Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, manticore-manglers—Christ is risen! He truly is risen. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Reverend, almost-double doctor, Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, almost double-master, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania—and we are live! And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346, and you can talk to us and speak with us. And we're going to get to your calls in the second half of this show, and our very own, most-beloved Matushka Trudi, will be taking your calls.

Fr. Stephen De Young: And we are both checking in safe from Kendrick Lamar diss-tracks. Dude is savage. So far he's left us alone.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So far. So last time we talked about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, beginning our series on apocryphal literature from the period of Second Temple Judaism. Tonight we're going to be talking about the Book of Jubilees, which is probably my favorite text of this sort. I think it's the most accessible of all of these books, requiring the least background knowledge to get what's going on in the text, unlike books such as 1 Enoch, which… we'll talk about that at some point on this podcast. If you know Genesis and at least the beginning of Exodus, then you have the framework that you need for this text, for Jubilees. But nonetheless, it's still kind of a bit different among all the apocrypha related to the Old Testament. So why is that? Why is this one different from the rest of those?

Fr. Stephen: Different title.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! There you go.

Fr. Stephen: This one's called the Book of Jubilees; the other ones are called other stuff, you know. Different titles: 1 Enoch or...

Fr. Andrew: I was trying to remember when Jubilee was first introduced in the X-Men, and my memory is failing me now, but I feel like it was in the 1990s or something.

Fr. Stephen: So that would've been… It was either 1989 or 1990. It was actually in an off issue. It's when the X-Men were in Australia; it was the Australian team.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: After "The Fall of the Mutants." There were four female members and four male members, and the four female members went to a mall in Australia, and that's where they ran into Jubilee.

Fr. Andrew: May 1989. Uncanny X-Men, 244.

Fr. Stephen: I was thinking it was about 1989. Yeah, 244. And then she ended up kind of hanging around. People didn't realize she was hanging around in what had been the Reavers' base in the Australian Outback. So then when Wolverine nearly got killed by the Reavers in issue 251, she came and rescued him and then sort of became his sidekick for a while.

Fr. Andrew: That I remember. Man, that was a long time ago! [Laughter] We were just starting high school, as I recall.

Fr. Stephen: That was right at the transition of Marc Silvestri penciling it to Jim Lee, which is before Jim Lee got really big, and in the middle of Chris Claremont's 17-year run writing Uncanny X-Men.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And so tonight we're going to be talking about a Second Temple Jewish text dedicated—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that is not related to that at all.

Fr. Andrew: —to this— [Laughter] Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: In no way.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Like, her name just comes from the fact that her given name is Jubilation Lee.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It's just a nickname.

Fr. Stephen: And so it's shortened, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But we couldn't not reference her at some point in this episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we might as well get it over with.

Fr. Andrew: All right. [Laughter] So why else is the book of Jubilees different from the other Second Temple Jewish literature?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, aside from the title?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, aside from the title.

Fr. Stephen: That would be the contents are different.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Anyway, yeah, no, more of what we were getting at in terms of— I mean, that's how they're all different from each other. [Laughter] But how the— Some of the uniqueness is sort of the legacy and the history that the text of the book of Jubilees has had. So last time we were talking about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is kind of typical for a lot of these that we're going to be talking about, in that the text was preserved among Christians and not among Rabbinic Jewish groups. We talked about last time the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs we have from basically two places: the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is of course a pre-Christian Jewish community, and then Christian monasteries, and the monasteries are where it was preserved, because a number of these texts—

And the reason for that is that many if not most of these texts that were made use of by the early Christians or come from Jewish communities that ended up developing into Christian communities were, if they had a lot of currency in other Jewish groups and especially in Pharisaic Judaism, they tended to be, then, rejected because they were seen as being Christian. Christians were pointing to them and using them to show the antiquity of their own beliefs, and so, because— When you get to the point where Rabbinic Jewish communities are declaring Christian communities heretical, they're also going to declare the communities that produced those texts the Christians were using heretical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, I mean, this is not some weird, crazy thing if you remember what first-century Judaism is like. It's not this single religious group that believes exactly one list of things and has exactly one list of texts. There's a variety there. As we've said before, there's Judaisms. And so just as Christianity took one track and said, "No, this—this viewpoint, this set of interpretations—is the true Judaism," so to speak, Rabbinic Judaism took another turn and ruled out various other things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then, because of the political realities of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity developing in parallel, there was more of an onus for one side to condemn the other and fight about it than there was in the diverse, pre-Christian Judaism, where sort of just different Jews in different parts of the world were doing their own thing in their own communities, and nobody was super worried about it, but there were any number of other political realities, especially those caused by the Roman Empire that caused it to be a critical issue for the two groups to want to distinguish themselves from each other.

But so that's sort of the normal thing. That's what you expect, that's what you're going to find with 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, any number of other texts that we're going to end up talking about on this show. But that's not what you actually find with the book of Jubilees. So first of all you find the book of Jubilees being used across a wide swath of Jewish groups in different parts of the world already in the Second Temple period, in the pre-Christian period. So it's not just a question of— Even though, technically, because of certain things in it, Jubilees might be considered part of the Enochic literature. The book of 1 Enoch, for example, is intensely popular among certain groups, certain sects, certain communities in Second Temple Judaism, and either unknown or rejected across a swath of other communities. So the Pharisees, for example, in some cases— The reason I want to specify "unknown or rejected," is because it's not the case that, for example, the Pharisees—and it's really out of the Pharisees that Rabbinic Judaism comes— It's not that they rejected all of these books or that they previously had accepted all of these books and then later rejected them; a lot of them they just didn't use. They didn't have any tradition of using them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they were just never in their...

Fr. Stephen: Right, they were never in. They didn't get taken out; they were never in. The Rabbinic Jewish Old Testament canon is basically—other than a couple of books on the edges—the Pharisaic canon, what the Pharisees always considered to be authoritative, for example. But, even though they never seemed to consider it canonical in the same way, the book of Jubilees was used to refer to among the Pharisees, and sort of Exhibit A of that is Josephus. In his Antiquities, when he's going through the history— He's writing a work of history, history of the Jewish people, for a Roman audience. So when he's going through the events in the book of Genesis, he's very clearly working from the book of Jubilees, on any number of counts. [Laughter] He's got all kinds of content in there that's clearly coming from the book of Jubilees and not Genesis itself—and he's a Pharisee. We also— As I mentioned, you can consider it, because of the contents, to be Enochic literature, we also find it with other Enochic literature in other Jewish communities. So it crossed over between these groups.

But that Pharisaic relationship with the text, where it's not canonical but it's kind of the way we've talked about Christian apocrypha functioning. It's a book that's worth being read but isn't read publicly. That has been maintained in Rabbinic Judaism. If you go to any of the— There are, online, websites that are sort of the Jewish equivalent of BibleHub or BibleGateway or Blue Letter Bible for Christians, but there are Jewish versions of that, that have the texts of the Hebrew Bible and different Rabbinic commentaries and that kind of thing, all cross-referenced and available there. If you go there—sometimes you have to dig around a little!—but if you go to any of those, you will eventually find the book of Jubilees on there. It'll be there somewhere. Does that mean the average Jewish person you meet, even if they attend an Orthodox synagogue, will know all about the book of Jubilees? No. [Laughter] Just like we talked last time about the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs and how it's on Mount Athos and all this, but if you ask the average Orthodox person about it, they won't know much about it! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Never heard of it, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So that's what I mean also when I say it functions in kind of the same way. Historically it has functioned that way. In modern times maybe it has fallen into a lack of knowledge. The comments you will find on those websites, or if you talk to somebody, a Jewish person who sort of knows their stuff, they will say that the book of Jubilees is not canonical, but it contains important historical information, or it's historically accurate. Now, later on tonight when we talk about some of the contents, that's going to make you wonder because— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Some fun stuff in there!

