Extra Biblical Reference Introduction No. 2
The Book of Jubilees – can we trust it?
I look forward to testing this book with you all, but in terms of yet another thing we may have been lied to about, here’s an interesting question: Why did the Rabbis after the destruction of the temple 70AD exclude the book of Jubilees from their canon?
“To many of the Jews of the first millennium BCE, all the texts had been equally holy,” she says. “The [excluded] Book of Enoch or Book of Jubilees were certainly not considered less sacred than the [canonical] Book of Judges or Esther or Daniel.” Yet the excluded texts – close to a dozen major works – were not just abandoned but excised as if they were a malignant growth. “Whoever reads them,” declared Rabbi Akiva, one of the foremost sages involved in the process, “will have no place in the world to come.”
Prof. Rachel Elior, professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel
Just to start your journey with reading this and other books that have been ‘cancelled’ from the Old Testament in the 20th century.
Q. Why were these texts so dangerous to the Pharisees and rabbis 2000 years ago – who redesigned Judaism after the collapse of the temple? Why were they cancelled during the late 19th and 20th century by most modern translations from the Old Testament?
Things that make you go: mmm?
More here from a magazine article:
https://www.jpost.com/magazine/features/from-the-sun-to-the-moon
and an interesting breakdown on Elior’s research with some Q & A discussion:
Nothing here is set in concrete – these introductions are included to help us on our own journey of sifting, discussion and testing of extra biblical references that may appear here and on drilldowns from time to time.
