I read two essays that I really enjoyed in Enoch and the Mosaic Torah: The Evidence of Jubilees.
The first one was Gabriele Boccaccini's "From a Movement of Dissent to a
Distinct Form of Judaism: The Heavenly Tablets in Jubilees as the
Foundation of a Competing Halakah". The second one was Hindy Najman's
"Reconsidering Jubilees: Prophecy and Exemplarity".
1. Boccaccini
discusses the Enochic perspective, the Mosaic perspective, and the
combination of the two in Jubilees. It has been argued (by George
Nickelsburg, for example) that the Enochic perspective dismissed the
Mosaic Torah in favor of an "Enochic revealed wisdom" (Nickelsburg's
words, as quoted on page 200). Boccaccini does not go that far, but he
does maintain that the Enochics consisted of priests who "felt excluded
from, or marginalized within, the Zadokite priesthood" (page 201). For
these Enochic priests, according to Boccaccini, the world was so
corrupted by evil that it was impossible to follow any laws, even the
Mosaic Torah. Meanwhile, the Zadokite priests offered sacrifices in the
Temple and affirmed "that this world was the perfect and eternal order
regulated by the Mosaic Torah" (page 200).
With the
Maccabees, Boccaccini contends, the Enochic and Mosaic perspectives were
both strengthened. The Enochic perspective was validated because their
enemies, the Zadokites, had been replaced, and thus were shown to be
illegitimate. But the Mosaic Torah became the national law of Israel. According
to Boccaccini, both perspectives were fused in Jubilees, in which the
world was still deemed to be corrupt and in need of eschatological
renewal, but the corruption was believed to exist among the Gentiles and
thus did not impact God's covenant with Israel.
I
appreciated Boccaccini's essay because he clearly delineated competing
ideologies that could account for the Enochic and Mosaic perspectives
and what is in Jubilees. But I still have questions. First of all, did
the Enochic perspective truly believe that no laws could be followed in
a corrupt world? I would not be surprised if even I Enoch maintains
that there are moral norms that should be followed! Second, was it the
case that the Mosaic Torah was not the law of Israel until the time of
the Maccabees? I have a slight problem with this idea, for II Maccabees
depicts the Torah as Israel's ancestral constitution, which Hellenizers
sought to undermine, plus I Maccabees shows the Israelites observing
customs even before the Maccabean rise to power, such as the Sabbath.
2.
Najman interacts with the question of whether Jubilees was intended to
replace the Mosaic Torah. He argues that it was not. Rather,
according to Najman, Jubilees aimed to put the Sinai revelation in a
"pre-Sinaitic context"----to show Israelites how to "observe the law
properly" by teaching them the traditions that Enoch transmitted. In short, Jubilees was halakah that was clarifying how to observe the Torah.
I
should note, however, that both Boccaccini and Najman present the
situation during the Hellenistic period as rather complex. Boccaccini
quotes John Collins, who argues that a Jewish movement that does not
focus on the Mosaic Torah was not "without precedent" (Collins' words),
for biblical wisdom literature does not talk explicitly about the Mosaic
Torah and Israel's history, and "Judaism in the early second
century BCE was not uniformly Torah centered, even among those who were
familiar with the Torah and respected it as one source of wisdom among
others" (Collins' words). And Najman on page 230 expresses problems
with the notion that there was "an authoritative or canonical Pentateuch
in the second century", though he acknowledges that "there is evidence
for a stabilizing, circulating, and authoritative text much like what is
eventually called the Pentateuch."