Fr. Stephen: —there's a lot of stuff in there that's not accepted by Orthodox Judaism today in the contents, but that's probably why they preface it with the "not canonical" part. [Laughter] Because there are parts that they accept and parts maybe not so much.

But that's pretty unique. There aren't any other—to my knowledge, that I've been able to find—any other Second Temple Jewish texts of these kind of texts that are still current in Rabbinic Judaism in the same way. There are elements of lots of things. There are elements of early Midrash and stuff that were incorporated into the Talmud and then, through the Talmud, still have currency in Rabbinic Judaism. But there's not a text like this, still in its original Second Temple form, that still functions this way in Rabbinic Judaism. So that's unique.

And so that also means that, at the point where we have these two communities that are slowly separating, getting more and more separate, more and more opposition even is taking place—the Rabbinic Jewish communities and Christian communities that are separating out of Second Temple Judaism—that the book of Jubilees is being used by both. The book of Jubilees, even though not given canonical public reading status for the most part in either of them, still holds some currency; it's still functioning as apocrypha; it's still functioning as this book worth reading in both of those sets of communities, which again is really unique for any of these texts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and kind of interesting. I've thought about this since you and I talked about this, and I thought: Well, why? What is it about this book? I don't know. We could speculate, but I don't know that there's a clear answer to that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I think we're going to get into that a little here, or at least I think some of the things we're going to talk about here in this first half—if you put a number of them together, I think they help point to why. [Laughter] But some of them also point away from it. So as I mentioned, technically speaking, the book of Jubilees would be classified with Enochic literature. While it had this relationship with Pharisaism that's unique, it also is very prominent in any community where the Enochic literature is prominent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so like Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls people.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the reason we say it's part of the Enochic literature is not just that sort of association, because, yeah, Isaiah's in the Dead Sea Scrolls, too, and that's not Enochic literature. It's a couple of things. First is that it's a text that's in the apocalyptic genre. It's apocalyptic—it's an apocalypse—in the sense that we've talked about before on the show. We have "apocalypse" in our head meaning the end of the world, which is actually completely wrong. Apokalypsis means revelation, something being revealed. And, as we've talked about before, apocalyptic literature presents a situation, usually some kind of heavenly journey—someone enters into the heavenly realm, and based on having entered into the heavenly realm, they have a new perspective on the world, on its history, yes, on certain future events, but on sort of the whole sweep of human history, what's going on in the world. And that unique perspective allows them to flesh out, in particular, what is going on spiritually behind various events.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's sort of the heaven's-eye view.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there are things going on that we can all see and experience, but then there's also spiritual realities behind that that may not always be as apparent to us, especially when we're going through whatever the situation is. The person who has sort of exited time as we're experiencing it and sees it from this other perspective can then fill in the rest of that vision for us. And so this is very much what happens in the book of Jubilees. It's just mostly framed as history.

The central figure is Moses in the book of Jubilees, and he is seeing history up to his time, so sort of Genesis 1:1 through Moses being up on Mount Sinai. And he's seeing that from that heavenly perspective. Now, that said, although it's a vision of the past, history, another part of what happens in apocalyptic literature is that apocalyptic literature provided a way to speak about the present in a kind of coded way. In this case, you're speaking about the past—and we'll see this in the book of Enoch and other Enochic literature—you're talking about the past, you're talking about the days of Noah or you're talking about the days of the patriarchs—but you're really talking about the present. You're talking about— because you're making sort of direct comparisons—direct, sometimes not subtle comparisons between things that happened in the past and the spiritual reality behind them, and things that are going on now and the spiritual reality behind them, and really that's the intent of the communication.

This is important when you're reading, say, the apocalypse of St. John, the book of Revelation in the Bible, that St. John is really writing about things that were going on then to people then—"Let the reader understand," as he keeps saying—but by talking about these spiritual realities in general or in terms of things that happened in the past, like the birth of Christ; that was in the past from his perspective. But then, through that, talking about now through this comparison. We'll see some more examples of that as we go on.

And then especially sort of blatantly, in-your-face obvious in the book of Jubilees in terms of it being Enochic literature is almost constant apologetics for the Enochic calendar. When we eventually talk about the book of Enoch, we'll go into some detail on the Enochic calendar, because there's a big section of the book of Enoch that is just laying out that calendar. But the Enochic calendar was a 364-day calendar that had four sets of three 30-day months, with a sort of interstitial day between them. So you have four 90-day periods, three months each, that give you 360 days, and then you had four more days that were each— One day was stuck in between each group of three months, each group of 90 days.

Fr. Andrew: It's like the Shire calendar! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And what the Enochic calendar did for you— They considered it to be mathematically perfect because, for example, all the Jewish feast days fell on not only the same date but the same day of the week every year. And so everything sort of lined up as far as they were concerned. That meant it was mathematically perfect. That meant it was God's calendar. Whereas the regular Jewish calendar that the Pharisees used, for example, you have to add a whole month every few years to get it back on track.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a leap-month.

Fr. Stephen: Because it's a lunar calendar, so you have to add— You chose today, so they'd be like: "Well, look, see, obviously that's a bogus calendar. That's a man-made calendar, because it's not perfect; it's not mathematically perfect. If it came from God, it would be perfect." It wasn't in use long enough as far as we can tell for anyone to notice that it wasn't perfect either. [Laughter] But it was only a day and a quarter and a couple of hours off, so it would have taken longer to notice.

But so that— In these communities, again, we want to— We tend to treat these texts as sort of these free-floating things, but they weren't. They were deeply connected to the lives of communities. And so this calendar issue, this calendar thing, was really the central issue for most Enochic communities. Qumran, they went out in the desert and left the Temple in Jerusalem and decided it was a mess because of this calendar issue.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because this is about how you live your life day to day. It shapes your actual, real life.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is what it was really about. It was about the way the community's life and the rhythms of the community's life and the patterns of the community's life— And these texts were embraced because these texts laid out, explained, argued for, defended that way of life, here signified by the calendar.

This is again why it's so interesting that in Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism the book of Jubilees had any currency, because it so blatantly argues for a calendar that they did not use. We'll see some actual examples of that as we go forward.

