Written a Second Time

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Jubilees, Book of” (J. C. VanderKam); the entries on Dinah, Levi, the Day of Atonement and tithes, for the canonical side.
• Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism — its articles on Jubilees, on the Aramaic Levi Document and on intermarriage.
• Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — “Jubilees” and the articles on the calendar and the priesthood.

• James C. VanderKam, Jubilees (Hermeneia, two volumes) — a two-volume commentary. Not consulted for this page; see Stage 5.
• James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees: A Critical Text (CSCO 510) — the Geʻez measured here, in a digitisation of its text without the apparatus.
• R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, or the Little Genesis (1902) — the English quoted here, from the 1917 SPCK reprint.
• James L. Kugel, A Walk through Jubilees; Michael Segal, The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology and Theology; Betsy Halpern-Amaru, The Empowerment of Women in the Book of Jubilees.
• Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIII (Qumran Cave 4.VIII) — the printed edition of 4Q221 and 4Q223–224. Not held; the Hebrew here is the SQE text.

The coverage map. Every verse of the Geʻez Genesis from 33:18 to 37:36 (141 verses) was screened against the 136 verses of Jubilees 30–34. 95 of the 141 share no two consecutive words with any of them. Against the whole of Jubilees, 50 still share none.

Genesis 34, verse by verse — the test of what a retelling keeps.

Each cell is one verse of Dillmann’s Geʻez Genesis 34, with the longest run of consecutive words it shares with any of the 136 verses of Jubilees 30–34 (unfolded). A dot = no two consecutive words. Darker = deeper.

Fifteen of its 31 verses share no two consecutive words with Jubilees 30–34: Shechem’s request to his father (34:4), Hamor’s and Shechem’s offers (34:8–12), the terms of circumcision (34:15–17), the speech at the city gate (34:20–23), the wives and children taken captive (34:29) and the brothers’ last word (34:31). Seven reach three or more, and six of those seven find their partner in Jubilees 30: Shechem son of Hamor (34:2, with 30:2), ‘because they had defiled Dinah their sister’ (34:13 and 34:27, with 30:3), ‘two of the sons of Jacob’ (34:25, with 30:17), Dinah brought out of Shechem’s house and the flocks, herds and asses taken (34:26 and 34:28, with 30:24) — each with a single partner in these chapters (band 1). The seventh, 34:30, is a counter-example: its three words are ‘who dwell in’, a phrase 18 Pentateuch verses carry, and its partner is 34:4 of Jubilees — the Amorite war. Jubilees’ own telling of Jacob’s reproach, 30:25, shares one word with Genesis 34:30. What the measurement keeps is the outrage, the killing and the spoil; what it cannot find is the negotiation.

What has no trace at all. Ten verses of Genesis 34 share no two consecutive words with any verse of Jubilees — Shechem’s request (34:4), the offers of marriage (34:9, 34:10, 34:12), the terms of circumcision and their acceptance (34:15–17, 34:20, 34:22) and the brothers’ last word (34:31). The 1917 edition’s note on 30:3 had already said so in its own terms: “Our author omits all reference to the circumcision of the Shechemites” — and went on to give a motive, which is that editor’s reading, not a measurement. Joseph’s dreams (Genesis 37:5–8) share no two consecutive words with any verse of Jubilees, and the word ‘sheaves’ is not in Charles’s English of the book at all. Genesis 36, Esau’s line, is 39 silent verses out of 43 here (the Edomite kings return in Jubilees 38).

Even what is kept is kept in other words. Jubilees 34:10–17 tells the same events as Genesis 37:12–36 — Joseph sent to Shechem, sold to Ishmaelites, the coat dipped in a kid’s blood, the father who will go down to the grave mourning — and no pair of their verses shares more than two consecutive words — and those two are ‘into the grave’ (34:17 and 37:35), a phrase five Pentateuch verses and three Jubilees verses carry.

