From Adam to Abraham

33

and Mesopotamia in arithmetic and the celestial sciences. If they could be faulted for
anything at all, it was for unoriginality; whatever they knew about these subjects they
acquired from sages of Jewish tradition. This benignly ecumenical vision of a shared
cultural inheritance is worlds apart from the perspective of the Book of Jubilees, a work
originally composed in Hebrew and probably dating to the 2nd century BC. The prod-
uct of a highly sectarian form of Second Temple Judaism, its recitation of history from
the creation to Sinai treats alien wisdom with a mixture of xenophobic distrust and
horror.33
In contrast to the more unilinear perspective of Josephus, the course of civilization
in Jubilees proceeds along two separate tracks: one, the path of divine wisdom revealed
to biblical figures of learning and virtue, the other, the alien and demonic sciences of
the nations.34 Like Josephus, Jubilees credits ante-diluvian generations with command
of astronomy and writing. They received this wisdom from Enoch, the seventh de-
scended from Adam and the “first who learned writing and knowledge and wisdom,
from (among) the sons of men, and from (among) those who were born upon the
earth, and who wrote in a book the signs of the heaven according to the order of their
months”.35 But Enoch’s discoveries have nothing to do with the corrupt wisdom of
the Babylonians. For the origins of the latter, Jubilees looks elsewhere, to ante-diluvian
learning carved on a rock and preserved for later generations. The author’s description
of the contents of this monument is far bleaker than the parallel version found in
Josephus. It contained, Jubilees .fays, the forbidden ante-diluvian revelations of a class
of fallen angels known as the Watchers, “by which they used to observe the omens of
the sun and moon and stars within all the signs of heaven”.36 When Cainan, one of the
forefathers of the Babylonians, discovered the monument and transcribed the occult
learning carved on it, he thus committed a great transgression.
The course of civilization after that time is a precipitous downward spiral into
tyranny, urban decay, warfare and idolatry, culminating in events during the time of
Serug, Abraham’s great-grandfather. Jubilees description of the age of Serug is what
we would expect from an author attentive to the omnipresent role of the demonic
in human affairs. Under the influence of Mastema and a confederation of demons
in league with him, people of his time committed acts of unspeakable evil: idolatry,
polytheism, internecine warfare, slave-trafficking, genocide, the consumption of blood,
and an array of other vices symptomatic of urban life.37 Ur, the city of Abraham’s birth,
was the site of the most extreme depravity. People there “began making for themselves
graven images and polluted likenesses. And cruel spirits assisted them and led them
astray so that they might commit sin and pollution”.38 Members of Abraham’s own
33 See in particular Werman (2007).
34 See Hengel (2004), pp. 241-243.
35 Liber Jubilaeorum 4,17.
36 Liber Jubilaeorum 8, 2-3. For the contrast between the parallel reports about ante-diluvian tablets in
Jubilees and Josephus, see further Hengel (2004), pp. 242-243.
37 Liber Jubilaeorum 11,1-5.
38 Liber Jubilaeorum 11,4.