In terms of understanding the text… So the sort of shape of text of the book of Jubilees is very different than, like, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs that we read last time, or a lot of them that we're going to read in the future, like the Ascension of Isaiah or the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Probably the biggest, most obvious difference is that Jubilees is basically just narrative. It's just simply telling a story.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when we talked about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, this is an incident that's not recorded in the Bible. The deaths of the twelve sons of Jacob are not recorded in the Bible. Whatever their last words were were not recorded. So this is completely composed; this is just: "I'm going to write this thing, and I'm going to communicate certain things through the mouth of this biblical character." And we saw that that had reference, if there was much information about them in the Bible, that was sort of incorporated or used as a jumping-off point. But really this was a whole new story. The Ascension of Isaiah, talking about Isaiah's martyrdom, that's not recorded in the Old Testament at all, so this just a new— even though it's a narrative, it's like a new narrative, a created narrative.

Fr. Andrew: Right, whereas Jubilees basically takes Genesis and a little bit of the beginning of Exodus and tells the same story with a lot of the same details, honestly, but kind of expands on certain parts. It's commenting on it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is a mode of commenting on the text that was very common in Second Temple and later Rabbinic Judaism. So this is one of the things that might explain why this is a text that maybe had a little more currency in Rabbinic Judaism in that there are texts sort of like this or formatted like this within Rabbinic Judaism.

For example, you've got the targumim, the targums that we've talked about at various points on the show. The Aramaic targums— "Targum" just means translation. But the Aramaic targums are referred to when people just refer to the targums, and these are Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, various parts of the Hebrew Bible.

Fr. Andrew: But not, like, word for word or thought for thought translations.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in many cases.

Fr. Andrew: There's a little bit of explanation or other comments included.

Fr. Stephen: So what's understood here by "translation"— So we today— Our modern idea of translation is you're either trying to go, as Fr. Andrew said, you're trying to go word for word: So here's this— I'm going to translate the New Testament into English for the 50,000th time for some reason. [Laughter] And so I see this Greek word, I am going to figure out what English word is relatively similar in meaning to this Greek word, and I will write that English word. [Laughter] And then, depending on your translation strategy, you smooth that out a little or a lot for an English reader, once you have a whole sentence. Or, as Fr. Andrew said, the other very common modern approach is "thought for thought," where you say, "Well, we can't do it word for word, because Greek syntax and grammar is totally different [from] English syntax and grammar. So sometimes there's going to be one Greek word, and we're going to need three or four English words to really convey the meaning. Like it's a future perfect, so I have to say 'he will have had gone' " [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, whereas in Greek, that'll just be the ending of a verb.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that'll just be one word in Greek. So you say, "Okay, well, we're just going to try the thoughts, the ideas. We're going to take the idea that the Greek is communicating and we're going to communicate that same idea in English."

This ancient mode of translation that produced the targums is closer to that second one but goes even further, because it not only is sort of trying to convey the thought and the idea and will use as many words or even sentences as necessary to try to communicate what they believed the idea of the Hebrew to be with some precision, it would also seek to answer obvious questions about the text sometimes. So if you read a verse and, after reading it, there's sort an obvious question about it—"Wait, what does that mean?" or "Why did he do that?"—the translator would just supply the reason, would just put in there: "Oh, he did this because da-da-dah."

And you get a little bit of the flavor of this, actually, when you read St. John's gospel in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, because he gives little comments here and there.

Fr. Stephen: He's not translating, but he just writes that way. He just puts in these parenthetical comments. See, this is sort of a very Jewish mode of writing at this time. When you read the Aramaic, it's not just that it was a little free with the translation like you're reading the NIV or something, it was that—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Shots fired!

Fr. Stephen: —they'd add— The Never-Inspired Version, that's what I'd say.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right!

Fr. Stephen: —but they'd add in some cases almost a whole story! Like, a whole explanatory thing. And so the Jewish communities, even the ones where people knew Aramaic and their Hebrew wasn't very good, so they needed to use these Aramaic targums a lot, they kind of knew that was going on, and so when you look at the rules for synagogues in the Second Temple period and around the time of Christ, you couldn't just go and read a targum in the synagogue. If you were going to use the targum in a synagogue, you had to read the Hebrew first. You'd get up and read the Hebrew first, and then you could read the Aramaic for the people there who only knew Aramaic. But because of how loosey-goosey it was, they wouldn't let you just read the targum by itself. You could read the Greek by itself, by the way, so there was a recognition that the Greek translation—the old Greek, and the Septuagint, in the case of the Torah, were recognized as being what we would call closer to a word-for-word kind of thing and so could be read by themselves.

But so people were used to reading the text of Scripture with some enhancements, with some explanatory notes that weren't in footnotes or margins, that were just in there in the text.

Fr. Andrew: Just added in. And there's not a sense of "they're pulling a fast one."

Fr. Stephen: Right. And then you get the midrashim which go even further than that. Midrash. Midrash is basically a method of commentary where you would have the actual text of Scripture, but then copious amounts of explanatory material—again, not in a footnote or a margin note, but just put in there with the text.

So a good example of something from the Midrash that St. Paul actually refers to: St. Paul in 1 Corinthians is talking about— He's sort of going through in an analogical way the history of Israel in the wilderness, and making a comparison to Christians living in the world. So he talks about how all of the Israelites pass through the sea and pass through the cloud, and they were baptized into Moses. And he said Israel had a rock that followed them in the wilderness, and that rock was Christ. And we go, "Oh, yeah, the rock. Moses hit it; it gave water. The rock is Christ. Cool." And we skip right over that "followed them" part. [Laughter] That the rock was following them around. You're not going to find that anywhere in the book of Exodus, but it comes from the answer to a question. At the beginning of their 40 years of wandering in the desert, they get water from that rock. At the end of their 40 years of wandering in the desert, there's another rock that Moses hits that he's not supposed to, and they got water from that rock. Where did they get water for the rest of the 40 years? The manna was falling wherever they were, but where'd their water come from?

And so the answer that you'd get when you read the midrashim when you read about the rock is: Well, the rock followed them, the whole time. And not just a little note: Oh, by the way, the rock followed them. What you find in the Midrash is not only a whole story about the rock following them, but the complete text of a song that Israel sang every time they made camp to get the rock to pick up from where it was and to roll over to them and deposit itself where they were camped now—

Fr. Andrew: That's so amazing.

Fr. Stephen: —and all the rejoicing they did every time it happened. So it's like this whole developed story, but it's just incorporated into the text. I believe it's in the Midrash in Numbers. Again, this is a thing. The midrashim are still being used in Rabbinic Judaism. So again, this was just a way of: Oh, yeah, we're accepting— This other stuff isn't on the same level as the Hebrew Torah itself, but there's, you know, this other information. And by the way, St. Paul feels totally free to just reference these traditions. He doesn't feel the need to parenthetically say, "Oh, but that whole 'following' thing, that's just a tradition; that's not actually in the Bible."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he just says the rock was Christ.

Fr. Stephen: He just says there was a rock that follows them. Everybody knows that. By the way, the magicians were named Jannes and Jambres, he says later on. You know. It's almost like he didn't believe in sola scriptura or something. [Laughter] But so that's an example [of] the kinds of stories that you get.