And what Jubilees has that Genesis lacks cannot be measured against it. The war with the seven Amorite kings (34:1–9) is set beside Genesis 48:22, where Jacob speaks of land taken from the Amorite with sword and bow, by the 1917 edition’s note on 34:2: the legend “harmonizes with the statement given in Gen. xlviii. 22”. Measured: Genesis 48:22 shares no two consecutive words with any verse of Jubilees. The connection is an idea, not a text. Against the whole Geʻez Genesis, the nine verses of the war reach at most three consecutive words, twice: 34:3 shares ‘were in the house’ with Genesis 39:14 — Potiphar’s household, another story — band 1 both ways; 34:4 shares ‘who dwell in’, a phrase 18 verses of the Geʻez Pentateuch carry (band 3 in Genesis). The one partner worth naming is where the war begins: 34:1 shares two words, ‘to pasture their sheep’, with Genesis 37:12 — the verse that sends Joseph’s brothers to Shechem — tie band 1 both ways. Jubilees opens its war and Genesis opens Joseph’s sale with the brothers at pasture by Shechem; two words, reported as two words.

Genesis itself does not. Jacob’s last words curse the anger of Simeon and Levi (Genesis 49:5–7). Measured: Genesis 49:6 shares no two consecutive words with any verse of Jubilees, and 49:5 only the pair of names, ‘Simeon and Levi’, with Jubilees 30:4 — a pair that stands in four Pentateuch verses and one verse of Jubilees. Jubilees calls the same act righteousness written in heaven (30:17–23).

Judith does, in her prayer. In the King James Apocrypha: “O Lord God of my father Simeon, to whom thou gavest a sword to take vengeance of the strangers” (9:2), and of the avengers, “which were moved with thy zeal” (9:4). The Testament of Levi and the Aramaic Levi Document also tell Levi’s part at Shechem and his call to the priesthood; neither is held on this disk, so they are named, not quoted. A Hellenistic poem on Shechem by one Theodotus survives in quotation in Eusebius; also not held.

Jubilees dates events ‘in the Nth jubilee, in the Mth week, in the Kth year’, so a date converts to a year from creation (Anno Mundi): AM = 49(N−1) + 7(M−1) + K. Every dated verse in these chapters, computed from Charles’s English and checked against the Geʻez numerals, which agree with it at every one:

Charles’s margin years agree with the formula at all five. From Salem in the fourth month (30:1) to Benjamin’s birth on the eleventh of the eighth month (32:33), everything happens in AM 2143: Shechem, Bethel, the visit to Isaac, Levi’s ordination, the feast, Deborah’s death, Benjamin’s birth, Rachel’s death.

Three ages, set against the same clock:

None of the three ages fits the book’s own dates. Dinah’s is the cleanest case: no editor marks either date, and both editors’ reckonings put nine years between her birth and Shechem. The page does not explain the difference. It is the kind of thing the commentaries discuss, and none was consulted (Stage 5). The Samaritan Genesis held here covers only chapters 5 and 11, so no Samaritan figure can be set beside these.

• 136 verses, 2,790 Geʻez word tokens in chapters 30–34, chapter by chapter 26·32·34·23·21 in both the English and the Geʻez.
• Moses is named at 30:11, 33:13 and 33:18, in both languages; each time the angel tells him to command Israel or to write.
• The digitised Geʻez of 32:4 reads sixty lambs and twenty-nine kids where Charles, and VanderKam’s own English, read seven and twenty-one. It is a question for the printed edition, which is not held.
• The book gives Levi’s priesthood two grounds, two chapters apart. At 30:18 it is his zeal at Shechem; at 32:3 Jacob counts his sons from Benjamin upward and ‘Levi fell to the portion of the Lord’ — a tithe of sons. The 1917 edition’s note on 30:18 already observed it: “A different reason for Levi's choice for the priesthood is given in xxxii. 3”.
• Simeon’s and Judah’s wives are called Canaanites in 34:20, four chapters after the law against marriage with Gentiles, and 34:21 goes on to say that Simeon ‘repented, and took a second wife from Mesopotamia’. The text records it; the page does not reconcile it.

