises signal his status as the evil trickster. A character's change of clothing, as one would imagine in a performance or play, offers critical narrative cues to the reader.