A NOTE ON DIVINE NAMES AND EPITHETS IN THE BOOK OF JUBILEES

James Kugel

In honor of our generation’s greatest scholar of Jubilees (as well as numerous other Second Temple writings), I wish in the following to raise a question that, to my knowledge, has been somewhat neglected in Jubilees scholarship. How does this book refer to God? It is a simple question, but the answer may prove enlightening for a variety of top- ics. (Indeed, in raising it in this brief note, I am afraid I will not be able to do much more than evoke one or two of its possible implications, but these are surely only one small part of what can be learned from studying divine epithets in Jubilees.)

Use of “God” and “the Lord”

Certainly the two most common ways of referring to the God of Israel in Jubilees are with the “generic” words for God (that is, ’elohim or ’el) and with the Tetragrammaton, YHWH. With regard to the latter, the surviving Qumran fragments leave no doubt that the original Hebrew text of Jubilees at least sometimes wrote out the Tetragrammaton itself, YHWH. It is likely that the Greek translator (or later Greek scribes) substituted the word kurios (“Lord”) for this divine name, as was done as well with the Old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and other ancient texts;1 this substitution then carried through into the second- ary translations of Jubilees. The usual Ethiopic rendering of “Lord” is ’egzi’abḥēr. However, a certain ambiguity surrounds this word in the Ethiopic manuscripts of Jubilees since, as James VanderKam observed some time ago, it “seems to be used indiscriminately” in Jubilees, often translating God as well as Lord.2

1 On the existence of an ancient Greek translation and its use for the Ethiopic and Latin translations, see James C. VanderKam, Textual and Historical Studies in the Book of Jubilees (HSM 14; Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977), 6–18. 2 VanderKam, Textual and Historical Studies, 20. For example: Jub. 21:2 reads in VanderKam’s edition of the Ethiopic text: “I have continually remembered the Lord 758 james kugel

In this respect, the surviving fragments of the Latin translation can be a more reliable guide to the original Hebrew text, since they regu- larly distinguish between dominus and deus. Perhaps surprisingly, the Latin fragments reveal a definite preference for “God” over “Lord”; the uses of deus outnumber those of dominus, with some eighty-four appearances of the former versus fifty-two of the latter.3 The evidence of the surviving Greek and Syriac fragments is somewhat less reliable, since these are, as VanderKam notes, often more in the nature of near- citations or allusions to the text of Jubilees.4

Divine Epithets

If the distinction between “Lord” and “God” in the original Hebrew text must remain unresolved in numerous cases, there remains none- theless the matter of divine epithets in Jubilees. The author of Jubi- lees frequently supplemented or replaced his “default” divine names (YHWH, and ’elohim/’el) with other words or phrases, and it is these that I wish to mention briefly here. The most frequent among divine epithets inJubilees is “the Most High,” no doubt corresponding to Greek hupsistos and, in turn, The phrase “the Most High God/Lord” or “the Most .[ה-]עליון Hebrew High” alone occurs some twenty-three times in Jubilees. Along with (אל )עולם ”these, one also finds two mentions of the “Eternal God (12:29, 13:8).5 I believe the author favored these epithets because they had a somewhat antique flavor for him, having been used by Israel’s ancestors or in reference to earliest times.6 In evoking them, he was, as it were, imaginatively projecting readers back into the era of the

[’egzi’abḥēr]” whereas the Latin text has “I have continually remembered our God [deum nostrum].” The corresponding fragment in 4Q219 backs up the Latin text’s .תמי[ד את א]לוהינו :reading 3 According to A.-M. Denis and Y. Janssens, Concordance latine du liber Jubilaeo- rum sive Parva Genesis (Louvain: Publications de l’Université catholique de Louvain, 1973), 46–47; 51–52. 4 On this see James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees: A Critical Text (2 vols.; CSCO 510–11, Scriptores Aethiopici 87–88; Louvain: Peeters, 1989), xi–xvi. 5 Both of these are in passages composed by Jubilees’ author and have no biblical (אל )שדי ”parallel. The author also used another antique name, “the God Shaddai (15:3 and 28:3), but in these he was following the biblical text of Gen 17:1 and 28:3 respectively. 6 For “the Most High” see Gen 14:18, 19, 20, 22, Deut 32:8 Ps. 82:4; for “Eternal God” Gen 21:33.