THE

BOOK OF JUBILEES

OR

THE LITTLE GENESIS

TRANSLATED FROM

THE EDITOR'S ETHIOPIC TEXT

AND

EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND INDICES

BY

R. H. CHARLES, D.D.

PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL GREEK, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

LONDON

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

ΤΟ

The Reverend George Salmon, D.D.

D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

PROVOST OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

WITH AN OLD PUPIL'S ADMIRATION AND GRATITUDE

PREFACE

I HAD hoped to issue this Commentary on the Book of Jubilees quite six years ago, as a sequel to my edition of the Ethiopic and other fragmentary versions of this work; but after writing a large portion of it, I was obliged to abandon the task, as I felt that somehow I had failed to give a satisfactory interpretation of the text, though at the time I could not understand wherein my disability lay. A year or two later when making a special study of the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs, I came to discover that the source of my failure lay in my acceptance of the traditional view that Jubilees was written in the first century of the Christian era. So long as I wrote from this standpoint, my notes became more and more a laboured apologetic for the composition of this work in the first century. The earliest approximation to the right date appeared in my article on the "Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs " in the Encyclopædia Biblica, i. 241, 1899, where, after giving grounds for the view that the main bulk of that work was written before 100 B.C., I concluded that we should "regard both works (ie. the Testaments and Jubilees) as almost contemporary, and as emanating from the same school of thought."

This