There are other forms of Rabbinic literature dealing with and commenting on the text that follow that kind of format, which is also kind of the way Jubilees is written, which is different from the way most apocalyptic literature and most Enochic literature is written. This is, I think, one of the reasons why it might have had more currency with that community, in that they kind of had a box to put it in. "Oh, this is interpretations and traditions associated with the book of Genesis. This is sort of a Midrash on Genesis. This is a sort of weird targum of Genesis."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There is some weird stuff in there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] There's plenty of wild stuff in the Midrash, though, so it kind of fits in there pretty well. But so, that said, that is part of how we have to look at the book of Jubilees, because that's how it's written. So what I mean by that and what that means is when we're talking about— Again, we'll look at the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs that we talked about last time: each of those is a composition. We talked about how at least several of them definitely circulated on their own. So this is a composition; it's composed by somebody, it has a theme, it has a message or a set of messages around a theme, composed at one point.

Whereas, when we're looking at the book of Jubilees and we're sort of tracking through Genesis and then there are these sort of added details and added bits, we shouldn't assume that there's one person who sat down to write the book of Jubilees and came up with all of those added bits out of his own head, because that's not how that kind of commentary was written. Rather, the person who's finally putting together what we now call the book of Jubilees has all of these bits of interpretation and tradition already, has received them from somewhere. There may be some of it that's his own thinking, but a lot of it at least, the majority of it at least, is stuff that he's received, probably orally, maybe some of it textually from texts we don't have any more, maybe from other bits and bobs of Enochic literature that already existed, but that stuff is all finding a resting place here in the book of Jubilees. So it's a repository of all these different bits of tradition and interpretation.

And it's important that we set that out, because we're going to talk about, later on, places where things from the book of Jubilees show up in the New Testament, and when they show in the New Testament, there are some times when it's virtually a quote. Those places look like places where it's the book of Jubilees. There are other places where there are just references to things that are in the book of Jubilees, where we can't be sure if "oh, the author is taking this from the book of Jubilees," or if it's just, you know: This is a Jewish tradition of interpretation that lots of people had. The earliest written source that we have it in—that we today have it in— is the book of Jubilees, but it may have been much older than that. It may have been in all kinds of other literature that we don't have any more.

Fr. Andrew: I think for people maybe to get some sense of this, if people know about the tradition of Arthurian literature. I mean, a big difference, of course, is that as far as we know no "original" Arthur story that we can all point to, unlike that there is Genesis, you know. But for instance you get Thomas Malory who writes Le Morte d'Arthur. Well, what he's doing is he's compiling a whole bunch of Arthur stories that he's gotten from various sources, so you can see these things combined together. And he did some editing! It's pretty clear that he did some editing to make it kind of fit together in certain ways, but probably none of it did he actually compose himself in the sense of coming up with a story. Almost all of it we can point at other sources and say, "It's probably from this." Whereas with Jubilees it's so old that we just don't— If there are other textual sources, we don't have them, largely speaking.

Fr. Stephen: Probably, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Probably. A lot of probablys at this point in history when we talk about texts! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. But the main reason I said probably is for example obviously the 364-day Enochic calendar that Jubilees points to pre-existed it.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, of course.

Fr. Stephen: Because the book of Enoch was written before the book of Jubilees, and it's laid out in the book of Enoch. But we can't say for certain that, "Oh, the book of Jubilees got this from the book of 1 Enoch as we have it today." They could both be drawing on something else that we don't have. There's all kinds of different options.

And I know I'm kind of belaboring this, but the reason I belabor this is one of my pet peeves is— Again, anyone who listens to this show for a long time hears me rant all the time about how people need to take logic courses before they get PhDs. But people argue all the time, make what is essentially what is essentially a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument that "well, X existed before Y; therefore Y plagiarized, stole from, copied X."

Fr. Andrew: Yes, post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Fr. Stephen: Whereas, no, that doesn't prove anything! Doom Patrol and X-Men were developed at the same time. You can't prove either of them stole from the other. But early Doom Patrol is definitely swiping from the Fantastic Four! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: They're drawing on similar traditions!

Fr. Stephen: Right? So you have to be much more careful and much more nuanced than that. Just the fact that something pre-existed something else does not mean that they had any relationship whatsoever. And especially when we're talking about history, the historical documents—I'm not even going to say ancient texts, just the historical documents that are extant today—are a tiny fraction of all of the documents that have ever existed. So basing conclusions on, making sweeping statements—"No one in the early Church did this"; "Everyone in the early Church thought this"—all of these statements are ridiculous because we don't have the voices of anything but a tiny fraction of the people in the early Church—a tiny fraction of the bishops of the early Church!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It's similar to when people will sometimes say things like, "The Church Fathers say—" Or my favorite is: "None of the Church Fathers say—" And I'm like: "Hold on, hold on, hold on. Number one, can you read all of the languages that would be required to literally read all the Church Fathers?" And if it's like Yaroslav Pelikan, okay, yes, this guy reads all those languages.

Fr. Stephen: But he's smart enough to say, "No extant writings of the Church Fathers say—"

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because he knows most of them are not extent!

Fr. Andrew: Right. That's why you have to more often say, "I'm not aware of…" or something like, "This Church Father says this in this text."

Fr. Stephen: So if I seem to be belaboring these things sometimes or sound like I'm being mealy-mouthed about things, like "Well, we don't know for sure, it could be…," I'm trying to be responsible. I'm trying to model good behavior into my brethren.

Fr. Andrew: A little intellectual humility.

Fr. Stephen: You can't model humility. As soon as you set out to do that, you've failed. [Laughter] But I'm trying to model logic of not jumping to conclusions: what can we say for sure, what can we say probably, what can we say maybe, and be consistent about that and fair about that. So, again, we know that the book of Jubilees is a repository for all these traditions surrounding the book of Genesis. We know it is probably not the origin of most of them, but a repository of them, and in many cases it is our earliest written text that contains those traditions. All of those are fair statements.

We've been talking about when it was written and things written before it and things written after it. The book of Jubilees was written in the mid-second century BC, which is circa 150 BC is what that means, and that puts it in the time period, the Hasmonean Era, immediately after the Maccabean Revolt, to sort of frame it historically. There are things in the contents that reveal that pretty clearly, even if we weren't just going based on the manuscripts that we have, manuscript evidence. For example, there is a very obvious shot at the Greeks in, of all places, the story of the expulsion from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: There is a comment about Adam receiving the garments of skin to cover his shame, and it says, "Unlike those who go about naked with unconcealed shame," referring to the gymnasia that the Greeks built in and around Judea.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where people were naked.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. That's what "gymnasia" means. It means naked place.

Fr. Andrew: Please don't take that literally when you go to the gym next time, boys and girls.

Fr. Stephen: And you will get thrown out! Don't ask me how I know. Anyway—

Fr. Andrew: Of course, in Europe that's just the word for high school.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] But they did. They came from a very literal thing, that they exercised in the nude. But so that's a deliberate shot. And that was, to carefully give a little bit of background on that, that was one of the issues preceding the Maccabean Revolt. There were Jewish men who had concocted various means to try to reverse or hide their circumcision—

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: —because of that, so that they could go to the gymnasia and not be obviously Jewish. And so there was a whole idea of being ashamed to be Jewish and this kind of thing associated with the gymnasia. So that's why you would get this seemingly random shot. [Laughter] You're talking about the expulsion from paradise and Adam, and all of a sudden you're like: "yeah, running around naked, shameless." But that's why, because it's coming from this time period and taking a shot at the Greeks.

