My LORD’s BibleWhat Is the Book of Jubilees?
Jubilees rewrites the story from Adam to Sinai as an angel dictated it to Moses — with its own calendar, its own chronology, and a Sabbath traced back to the week of creation. It was popular enough at Qumran to leave more copies than several books that did make the Bible.
The short answer
Jubilees is a retelling of Genesis 1 through the early chapters of Exodus — the whole span from creation to Israel's arrival at Sinai — framed as a revelation an angel dictated to Moses during the forty days he spent on the mountain. It takes its name from its own chronological scheme: it divides all of history into “jubilees” of forty-nine years (seven cycles of seven), and dates nearly every event in the story to an exact year, week, and jubilee.
The forty days on the mountain that Jubilees claims to fill in with new detail:
Exod 24:12
Read in full chapter →12And the LORD said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.
See also: Revelation 4:1, Deuteronomy 5:22
What is in it
The book follows Genesis closely but adds enormous detail along the way: Abraham smashes his father's idols as a boy, the patriarchs keep a 364-day solar calendar tuned precisely to the sun rather than the moon, angels mediate revelation at nearly every turn, and the Sabbath itself is traced back to creation week — kept first by the angels in heaven, long before it was ever given to Israel.
The book's own framing, in its opening lines:
Jubilees 1:1-4
Read in full chapter →1And it came to pass in the first year of the exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, in the third month, on the sixteenth day of the month, that God spake to Moses, saying: 'Come up to Me on the Mount, and I will give thee two tables of stone of the law and of the commandment, which
2I have written, that thou mayst teach them.' And Moses went up into the mount of God, and the
3glory of the Lord abode on Mount Sinai, and a cloud overshadowed it six days. And He called to Moses on the seventh day out of the midst of the cloud, and the appearance of the glory of the
4Lord was like a flaming fire on the top of the mount. And Moses was on the Mount forty days and forty nights, and God taught him the earlier and the later history of the division of all the days
Its calendar dispute is not incidental — it is one of the book's central, recurring concerns, arguing at length that only a 364-day solar year keeps festivals on their correct days, against a lunar calendar it treats as a corrupting innovation.
Why it matters
Fragments of at least fourteen separate manuscripts of Jubilees turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran — more copies than of several books that did make it into the Hebrew Bible — showing it was read widely by at least one Jewish community in the last two centuries BC. Its emphasis on covenant, calendar, and separation from surrounding nations lines up closely with the concerns of the group that collected the scrolls.
Is it scripture?
As with 1 Enoch, only the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has always counted Jubilees as part of its Old Testament. It never entered the Jewish, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant canons, and — unlike 1 Enoch — no New Testament book quotes it by name, though early Christian writers, including the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, show clear familiarity with its material.
Where to read it
This site carries the complete book — all 50 chapters — in R.H. Charles's public-domain translation, with the surviving Ge'ez alongside the English.
Common questions
- Who wrote the Book of Jubilees?
- An unknown Jewish author, writing in the second century BC. It is framed as a revelation an angel gave Moses on Mount Sinai, with Moses as its narrator within the story rather than its actual author.
- Is the Book of Jubilees in the Bible?
- Only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, which has always treated it as scripture. It has never been part of the Jewish, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant canons.
- Why is Jubilees sometimes called 'Lesser Genesis'?
- Because it retells the same span of history as Genesis and the opening of Exodus, in far greater detail — a second, expanded pass over the same ground, not a separate story.
- Was the Book of Jubilees found among the Dead Sea Scrolls?
- Yes. Fragments of at least fourteen separate copies were found at Qumran, making it one of the most-copied non-canonical books recovered there.