סיפורת וחוק בספר היובלים: עיון מחודש בסיפור הכניסה לגן עדן

One of the most distinctive features of the book of Jubilees is the juxtaposition of laws generally known from the pentateuchal legal corpora with stories of the patriarchal period. The collocation of specific laws with these narratives reflects halakhic interpretation of the biblical stories. Close examination of the rewritten accounts reveals halakhic interpretation already embedded in the stories themselves. This paper presents one example, the story of the entrance to the Garden of Eden, in which the rewritten narrative sections of Jubilees (3:1–,y,y7, 15ff.) explicitly contradict the juxtaposed legal passage, the law of the impurity of the new mother (3:8–14; based upon Leviticus 12). In addition, both the rewritten narrative and the juxtaposed legal passage are the product of independent exegesis of biblical texts. It is therefore suggested that the legal passage was composed independently of the rewritten narrative of Jubilees. Evidence for the independent existence of the legal passage is found in 4Q265 (4QMiscellaneous Rules), frg. 7, that similarly derives the law of the impurity of the new mother from the story of the entrance to Eden. Scholars have generally assumed that 4Q265 borrowed this passage from Jubilees. Here it is argued on grounds of structure and language that in fact Jubilees preserves a later version of this legal derivation than the one found in the Qumran scroll.