The earliest copies we have are fragmentary; they're not the whole text, but they're in Hebrew and Aramaic and come from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hebrew is clearly the original language. We have enough of the Hebrew and enough of other languages to be able to determine that pretty accurately. We have a lot of— Even though they're fragmentary, we have a lot of copies among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is the third most-common text among the Dead Sea Scrolls in terms of number of copies there. In general, because of the time and expense and effort that was required to copy a manuscript, when you're looking at a library, an ancient library, whether it's at a monastery or like at Qumran or that kind of thing, the more copies of a text you find, generally it's considered the more important that text was, because the more time and effort and expense they were putting into preserving that particular text as opposed to others.

The three most common texts, for the record in the Dead Sea Scrolls: number one is the book of Genesis, number two is the book of Enoch, and number three is the book of Jubilees. Most of the text is available in a Latin translation and—this is also definitely a unique thing among Second Temple Jewish texts—you can reconstruct almost the entire Greek text from patristic citations. You can take quotes from the Church Fathers and construct almost the entire book of Jubilees in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— I think the only other text you can do that with is probably portions of the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, yeah, you can't do that with any of the other Second Temple literature texts that we're going to talk about.

Fr. Andrew: Which is another way of showing how popular this text was.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that's in a Christian context, of the Church Fathers. And of course we have the entire text in Ge'ez, and there it's called the "Book of Divisions," like the divisions of time.

Fr. Andrew: And, everybody, that's the liturgical language of the Ethiopians.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and that's because it was publicly read by Ethiopian Jews in the pre-Christian period, and then Ethiopian Christians took over the Ethiopian Jewish canon as their Old Testament. That's why we have the whole text. So this means, the fact that we have all that— We talked about, with—since it's the other one we talked about, I'm going to keep using it for comparisons—the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: we talked about how we have some of them in Aramaic, all of them in Greek; how there are differences between the Aramaic and Greek. This amount of testimony to the text in this many different language sources is kind of unprecedented for these texts, which is another testament to the popularity across a range of different people, across a rang of centuries. But, having all those different translations, we have a really good idea of what the text is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the original. You can really reconstruct well what the original must have been.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Even though we've got a lot of these texts are fragmentary—and we're talking about most—and almost the entire text, we've got so many different witnesses in different languages that we can pinpoint what the text says really, really well. That's unusual. A lot of these texts, there are multiple versions in multiple languages, as we saw last time, as we'll see in the future, talking about these texts.

A basic overview of the structure—and when we get into our second half, we're going to go into much more detail about the structure, but basically the structure of the book of Jubilees is that there's sort of this frame story, and the frame story is Moses on Mount Sinai, Moses on the top of Mount Sinai.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, you know, that's in Exodus. You get Moses on Sinai, and we know that Moses is given the Torah on Sinai, but you don't— like, that never sort of plays out on camera, so to speak, in the Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And when we say "Torah" here, we're saying Torah like the book of Genesis as part of the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So this is— Jubilees is sort of saying, "Now, what if you could have been there as Moses is getting this vision and you saw it with him?"

Fr. Stephen: And then it plays out. So the body of the text within the frame story is a retelling of the book of Genesis, but it sort of begins and ends— The frame, the narrative frame begins and ends with Moses on Mount Sinai. And so that does mean that the contents of the book of Genesis are being framed as a vision that Moses is receiving, as something that's being revealed to Moses, meaning the story of the creation of the world, the expulsion from paradise, Noah and the flood, the Tower of Babel: these aren't traditions that were handed down to Moses; this isn't Moses rewriting those stories as they were told by the other nations; this isn't Moses communicating certain theological ideas that he received from God. This is Moses recounting this vision he received of these things, according to the book of Jubilees. That's how the book of Jubilees is presenting it: he's sort of seeing this play out, and then he's recording it.

That doesn't mean that the book of Jubilees is presenting this all as "liberal, modern history."

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: Because it's being presented as a vision, that opens up all these different levels of interpretation, of interpreting Moses' vision. What this also means about the text, because of the way the text is written, that because this is sort of a recap or a retelling of Genesis, part of what's being communicated by the text, part of the way in which the text communicates is based on what within the text is moved over quickly and what within the text is expanded upon. The text is free to add in stories, add in information, add in details, flesh out things that are only briefly discussed in Genesis, and there are places where it does that.

So if we have a place where one or two verses in Genesis becomes two-three chapters in Jubilees, well, obviously this is— the author of Jubilees thought this part was very important. If we have something that's three verses in Genesis and is also three verses in Jubilees or even gets skipped over in Jubilees in the retelling, then that's something that the author of Jubilees didn't think was as important to touch on again and comment on. So just that emphasis or lack of emphasis is part of how the book of Jubilees communicates. Part of what the author is telling us is what episodes in Genesis, what stories, what figures in Genesis he thinks are really key and important and wants to focus on.

Fr. Andrew: I think it's worth pointing out this is not intended to be a replacement for the book of Genesis. It's a commentary of sorts. It's not like he's saying, "Well, these parts don't matter, so I'm not going to include them in my version of the story." It's just like listening to Fr. Stephen's Bible study and he occasionally reads through a genealogy. Some genealogies he reads through, he points out a bunch of stuff for an hour, but others you're like: "Begot, begot, begot—okay, next." [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Sometimes you just have more to say about this than about that. But this is true of all authors, any author you read who's writing secondary literature—and this is secondary literature; Jubilees is secondary literature, is commenting on Genesis—anyone writing secondary literature—that includes all history writing, for example—you have to make choices. You don't end up focusing on every figure and every event and every line of text to the same degree. And if you do, your work becomes very tiresome and hard to read! [Laughter] You always make choices, and so part of reading and understanding a text, a secondary text, is understanding and identifying those choices that were made and what the author is doing and how he's communicating by way of those choices. So this isn't something weird that Jubilees does; this is something that everybody writing secondary literature does.

And then, sort of a last note: because we can pretty much reconstruct—I mean, we have a lot of the Hebrew text first-hand from the other language versions—we can reconstruct the rest. This is just kind of an interesting tidbit, that the Hebrew text that Jubilees is working from and commenting on—because it's just quoting it a lot of the time—doesn't quite match any Hebrew text that we're aware of. It doesn't really match the proto-Masoretic text. I won't go too far down that rabbit-hole, but technically the Masoretic text didn't exist in the second century BC because the Masoretes whom it's named after, the scribes whom it's named after, didn't exist for hundreds of years afterward; and what makes it the Masoretic text is their notes. But the text they would later put their notes on did exist in the second century BC, and it's not that. So it's not the Hebrew text that's commonly used by Rabbinic Judaism today or that's used for Protestant Old Testaments. It's also not the Hebrew text that underlies the Greek translations, because there's a different Hebrew text.

This is part of what we have to remember, that in the second century BC still, the Hebrew text was not settled. The Hebrew text was fluid, and there were a number of different Hebrew textual traditions at that time. So for example the book of Jeremiah is much longer in the Hebrew text, in the Masoretic text, than it is in the Greek version. At Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we found Hebrew copies of the long version and the short version of the book of Jeremiah: a Hebrew text that matches the Greek text and a Hebrew text that matches the later Hebrew text, side by side. The same community had both of them. [Laughter] So there was not a single canonical text at this point, even in Hebrew. There are variations at this point. So whatever text the author of Jubilees is using, it's not identical to either of those, so there's another Hebrew textual tradition, now lost, out there that Jubilees is using.

