Hi Everyone, Happy Thursday from an 85 degree day in Central Florida. Unfortunately in South Dakota where my kids still are and where I used to live it's noon right now and it's 12 degrees. Yikes! If you're also where you're still having a cold winter, Stay warm you guys.
The other day I was asked why I'm so focused on the Ethiopian Bible. I knew that there were many other books in the Dead Sea Scrolls that didn't qualify to make it into the Protestant Bible when the official list was voted on during the Council Of Nicea during the time of Constantine. Then I thought why weren't they included? I don't want to drag this on and be boring but I also feel everyone should know. We'll get into more book content after this explanation. This information is regarding only The Book Of Jubilees from questions directed to my friend Google Gemini, and not any of the other books. So here goes.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection around 900 manuscripts found in caves near the Qumran settlement between 1947 and 1956. They contain every book in the Protestant Bible except Esther, plus many others that weren't allowed. If we go with number 900, and there are 66 books in the Protestant Bible that leaves 834 books that potentially had vital information that inquiring minds (old tv commercial reference) like you and I want to know, that were rejected. WHY?? I want to know what's in there. Some people are satisfied going to church 1-3 times a week, maybe having a daily or weekly bible study. That's okay. Personally I'm not, but then again I never have been satisfied with the status quo or being compliant for that matter.
When I read the guidelines for why books were excluded a couple of things were a little startling. Maybe it's something maybe it's nothing. But one document in the Historical& Textual category called Community Rule or War Scroll was specific to The Essene sect, granted this document was community specific not universal to everyone but it has become accepted by some that Jesus was part of the Essenes. I heard a guy this week named John Bevere say Mary was an Essene.
In the Jewish Rabbinic category some were excluded because they were written in the "post-prophetic" era or weren't written in Hebrew. Some were written in Aramaic. Also what Jesus spoke. The next category was Theological. These were excluded because they were either apocalyptic or Conflicted with the Mainstream Lunar Calendars and Temple practices at the time. We'll see more about this. Other factors were Sectarian Identity, too community specific for the general Bible, like The War Scroll. Were they considered Divinely Inspired or just helpful to read? And Popularity. Were they popular in the scrolls but rare elsewhere? Jubilees were in the scrolls 15 times.
This is the main thing that bothers me. Exodus was written by Moses. The Book Of Jubilees written by Moses being spoken by angels. Throughout history we've seen a division among people over things they just couldn't agree on. In this case the rest of the world has missed out on and ridiculed for reading books other than the standard canonized books of the bible. Admittedly, the Bible the Catholic church uses has the Apocrypha. Here's how the different sides looked at their solar and lunar decisions. As we'll see in the Book Of Jubilees God gave requirements that the festivals were to be celebrated on the same days each year, and the solar calendar allows for that.
The Battle of the Calendars
To understand why this led to the book's exclusion, we have to look at the "Calendar War" happening in Judea at the time.
| The Solar Calendar (Jubilees) ☀️ | The Lunar Calendar (Mainstream/Rabbinic) 🌙 |
| 364 days exactly. | Roughly 354 days, requiring "leap months" to stay in sync with seasons. |
| Holidays always fall on the same day of the week every year. | Holidays shift days (like your birthday or modern Hanukkah). |
| Claims the lunar system is "corrupt" and leads to sin. | The standard used by the Temple authorities in Jerusalem. |
The Jubilees proposes a year that has exactly 52 weeks. Every date falls on the same day of the week every year. The year is divided into 13-week seasons. One Key Point, In this system the first day of the first month of the New Year always falls on a Wednesday, which I didn't notice it saying, but that's the day, sun, moon, and stars, were created and made the first day. I still don't know why the time frames are called Jubilees, but it really doesn't matter, I don't know why we call a week a week, or a year a year. So to continue on, another copy and paste from our friend Gemini
The "Units" of Time 🧱
The author breaks time down into specific mathematical blocks:
The Year: Exactly 364 days (52 weeks).
The Week of Years: A 7-year period (based on the Sabbath year cycle in Leviticus).
The Jubilee: A 49-year period (consisting of 7 "weeks of years").
The Total Calculation 🧮
If we multiply these units, we can see the grand scale of the book's chronology:
By using this rigid system, the author ensures that every major event—like the birth of Noah, the Flood, or the life of Abraham—falls on a mathematically "perfect" year and day. This was a direct challenge to other ancient calendars that relied on the moon, which the author felt were messy and prone to human error.
This calendar does however have 1.25 missing days over the course of a year. One early 1900's scholar R.H.Charles has what is regarded as a very accurate interpretation of Jubilees, has said he thinks the author of Jubilees was so blinded by "theological dogmatism" that they prioritized mathematical perfection over the actual movement of the sun, and possibly didn't account for the shortfall at all. Because to add a leap day or extra month somewhere would break the 7 day cycle and ruin the Sabbath nature of the calendar. Charles supposedly shows in his 1913 interpretation of Jubilees that the Flood lasted exactly 364 days and not 370 like in a Masoretic Text of Genesis which is considered to be an authoritative text of the Jewish Bible.
As we saw in the last post A.M. is used to signify a period of time in Jubilees called Anno Mundi. It's a system used to date events based on the number of years since the creation of the world. With that in mind, the world, and everything in it was created in the first week of the first Jubilee {1-7A.M.} The first week of the first 7 year period based on the Sabbath year cycle in Leviticus.
The first week of the of the first year of the the first 49 year Jubilee. Adam and Eve were in the garden a full 7 years exactly, the 17th day of the 2nd month the serpent came to Eve. {8A.M.)
Next time I was just going to give a lineage list of from Adam to Noah but well see how it goes breaking it down to include Jubilees. Until then,
Keep Searching,
Paul
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