The Book of Jubilees is a Jewish religious text from the second century BC that retells Genesis and the early chapters of Exodus as a revelation dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai by the Angel of the Presence. It organizes all of history into 49-year periods called jubilees — the source of its name — and it stands as canonical Scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible to this day. At least fourteen Hebrew copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, making it one of the best-attested books at Qumran.
Jubilees keeps the familiar story — creation, the flood, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph — but names the unnamed, dates the undated, and explains what Genesis leaves unexplained. Along the way it introduces a satan-like prince called Mastema, an army of angels created on the first day, and a solar calendar of exactly 364 days. This guide covers what is inside the book, why it carries the name it does, where it stands on the Bible question, and how it connects to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Book of Enoch.
Jubilees runs fifty chapters. The frame comes from Exodus 24: Moses climbs Mount Sinai and remains forty days — and Jubilees claims to record what he was shown there. God foretells Israel's future, then commands the Angel of the Presence to dictate the history of the world from the heavenly tablets, from creation down to that very moment on the mountain.
| Chapters | What happens |
|---|---|
| Prologue–1 | Moses ascends Sinai; God foretells Israel's story and commands the Angel of the Presence to dictate the history from creation. |
| 2–4 | Creation week — with the angels created on day one; Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel; the named wives of the patriarchs; Enoch. |
| 5–10 | The Watchers' descent and the giants; the flood; Noah's covenant and the 364-day calendar; Mastema and the demons; Babel. |
| 11–23 | Abraham — his youth in Ur, the burning of the idol house, the covenant, circumcision, the binding of Isaac, his death. |
| 24–45 | Jacob and his sons — Isaac's blessing, Levi's priesthood, Dinah, the wars with Esau, and the Joseph story. |
| 46–50 | Egypt and the exodus — Moses' birth, Mastema's opposition, the first Passover, and the laws of Sabbath and jubilee. |
Genesis says nothing about when the angels were created. Jubilees answers in its second chapter: on day one, alongside heaven and earth, God made every spirit that serves him — the angels of the presence, the angels of sanctification, and the angels set over fire, wind, cloud, snow, hail, frost, thunder, and the seasons. All told, the book counts twenty-two works of creation across the six days, and pointedly matches them to the twenty-two generations from Adam to Jacob. Even the Sabbath is bigger in Jubilees: the highest angels have kept it with God since the beginning of the world.
Like the Book of Enoch, Jubilees tells of the Watchers — angels who descended to earth in the days of Jared. But Jubilees adds a twist: they were originally sent down to teach humanity justice and uprightness, and only afterward fell, taking human wives who bore the giants. Violence spreads, the flood follows, and Enoch — whom the book calls the first man to learn writing — records the testimony against them.
After the flood comes one of the book's most influential scenes. The spirits of the dead giants begin to torment Noah's grandchildren, and Noah prays for their removal. Mastema, the prince of those spirits, petitions God to leave him a tenth of them to carry out his work of testing and accusing humanity — and God grants it. Angels then teach Noah remedies against their afflictions. In a few verses, Jubilees sketches an entire theology of where demons come from and why evil persists in a world already cleansed by the flood.
Genesis introduces Abram as a grown man with no backstory. Jubilees supplies one. As a boy in Ur, Abram turns from the city's idolatry; at fourteen he drives off the ravens Mastema sends to devour the seed of the land, and he improves the plow so grain is buried as it is sown. He pleads with his father Terah — who serves the idols, and whom later Jewish tradition would famously recast as their maker and seller — to abandon them. Finally, at sixty, Abram burns down the house of idols by night. His brother Haran dies rushing in to save them, which quietly explains a detail Genesis leaves bare: that Haran died before his father in Ur of the Chaldees. Later legend grew this fire into the story of Abraham surviving Nimrod's furnace; the spark of that tradition is here in Jubilees.
The book also reframes the binding of Isaac. As in the opening of Job, the test originates when Mastema challenges God to prove Abraham's devotion — an ancient answer to the hardest question in Genesis 22: why would God ask such a thing at all?
The longest stretch of the book belongs to Jacob, its true hero. Rebecca, nearly silent in Genesis, becomes a major voice — blessing Jacob, counseling him, securing the chosen line. Levi is raised to the priesthood generations before Sinai; Judah receives the royal blessing. The narrative follows the sons through the Dinah episode, wars against Amorite kings, and a final battle in which Jacob defeats Esau. The Joseph story then carries the family into Egypt, setting up the exodus chapters — where Mastema returns to oppose Moses, and the first Passover is instituted while he is bound and powerless.
Chapter 6 delivers the book's most distinctive teaching: the year is exactly 364 days — fifty-two weeks precisely — so that every festival falls on the same day of the week, every year, forever. Jubilees warns Israel against reckoning by the moon, which drifts and would cause the holy days to be kept at the wrong times. This was no idle detail: the community that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls appears to have ordered its entire liturgical life by this same calendar.
