Bible Review

c. 150–100 B.C.¹

The passage from Jubilees, beside its biblical counterpart, illustrates several aspects of the book—how it expands the biblical text (the “rewritten Bible”), uses the jubilee (seven times seven) years as a measurement of time and traces later festivals to the time of the ancestors. It also enlarges on the lives of patriarchs such as Abram. The Jubilees text is based on the Ethiopic version as corrected on the basis of fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Thanks to an unusual fad—the carving of inscriptions on arrowheads—that flourished in the 11th century B.C.E., we now have a bridge from proto-Canaanite script to the Early Phoenician linear script that is the immediate ancestor of Old Hebrew, Old Aramaic and the early Greek alphabet.

boustrophedon (boo-STRA-fed-on): “as the ox ploughs”; an ancient method of writing in which the direction of written lines alternates between left-to-right and right-to-left or, more rarely, between up and down.

eschatology (ES-ke-TOL-e-jee): the doctrine of the end of days, including the consummation of history.

hierophant (HIGH-re-fant): an interpreter of sacred mysteries or esoteric principles.