Against the Geʻez Genesis (1,526 verses): of the 136 verses of Jubilees 30–34, 32 share no two consecutive words with any verse of Genesis; 104 reach two, 22 reach three, 4 reach four, 1 reaches five, and nothing reaches six. With the fold: 32 share no two consecutive words with any verse of Genesis; 104 reach two, 23 reach three, 5 reach four, 1 reaches five, and nothing reaches six.

Against the whole Geʻez Pentateuch (5,797 verses): 14 share no two consecutive words with any verse of the five books; 122 reach two, 39 reach three, 7 reach four, 2 reach five, 1 reaches six, 1 reaches seven, 1 reaches eight, and nothing reaches nine. With the fold: 14 share no two consecutive words with any verse of the five books; 122 reach two, 40 reach three, 8 reach four, 2 reach five, 1 reaches six, 1 reaches seven, 1 reaches eight, and nothing reaches nine. The one verse that reaches eight is 33:12.

Is that low? Measured on the same screen, the whole book against Genesis: 86 of Jubilees’ 1,307 verses reach four or more, and the deepest run anywhere is eight words (24:1 with Genesis 25:11, band 1 both ways). In Jubilees 24–28 — the stolen blessing and the flight to Laban — 32 of 148 verses reach four or more with Genesis. Here, 4 of 136. With the fold: 91 in the whole book, 33 in Jubilees 24–28, 5 here; the deepest run in the book is still eight, at 24:1. Two stretches of one book, a chapter apart, retell Genesis at very different distances from its wording.

For every verse, not only the deepest. Of the 104 verses with a two-word partner in Genesis, 38 have exactly one deepest partner (band 1), and eleven form mutual pairs: the Genesis verse’s own deepest partner in all of Jubilees is that same verse, alone, at the same depth. The widest band is 29, at 33:20, made of three different two-word phrases — chiefly ዲበ ፡ ምድር, ‘on the earth’, which 25 verses of Genesis carry. The fold changes the depth of one verse only, 30:12, against Genesis and against the whole Pentateuch alike. The full table is below.

The 32 verses with no two-word partner in Genesis: 30:1, 30:16, 30:19, 30:20, 30:22, 31:10, 31:12, 31:13, 31:15, 31:16, 31:19, 31:29, 32:3, 32:5, 32:8, 32:13, 32:14, 32:21, 32:26, 32:27, 32:28, 32:29, 33:5, 33:11, 33:12, 34:2, 34:5, 34:7, 34:8, 34:11, 34:15, 34:16. 33:12 is one of them: the verse that shares eight words with Deuteronomy shares not two with Genesis.

The fourteen verses with no two-word partner in the whole Pentateuch: 30:1, 30:19, 31:10, 31:13, 31:19, 32:5, 32:8, 32:14, 32:29, 33:5, 33:11, 34:7, 34:11, 34:16. Among them is 34:11 — Joseph sold to the Ishmaelites, brought to Egypt, sold to Potiphar — whose events Genesis tells three times.

Unfolded, Genesis 34:14’s own deepest Jubilees partners are two verses at two words — 30:12, and 30:4 with the pair of names ‘Simeon and Levi’.

Jubilees 33:12 against Deuteronomy 27:20: eight words, tie band 1 both ways. No other verse of the Geʻez Pentateuch shares eight with 33:12, and no other verse of Jubilees shares eight with Deuteronomy 27:20. The verse announces a citation — “And again, it is written a second time” — and the measurement finds a matching verse, the one the 1917 edition’s note already points to (see our Deuteronomy 27 study for the twelve curses). ‘A second time’ is apt in a further sense: two verses earlier, 33:10 states the same law in its own words, and that verse shares four words with Deuteronomy 27:20 and three with Leviticus 20:11; the phrase ‘with the wife of his father’ stands in two Pentateuch verses and two Jubilees verses, and they are those.

The page does not say Jubilees is ‘quoting’ the Geʻez Deuteronomy. Jubilees itself signals a citation; the measurement shows that, in these two Geʻez texts, the cited words are the same words. Which text shaped which, in Hebrew, in Greek or in Geʻez, is not measurable here.