Fr. Andrew: Cool. So it's valuable for biblical scholarship, in and of itself, even apart from the commentary side of things.

Fr. Stephen: Old Testament textual criticism, which is an interesting world.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Yes, it is! [Laughter] I've been reading some more of that stuff lately! It gets weirder the deeper you go. All right! Well, that's our first half on this episode on the book of Jubilees. We'll be right back with the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back!

Fr. Stephen: I have a question.

Fr. Andrew: You have a question! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Does Byzantine coffee concoct elaborate schemes to assassinate you and make itself the emperor?

Fr. Andrew: Well, that is what Harnack said.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Just curious. I mean, I could be down for that on a boring Saturday. That could add some intrigue.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, I'll pay extra if my coffee could do that. [Laughter] Yes, "Assassin's Grind."

So, yes, we're talking about the book of Jubilees and getting a lot of great engagement on the YouTubes from some of our commenters there. So hello, YouTube. We're very happy to have you with us this evening—or morning for those of you over in east Asia, which some of you are.

Fr. Stephen: By "great engagement" do you mean they're fighting you, or…?

Fr. Andrew: No, not that kind of engagement. Yes, yes—yeah! So we're talking about the book of Jubilees. We just discussed basically what it is, kind of in a meta sense, and its place in Jewish and Christian history early on, why it was being read and continues to be read by both Jews and Christians even up until this very day. So this second part of this episode, we're going to be discussing sort of the structure of the book—

Fr. Stephen: Well, the first part of the second part.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the first part— That's true, yes. The structure of it—

Fr. Stephen: Tonight's episode is constructed after Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. There is a first part, a first part of the second part, a second part of the second part, and then a third part.

Fr. Andrew: And a third part of the fifth part...

Fr. Stephen: But not four halves!

Fr. Andrew: No, just three halves. We've only ever had one episode with four halves. That was the thunder-gods episode, if I remember correctly.

Fr. Stephen: Which was two, two, two shows in one.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. So structure is actually a theme of the book. It's not just that we're talking about that this book has structure—

Fr. Stephen: It's called the Book of Divisions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Book of Divisions is the literal name of it, which— A jubilee is a division from the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: A division of time, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: A division of time.

Fr. Stephen: There is— Basically the entire book is structured around the Enochic calendar, therefore around the Jewish feasts, the festal cycle, the various other cycles of the calendar as mapped out on the 364-day Enochic calendar. Now we're going to get into a little more of what that means, in a little more detail. It's centered around the most important feast. We talked about this a few episodes ago, but if you haven't heard that episode, you probably wouldn't guess which feast it is. You might guess, well, Passover? or Day of Atonement? But, no, it's centered around Pentecost; it's centered around the Feast of Weeks, which is interesting for a bunch of reasons, but is the feast that celebrated every year the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, which as we said is sort of the frame story for the book. But that is the central feast.

And Moses, as we were talking about the book of Jubilees being apocalyptic literature—apocalyptic literature has someone making this divine ascent, and so Moses' ascent of Sinai in the book of Jubilees is such a divine ascent, because he goes to the top and now is in the presence of God. The top of the mountain has become paradise, he has entered into it, he is now in the heavenly realm—and there the feast of Pentecost, the feast of the giving of the Torah, of the giving of the covenant, of the ratification of the covenant, is an eternal reality. And that is because God is eternally faithful to, loyal to the covenant.

The ratification of the covenant, what we're concretely talking about: the first time it was done was when the people of Israel said, "All these things you have said, we will do," and then they got spattered with blood. They had their fingers crossed, we know from the rest of the Hebrew Bible—[Laughter]—but they said, "All these things you have said, we will do." That was them ratifying it. So God eternally ratifying it means there's no doubt; there's never a question: God is going to honor his covenant, in terms of blessings, in terms of curses, in terms of all the things he promised, no doubt from his side. And so the Feast of Weeks, then, Pentecost, was a yearly re-presentation, re-enactment, ritual participation in it from the other side, where the people again, every year, through the ritual participation of participating in the Feast of Weeks, stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and said, "All of these things that you have commanded, we will do."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's that there's kind of an eternal Pentecost being celebrated in heaven, and once a year humanity goes and celebrates with the angels, basically, participates in what's ongoing in heaven.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this presents a certain idea of the relationship between eternity and cyclical time. I know you've heard this thing—it's a very modern thing—that all the pagans thought that time was cyclical and the Jews didn't: they thought it was linear. [Laughter] It's not. There's an element of truth to it. Here is the more accurate statement. Pagans thought that time was circular—circular, meaning—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but it was still linear.

Fr. Stephen: —everything just happens over and over and over again. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that the whole universe will collapse eventually and then destruct and then be reborn, all the gods will come back...

Fr. Stephen: They believed that the world was eternal. They believed all of these things: yes, gods were born and gods died, humans were born and humans died, civilizations rose and civilizations fell: everything just repeated itself over and over again and went nowhere. Whereas, in Scripture, you have this presentation of time and eternity, and time is cyclical, which is not the same thing as circular.

Fr. Andrew: And one of the ways that we see this— I mean, we mention this over and over again on this show, this idea of ritual participation, bringing us to experience eternal realities, that we keep coming back to them on calendar days, but we're entering into an eternal reality. Well, this is simply illustrated here in Jubilees, this principle that we've been talking about over and over again, and is the reason that so many Orthodox hymns begin with the word, "Today," even if they're talking about an event that, from a historical point of view, is long in the past.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what a calendar does, a liturgical calendar—well, any calendar—what any calendar does, because any calendar you use is going to be cyclical, is going to be a series of weeks that make up a series of months that make up a series of years, and that cycle is going to repeat. There's going to be a May 23 every year. [Laughter] It loops back around.

Even if you want to talk about— Let's talk about the most secular calendar I can think of, which is the American consumer calendar, meaning it's structured around holidays that are built to sell things. So we just had Memorial Day: sell barbecue supplies and flags. We're going to have—now, Juneteenth has been added to the list; I think that's also going to be a lot of barbecuing for most people. Fourth of July, sell fireworks, sell flags. Mother's Day, Father's Day is in there: buy gifts for Dad, get the tie cake from Carvel. Valentine's Day. St. Patrick's Day: sell a lot of beer and green stuff, etc. So this is the most— about as secular as you can get of a calendar; even though some of those dates are still named after saints, it's pretty secular.

That calendar, if you follow it, will shape the rhythm of your life. And that's what it's designed for! That's what it's designed for. Retail establishments want that to shape the rhythm of your life. That "seasonal" section at your local Walmart, where they have the stuff for whatever the next one of these holidays that aren't really holy days per se in most cases— They're counting on that cycle. They want that to shape your life. "Oh, now I go and buy and consume this. Now I go and buy and consume that." They'll shape your life; it'll form you.