In Leviticus 25, Israel is told to count seven weeks of years — seven times seven — and then proclaim a jubilee: a year of liberty, when slaves go free and land returns to its families. This book takes that 49-year unit and turns it into the master clock of history. Every event is dated by jubilee, by the seven-year week within it, and by the year within that. Adam leaves Eden, Noah builds the ark, Abraham hears his call — each carries a timestamp.
The chronology is not decoration; it is the argument. From creation to Israel's entry into Canaan the book counts exactly fifty jubilees — 2,450 years — so that Israel comes into its land in the great jubilee of jubilees, history's own year of liberation. The message to its second-century-BC readers was plain: time itself runs on God's schedule, down to the year.
The book has carried other names. In Ge'ez, Ethiopia's classical language, it is Mets'hafe Kufale, the Book of Division — from that dividing of time into jubilees and weeks. Ancient Greek writers called it Leptogenesis, the Little Genesis — not a comment on its length, but most likely a nod to the fine detail with which it treats the things Genesis passes over.
All fifty chapters in clear modern English — the whole retelling, from creation week to the first Passover. Members read free online.
Get The Book of Jubilees →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryIn the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, yes — and it has been for roughly fifteen centuries. Jubilees was translated into Ge'ez and received as fully canonical Scripture within the Ethiopian canon, traditionally counted at 81 books, alongside the Book of Enoch. Beta Israel, Ethiopia's ancient Jewish community, holds the book as Scripture as well — making Jubilees canonical in two living traditions. For the full picture of that larger canon, see our guide to the Ethiopian Bible.
Everywhere else, the honest answer is that Jubilees was never removed from the Bible — it simply never entered most canons. When Jewish authorities consolidated the Hebrew Bible in the era after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, Jubilees was not among the books received, for all its earlier popularity. Early Christians knew and used it — the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius drew on it, and Byzantine chroniclers went on quoting it for centuries — but when the church drew up its formal canon lists in the fourth century, Jubilees was not on them. It was classed instead among the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha: books written under an ancient name, valued by many, but not received as Scripture.
Canon decisions had consequences for survival. Ancient books lived by being copied, and once Jubilees fell out of church reading, Greek and Latin scribes largely let it go. The Greek version survives only in quotations; about a quarter of an old Latin translation remains; the Hebrew original vanished entirely until the Dead Sea Scrolls. Only Ethiopia kept copying the whole book, century after century — which is why every complete Book of Jubilees on earth descends from Ge'ez manuscripts. Europe recovered the text in the nineteenth century, when Ethiopic manuscripts reached the West: August Dillmann published the first modern translation in the 1850s, and R. H. Charles's 1902 English edition set the scholarly standard for the century that followed.
Precision, personnel, and law. These are the most famous additions:
Before 1947, Jubilees was known complete only in Ge'ez, and scholars debated its original language and date. The Dead Sea Scrolls ended the debate. Fragments of at least fourteen Hebrew manuscripts of Jubilees were found in the caves near Qumran — a tally only a handful of biblical books exceed. The book was composed in Hebrew in the middle of the second century BC, most likely around 160–150 BC, and the oldest surviving copy was made within a generation or two of the original.
The Qumran community treated it as an authority, not a curiosity. The Damascus Document — one of the movement's foundational texts — points its readers to "the Book of the Divisions of the Times into their Jubilees and Weeks," a near-exact match for how Jubilees describes itself in its own opening lines. The group's liturgical calendar was the 364-day solar year that Jubilees commands. And when the Ge'ez text was finally set beside the Hebrew fragments, it proved a faithful rendering — vindicating more than a thousand years of Ethiopian copying.
Jubilees and 1 Enoch are the two great pillars of the Ethiopian Bible's wider canon, and they grew from the same soil. Both expand the terse notice in Genesis 6 about the sons of God; both tell of the Watchers, the giants, and the flood; both teach the 364-day calendar; both were prized at Qumran; and both survive complete only in Ge'ez, because the Ethiopian church alone kept them as Scripture.
They are not merely parallel — Jubilees knows the Enochic writings. Its fourth chapter gives Enoch a full résumé: the first man to learn writing, the recorder of the signs of the heavens, the witness who testified against the Watchers — a compressed catalogue of what the Enochic books actually contain. Where the two differ is emphasis. In 1 Enoch, the Watchers' descent is rebellion from the start; in Jubilees they come down with good intentions and corrupt themselves on earth. And where Enoch roams the cosmos, Jubilees stays close to the biblical storyline, welding the Watchers' tale into the history of Israel and its law. Read together — Genesis first, then Jubilees, then Enoch — they open up the world of Second Temple Judaism as few other books can. For the companion volume, see our full guide to the Book of Enoch.
The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible includes the Book of Jubilees as canon — alongside Enoch and every book the Ethiopian church preserved — in clear modern English for $49.95 USD.
Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryKeep exploring. Library of Alexandria Press restores lost and ancient texts into clear modern English — members read and listen free online. Jubilees is one chapter of a much larger story: see our guide to the lost books of the Bible to meet the rest.