• Jub 33:1 → Genesis 31:18 — four words, band 1 both ways. ‘And he went to Isaac his father’. It is the deepest partner 33:1 has — and Genesis 31:18 is a different journey, Jacob leaving Laban years earlier. A travel formula, unique by accident.
• Jub 32:2 → Exodus 12:18 — four words, band 1 both ways. ‘The fourteenth of this month’. In Exodus it is the Passover; in Jubilees it is the day Jacob tithes, the eve of Tabernacles. A date formula.
• Jub 32:18 — three words with 15 Pentateuch verses at once. ‘I am the Lord’. A band of 15 is the signature of a formula. Against Genesis 35:11–12, the promise it retells, 32:18 reaches two (‘I am’, a pair in 34 Pentateuch verses) and 32:18–19 share no two-word run with 35:12.
• Jub 34:13 → Genesis 37:33 — a run of one. Charles’s “An evil beast hath devoured Joseph” reads in English like a quotation of Genesis 37:33. The resemblance lives in the English; in Geʻez the adjective differs and the Geʻez Genesis has a further clause before Joseph.
• Jub 30:25 → Genesis 34:30 — a run of one. The two verses tell the same moment, Jacob reproaching his sons for fear of ‘those who dwelt in the land’, and share a single word. Genesis 34:30’s deepest partner in these chapters is instead 34:4, the Amorite war, at three words — ‘who dwell in’. A formula finds the wrong verse; the right verse is retold in other words.
• Jub 30:12 → Genesis 34:14 — two, or four. The verse that says it records ‘how the sons of Jacob spake’ doubles its run under the fold, because the two Geʻez texts spell ‘reproach’ with different letters. Without declaring the fold, one would publish two; with it, four. Both are printed. Even the brothers’ condition differs: Jubilees’ ዘቦ ፡ ቍልፈተ (‘who has a foreskin’) against Genesis’ ዘኢኮነ ፡ ግዙረ (‘who is not circumcised’).

Three pieces overlap these chapters (the identifications by content are this page’s own): 4Q221 frg. 4 (33:12–15), 4Q223–224 frg. 1 i (32:18–21) and frg. 2 i, lines 4–5 (34:4–5). Most of what an edition prints in them is restoration. In 4Q221 frg. 4, lines 1–10: 27 whole words survive, 13 are partly restored and 43 wholly. In 4Q223–224 frg. 1 i: 8, 7 and 36; in frg. 2 i lines 4–5: 2, 2 and 12. Restorations are made with the help of the Geʻez and of the biblical text, so measuring them would measure the editors. Only whole preserved words are screened, and a restored letter breaks a run.

4Q221 frg. 4, lines 1–2 (restorations in brackets): [כ]ת[וב] שנית [ארור] [שוכב] [עם] [אשת] אביהו כי גל[ה] / כנף אביהו [ואמרו] [כול] [קדושי] [יהוה] [אמ]ן אמן ואתה

Masoretic Deuteronomy 27:20: אָר֗וּר שֹׁכֵב֙ עִם־אֵ֣שֶׁת אָבִ֔יו כִּ֥י גִלָּ֖ה כְּנַ֣ף אָבִ֑יו וְאָמַ֥ר כׇּל־הָעָ֖ם אָמֵֽן

Against all 23,204 Masoretic verses, the deepest run of preserved words in 4Q221 frg. 4 is three — ‘command the sons of [Israel]’, a formula shared with 5 verses of Leviticus and Numbers. At the cited sentence itself, no two consecutive preserved words match Deuteronomy 27:20: the scroll spells ‘his father’ in the long form, where the Masoretic text has the short one, twice. The two preserved words ‘his father, for’ do find a two-word partner in the Masoretic text — 1 Kings 5:15 [5:1 in English Bibles], band 1, where the same spelling stands in a sentence about Hiram and Solomon. That is this section’s counter-example. With the spelling folded (long suffix read as short), ‘his father, for’ reaches two (band 3, Deuteronomy 27:20 among them) and ‘the skirt of his father’ reaches two (band 2: Deuteronomy 23:1 [22:30 in English Bibles] and 27:20); the restored final letter of ‘uncovered’ keeps them apart.