This, to me, is one of the worst backlashes of particularly the Puritan movements that come out of the Protestant Reformation. Bear with me here, Protestant friends. Really think about this. They had such an antipathy for [things] like saints' days… Some of those Puritan movements— Well, most of those Puritan movements wouldn't celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ. Some of them won't even celebrate Easter, Pascha. But definitely we don't want a lot of, you know, feast days. I think it's in the Westminster Standards that says you must guard against the proliferation of saints' days.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Protect everyone from this, right? So all of this stuff from the Christian liturgical calendar gets removed. And most American Christianity, American Evangelicalism really comes out of those Puritan movements, just historically. But then what do you end up centering even your church life around? You've got Mother's Day sermons, Father's Day sermons.

Fr. Andrew: You're going to have a liturgical calendar one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Fourth of July sermons when you sing patriotic songs in a church!

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: All of these things. It's the same thing! You've just chosen the most secular possible version! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What I want to know is—and I'm pretty sure the answer to this question is yes; I just haven't encountered it yet because I haven't googled it up yet— Are there Amazon Prime Day sermons?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I'm sure. I know there are Black Friday sermons.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, of course!

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] Right? Just pause and think about it for a minute. What's better: to base and structure your liturgical life on the life of Christ and the stories about Christ recounted in the Bible, or to base the cycles of your church life on random national holidays that often don't even have any particular religious significance? I mean, the answer to that seems so obvious to me. I think the Puritans would be horrified by Fourth of July sermons and Mother's Day and Father's Day sermons! [Laughter] So think about that. But this is why, again, the calendar is so important.

You end up— If you're on any calendar at all, you end up with these cycles. The key thing here is about, again, that cycle being connected to eternity, that cycle coming around and bringing you back to eternal realities over and over and over again, because we in this life on this earth cannot participate in those eternal realities eternally yet. This is why St. Peter couldn't build the booths on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. This is why Moses had to go down from the mountain. We're not able as humans to live perpetually in these eternal realities. That's what we're looking forward to, that's what we're hoping for in the age to come, that we can live eternally in those realities, but we can't, here in this world. But what we can do is live our life in a series of cycles, concentric cycles, as it were, that lead us out into the world and then back to those eternal realities again, over and over and over again, and form our life around that, around that structure of return.

As we mentioned, there's this frame story with Moses. We're getting this from Moses' perspective on top of Mount Sinai. Moses is there with the Angel of the Presence. And the Angel of the Presence—if you go back to our Old Testament christology episodes, this is one of the titles given in Second Temple Jewish literature for what we would call the second Yahweh figure, the second hypostasis of the God of Israel, the second Person, whatever version you want to use—short version, this is Christ. But one of the ways this is telegraphed in the text— He's referred to as the Angel of the Presence: "Oh, well, it's an angel," but every time he's describing God's actions, he says We. He says, "When God created the world, we did this," and he's talking about what God did. It's not like: "When God created the world, we angels rejoiced."

Fr. Andrew: No, it's this common action.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it's: "When God created the world, we separated light from darkness." So that's how this idea of a second Person in the one God is conveyed. Again, this isn't full-blown Trinitarian doctrine, but this is— Again, the book of Jubilees is meditating and commentating on things that we see in Genesis and Exodus, and presenting them here in commentary form. So there are all these places—again, you can go back to that series we did—where we see this second figure in Genesis and Exodus, whom he is now referring to. And Moses receives this as this vision.

Going into a little more detail, then, on sort of the internal structure, it's structured around, as we've mentioned now, the Enochic calendar. I mentioned a couple minutes ago this idea of sort of "concentric cycles." If you want to start with the smallest cycle, there's a weekly cycle with the sabbath, and the sabbath is on that one day, when it's observed on that one day a week, as an entering into God's rest, which, as we've talked about, it isn't God taking a break; it's God being enthroned over his creation, so it's an entering into the kingdom, the rule, the dominion of God, which is an eternal thing, but that's entered into by humans on that one day, and then they go back into the world and they do their work and then it comes around again. So there's this weekly cycle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and one thing I'll add to that is that if you read through the book— And I encourage people to read it. Really, this is one of the easiest ones to read. It's not going to lead you off into wild, crazy, speculative directions.

Fr. Stephen: There's not the kind of symbolism and stuff that you get in the other— especially the other apocalyptic literature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but one of the things you'll notice as you read it is the word "week" is used a lot. It means— Generally, when "week" is used in the text, it means just any kind of "seven." Sometimes it'll say, "He fulfilled his week," which means usually in that case seven years. But, yeah, "week" just means "seven."

Fr. Stephen: There were also sabbath years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: People often forget.

Fr. Andrew: So there's this "seven" structure that's built into the text that you see referenced over and over and over again.

Fr. Stephen: Every seventh year, people were to not go and work their fields, and leave them to the poor to go and work. Now, we know Israel never did that, but they were supposed to. So there was the weekly cycle of seven days; there was to be this yearly cycle of seven years. There was also, then, every seven sevens—so after 49 years, after seven sabbath years—there was to be a jubilee year, whence "book of Jubilees" comes from. And in that fiftieth year not only was it a sabbath, but all debts were canceled, all land was supposed to revert to the families God had given it to in the Torah, etc., etc., etc. Just like the sabbath years were never actually practiced, the jubilee year was never actually practiced, we find out in the book of Jeremiah. That's part of the reason for the exile. But that's how it was to be. This is how the— These are the cycles that the life of the people were to follow.

And then, of course, within each year, you have the cycle of feasts, the cycle of the feasts at this point. There are some that come after the Torah—so we don't have Purim, we don't have Hanukkah—but the ones in the Torah you have in this yearly, annual cycle. Each of those represents, again, a unique way of entering into particular eternal realities pertaining to and relating to God. Now, in communicating this, as you read through the book of Jubilees, you'll see what look like sort of crazy anachronisms. So you'll see Noah celebrating Pentecost, and you're like: "Noah is celebrating the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai? What?" [Laughter] Or you'll see the patriarchs celebrating Passover, and you're like: "Uhh… Abraham? Wait. Egypt? That…" [Laughter] And that will seem odd for obvious reasons. But first of all, you've got to remember the text of the book of Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Genesis itself does this.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, like, Noah's getting on the ark. He has to go get all the animals. He gets a certain number of the clean animals and a certain number of the unclean animals. You're like: "Wait. Where did we find out about clean and unclean animals? That's in Leviticus!" So Genesis itself does this, and why is it doing this? I mean, it seems nonsensical to us. Part of that is because, even if you've been listening to this show for a long time, you may be thinking of… well, so for example, the Passover or Pentecost is later people participating in the exodus from Egypt or participating in the giving of the Torah at Sinai, people who live maybe hundreds or thousands of years later, participating in that same event. But that's slightly off. That's slightly off.

So those earthly events are places where eternal realities sort of broke into the human experience of time. And so the later people celebrating Passover are not just participating in the earthly material event of Israel leaving Egypt, but they're participating in the eternal reality of God setting his people free from bondage ultimately to sin, to death, the powers of evil. They're really entering into that by way of entering into the place where that eternal reality broke into time. And that being the case, Noah, for example— when Noah receives a covenant from God, he is in a sense participating in that same eternal reality that will later break into human experience when the Torah is given at Mount Sinai. So that's number one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, just as— Not to belabor this point, but just to connect it to one we've made over and over again— Just as when Adam and Eve hear the feet of God in the garden of Eden, they are participating in the Incarnation which, from a chronological point of view, is not going to happen for thousands of years.

