The Eschatology Of The Book Of The Jubilees

In spite of some scholars’ inclination to include the book of Jubilees as another witness to “Enochic Judaism,” the relationship of Jubilees to the apocalyptic writings and events surrounding the Maccabean revolt has never been adequately clarified. This book builds on scholarship on genre to establish a clear pattern among the ways Jubilees resembles and differs from other apocalypses. Jubilees matches the apocalypses of its day in overall structure and literary morphology. Jubilees also uses the literary genre to raise the issues typical of the apocalypses—including revelation, angels and demons, judgment, and eschatology—but rejects what the apocalypses typically say about those issues, subverting reader expectations with a corrected view. In addition to the main argument concerning Jubilees, this volume’s survey of what is fundamentally apocalyptic about apocalyptic literature advances the understanding of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and, in turn, of later apocalypses and comparable perspectives, including those of Paul and the Qumran sectarians.

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The Book of Jubilees, an ancient text which details the history of the division of the Laws of Moses, is presented here complete. The text discusses the laws revealed to Moses and treats his character as a second creator of the world. Each chapter covers a range of history spanning 49 years, with Moses life story and other principal events told over a course of 2,410 years. Perhaps most importantly from a theological perspective, the book discusses the angels and how these entities formed a vital component of the Earth's creation. Enoch was taught by fallen angels; through them, he discovered writing and history. We also hear that early man was formed from a mating of Earthly humans and fallen angels, but that these hybrids were killed during the Great Flood. The status of the Book of Jubilees was not properly ascertained until the 20th century, with the famous discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Prior to this, the only manuscripts of Jubilees that were available date to the 15th/16th centuries in what is today Ethiopia, which left scholars unsure of its true origins. Modern scholars agree that the text dates to approximately 150 BC. Today, the text is mostly held as canonical in Ethiopia, while the Protestant and Catholic churches consider the work pseudepigrapha. Robert Henry Charles, the translator of this edition, was an Irish theologian and scholar who translated a range of Old Testament apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. Highly respected, he contributed entries pertaining to his field to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and spent his later years as the archdeacon of Westminster, London.

Beginning with the historical origins of the jubilee in ancient Israel, this book traces the reinterpretation of the jubilee through the Old Testament, Second Temple literature, and Qumran documents, demonstrating a tendency toward eschatological re-readings with the passage of time.

This probe into Paul's theology argues that in his eschatological thinking there is a conceptual overlap between Jesus and God. As in several pseudepigraphical texts, there is in Paul a certain identification of the roles of God and the messianic figure. Especially in Paul's doctrines of the parousia and the final judgment this overlap features the Old Testament idea of the Day of the Lord Yahweh becoming transposed into the Day of the Lord Christ. In examining Paul's teaching on the messiah and the Kingdom, Kreitzer offers a penetrating analysis of how Paul balanced theocentricity and christocentricity within his eschatology, and how the theme of Christ's subordination to God is interjected into his doctrine.

The classic study of the history of the development of Jewish and Christian eschatology. Charles superseded all predecessors with a fuller treatment of the Apocalypse and a deeper study of the Messianic hope of the Nation in the Old Testament.