4Q223–224 frg. 1 i keeps 8 whole words of the promise and vision of 32:18–21, and no two consecutive ones match any Masoretic verse, again partly because of spelling: with the scroll’s full spellings of ‘all’ and ‘tread’ read as the Masoretic short ones, ‘the tread of [the] foot’ reaches two with Deuteronomy 2:5 (band 1).

• Potiphar’s office (Jub 34:11; Genesis 37:36). Masoretic שַׂ֖ר הַטַּבָּחִֽים; Greek ἀρχιμαγείρῳ (chief cook); Dillmann’s Geʻez Genesis ሊቂ ፡ መበስላኒሁ; Jubilees ሊቀ ፡ መብስላን. Charles: “the chief of the cooks”. The same office in both Geʻez texts, in different word forms (the Genesis form carries a suffix, ‘his’); the two verses’ longest shared run is one word.
• The tower of Eder (Jub 33:1; Genesis 35:21). Masoretic לְמִגְדַּל־עֵֽדֶר; the Greek has no 35:21 and puts τοῦ πύργου Γαδερ in 35:16; so does Dillmann’s Geʻez, ማኅፈድ ፡ ዘጋዴር (‘tower’ translated). Jubilees’ Geʻez carries one compound name, መግደለድራኤፍ — Charles’s “Magdalâdrâ’êf”. The reading of that name as the tower of Eder is the 1917 edition’s note on it: “A compound of migdal ‘eder ’ephrāth ("the tower of Eder of Ephrath"); cf. Gen. xxxv. 21”.
• Kabratan (Jub 32:32; Genesis 35:16) — see Stage 3: a name in the Greek and in Jubilees, a distance in the Masoretic text, absent from Dillmann’s Geʻez.

• Numbers 25:11–13 (Phinehas’ zeal and a covenant of priesthood) — measured only in Geʻez (Stage 3): a run of two, and not the deepest partner on either side. Deuteronomy 33:8–11 — no two-word run with these chapters in Geʻez. Malachi 2:4–7 — named only.
• Acts 7:53; Galatians 3:19; Hebrews 2:2 — the law given through angels, which is the frame of the whole book (an angel dictating to Moses). See our Hebrews 2 study.
• 1 Corinthians 5:1 — ‘a man has his father’s wife’: the sin of Jubilees 33 in a church at Corinth. See our 1 Corinthians 5 study.
• Hebrews 7:4–17 — Levi and the tithe, and a priesthood that is changed. Jubilees 32 has Levi receive the tithe and a priesthood ‘for ever’.
• Hebrews 9:7 — the Day of Atonement, ‘once a year’; Jubilees 34:18–19 says ‘once a year’ too, and gives the day a different origin.
• Romans 4:15 and Revelation 3:5 — cited by the 1917 edition’s notes at 33:16 (“Where there is no law there is no transgression”) and at 30:22 (the book of life).
• No run is possible against any of these. Jubilees 30–34 is held here in Geʻez and in a few Hebrew scraps; the New Testament is Greek.

• The commentaries. VanderKam’s Hermeneia commentary, Segal, Kugel, Halpern-Amaru and the DJD XIII edition of the Qumran pieces were not consulted. Where this page interprets, it rests on its own measurements, on the 1917 edition’s notes, or on its own reading of the text — never on those commentaries. Whether the commentaries explain Dinah’s age, Isaac’s or Joseph’s, this page cannot say.
• The printed critical text. The Geʻez of Jubilees is a digitisation of VanderKam’s text without its apparatus. The sixty lambs and twenty-nine kids at 32:4 cannot be checked against the printed page from here; the three hosts of the digitisation agree with one another, which proves only that they are one digitisation.
• Which Hebrew, Greek or Geʻez stands behind what. The usual account is that Jubilees was written in Hebrew and reached Geʻez through Greek, and that the Geʻez Bible was translated from Greek. None of that is tested here, and no sentence on this page depends on it.
• Any Samaritan figure. The Samaritan Genesis held here covers chapters 5 and 11 only.
• Allusion. A run of identical words finds verbatim contact. It cannot see Levi’s zeal standing in Phinehas’ shoes, which is an idea, and it is not evidence against it.

• Two editors, two centuries apart. A run between VanderKam’s Jubilees and Dillmann’s Pentateuch can be shortened by either editor’s choice of spelling. That is why the fold is printed beside every headline — and why 30:12 is two or four.
• The fold is coarse. It merges letters that manuscripts interchange; it also merges, in principle, words that differ by those letters alone. On these chapters it changes the depth of one verse, 30:12, from two to four, and leaves the deepest runs (five with Genesis, eight with the Pentateuch) where they were.
• The law/story division in the diagram is a reading. The counts that support it are measured; the boundaries (41 law verses) are drawn by hand from the text and stated.
• The English is quotation, not a measured column. Charles’s 1902 translation was made from the Ethiopic text of his day, not from VanderKam’s; where they differ (32:4 is one place), the English and the measured Geʻez are not the same witness.

• Five slips in the Charles transcription in this range, checked against the archive.org OCR of scans of both the 1902 and the 1917 printings: 32:19 ‘Ana’ for ‘And’, 32:21 ‘through- out’, 32:24 ‘will. it’, 34:6 ‘housel he’ for ‘house, he’, and 31:27 ‘journey, set’ for ‘journey; set’ (both printings). The last was found by a reviewer after the first draft printed the whole of 31:27; the codex now stops that line before it. No line printed on this page contains one. They are left in the corpus file and reported.
• The Geʻez Deuteronomy file splits one word (10:19) where the digitiser’s own page does not — found by cross-checking eight chapters word by word. It touches nothing measured here.
• The shelf’s Hebrew word-splitter keeps the Masoretic paragraph letters as words (a final ‘samekh’ or ‘pe’ after many verses). It cannot touch this page’s numbers, because the Qumran text has no such tokens, but it can lengthen a Hebrew-against-Hebrew run by one where two verses both end a paragraph. Reported, not patched; the splitter is frozen.
• The two earlier pages of this series attribute their English to ‘Charles 1913, lightly modernized’. The text now held is the 1917 reprint of the 1902 translation; this page quotes it unaltered and leaves those pages to be brought into line.

• James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees: A Critical Text (CSCO 510, 1989) and the translation volume that accompanies it; and his Jubilees (Hermeneia).
• August Dillmann, Octateuchus Aethiopicus (1853–55) — the Geʻez Genesis to Deuteronomy measured here.
• R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, or the Little Genesis (1902; reprinted by SPCK in 1917 with an introduction by G. H. Box) — the English and the notes quoted here.
• Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIII — 4Q221 and 4Q223–224 in print. Not held.
• Kugel, A Walk through Jubilees; Segal, The Book of Jubilees; Halpern-Amaru, The Empowerment of Women in the Book of Jubilees.

• A retelling can feel like Scripture and not be it. Jubilees sounds like Genesis in English. In Geʻez, the one language in which it survives whole, no verse of these chapters shares more than five consecutive words with Genesis. Know which book you are reading.
• Where it signals a citation, it says so. The one long run of shared wording sits under the words ‘it is written a second time’. Citation is honest when it is marked.
• Two verdicts on Shechem. Genesis curses the anger (49:5–7); Jubilees writes the sword into heaven’s book. Read them side by side and let Scripture’s verdict stand.
• Dinah is a person in both books. Jubilees gives her an age and a death. Whatever the arithmetic, the girl at the centre of chapter 30 is not a device.
• One concrete response. Read Genesis 34 and Jubilees 30 in one sitting this week, and ask at each difference: what does Jubilees say that Genesis does not, and on whose authority?