Fr. Stephen: Isn't going to break into human experience for thousands… We'll just say thousands of years.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I'm just going to throw out a big number.

Fr. Stephen: So we don't have, you know, tedious emails.

Fr. Andrew: Billions and billions… Sagans and sagans of years! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There's a conspiracy group now that says that the earth's only— I think it's only 2500 years old.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Oh, yes, I've heard of this!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Tartarian people.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: So there you go. Young Earth creationists, you wacky liberals! Your Old Earth… [Laughter] So that's sort of number one. Number two, though, is— And this is important, too, in terms of how the book of Jubilees sees this. Remember, it sees what it's saying— These are things being revealed to Moses, so this is a view of what the Torah is and what's going on in the Torah. We tend to—and this is partially a problem with "torah" being translated as "law" by way of nomos and lex that we've talked about before. We won't belabor that again, but we think of it as: Well, this is God giving rules; this is God giving commandments, and if we disobey him, he gets upset and does bad things to us, and if we obey him then he's happy and he does nice things for us.

What that speaks to is a certain relationship between the commandments and created reality that is wrong. So I can make rules that are just based on my own personal likes and dislikes that are somewhat arbitrary, like if you're going to drink a drink in my house, you have to put a coaster under it. Now, I have a reason for that. Maybe I don't want rings left on my furniture, or maybe it's just because this is Louisiana and I don't want a puddle all over my floor from the condensation on your drink. But whatever, for whatever reason I make that—if you don't do that, if you're over at my house and you don't put a coaster under my drink and I don't see it, nothing bad is going to happen to you. That is just based on my own personal preferences. And sometimes we think that God's commandments are that way, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they're more like the laws of nature kind of laws.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the way the book of Jubilees sees the Torah and the commandments of the Torah and everything in the Torah is that these things are built into the creation. A prototype case of this is the first chapter and first couple verses of the second chapter of Genesis, where the creation of the world—the creation of the heavens and the earth, the creation of the universe, of everything—is described in terms of a seven-day week, in terms of the sabbath, in terms of what humans going to do of this cycle going forward, that that cycle of seven days, the sabbath, is baked into— It is— That structure for time is baked into the structure of the universe, the structure of creation. So when God gives the commandment about resting on the seventh day, it's not that every day is really the same, but God is telling you to do this certain thing on this certain day; it's: No, God is revealing to you this part of the structure of the universe and time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also, for all those—there's a handful of people out there who probably do not listen to this show, but nonetheless there are people out there who say things like: "Morality can be revised." [Laughter] This is why morality cannot be revised, that sin is sin, period, because it's about the nature of the universe.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you live in another universe… Maybe you think we live in a multiverse, and you can go to another universe where something you want to do is morally good that isn't here, but— Like, you go live in the Terran Empire and murder is good. [Laughter] But in our universe...

Fr. Andrew: And everybody has been Van Dykes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: In this universe, killing people is bad: always has been, always will be. So these things are— And God is just revealing them, and he's revealing them to humanity so that humanity, as God's creation, can flourish and live within God's creation by knowing about these things. So, again, this is revelation of what really is, not commands given over a morally neutral field where… or all your parents' horrible rules when you're a teenager that you decide that you don't have to follow as soon as you leave home. And then you turn 30, and you're like: Wow! All of a sudden my parents are really smart and give good advice. [Laughter] If they were giving good advice, it was good advice all along.

So it's a question of these things being built into creation. That's how Jubilees sees it. And so you have most of the content of the Torah, both in terms of feasts and in terms of particular "regulations," particular commandments concerning all kinds of things, just sort of inserted into the narrative of Genesis as you go through it in the book of Jubilees—not in random places; where they're inserted is relevant, but they're sort of back-inserted into Genesis, and you're like: "Well, this is from Exodus, and this is from Leviticus, or this is from Numbers, or this is from Deuteronomy." But the idea is that this is hard-wired: it's built into the world. And Moses has it revealed to [him] that: "Oh, this is where you can see it. You can see that it's built into the world."

So, that said, we now move to the second part of the second half.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Or the second half of the second half.

Fr. Andrew: The lightning round! [Laughter] Yeah, this is the part where we talk about—

Fr. Stephen: The fourth quarter.

Fr. Andrew: This is the part where we talk about the many places that the book of Jubilees is either— I think there's sort of three categories. There's traditions that Jubilees represents that are also referred to in the New Testament that aren't in the Old Testament; there's possibly references to the book of Jubilees directly; and then there's even more directly quotes from or things that are very close to being quotes from the book of Jubilees.

Fr. Stephen: Language you lifted from, if not quotes, language lifted from Jubilees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So there's things that Jubilees knows or says, or however you want to put it, that the New Testament repeats but that are not in the Old Testament. And several of them are in the sermon that St. Stephen gives as he's about to be stoned—a saint important to both you and me!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there are a couple of places in the New Testament where you find sort of little clusters of references to these traditions in Jubilees, which is part of what I think justifies identifying them as traditions in Jubilees, the fact that certain speakers and authors make a bunch of references that seem to refer to things in Jubilees, even in some cases in some relatively short texts. And then there are other places where you just find scattered references.

Fr. Andrew: And a number of them are, like, I don't know— I don't want to call them unimportant details, but not super important details. [Laughter] Things that are not really— You wouldn't base doctrine on or anything like that.

Fr. Stephen: If they weren't there, you wouldn't notice. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is the kind of stuff that, frankly, until I was looking at this list when we were briefing the other day, I didn't really think too much about it myself, like: "Wait. Oh, that's not in the Old Testament." Stuff like: Where was Jacob buried?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, and the details of that. So, to frame this—and I really want to frame this with St. Stephen's speech, because this is one of the… I always like to take shots at biblical scholarship. So you would be hard-pressed today to find a lot of people, outside of maybe conservative Evangelical scholars— You would be hard-pressed to find a lot of people who think that the words—the words, not the concepts or something, but the actual words of St. Stephen's sermon in Acts 7—have any direct connection to the person of St. Stephen, the historical person. The best you would probably get is: "Well, you know, St. Luke is clearly in a lot of cases summarizing, reconstructing. St. Luke wasn't there, so he's kind of reconstructing a sermon from St. Stephen based on certain things. Maybe he talked to St. Paul who was there, and St. Paul said he talked about X, Y, Z, and St. Luke has reconstructed it." That's the best you'd get. The other end is just: "Oh, it's made up. It has no connection to anything." Frankly, most scholars now don't think— They like to contrast St. Paul's sermons in Acts with his epistles, the ones they accept are from him.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: But, as we're going to see—we're going to talk about, just right off the bat, four places—four places!—in St. Stephen's sermon in Acts 7 that reference traditions in the book of Jubilees. And we're not going to have any other quotes from the book of Acts in our list of references.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's just this one spot.

Fr. Stephen: Meaning St. Luke—or whatever you want to call the author [Laughter]—if he's making this one up for St. Stephen and inserting this, decided that St. Stephen would quote [and] reference the book of Jubilees a bunch of times, and that St. Peter, St. Paul, all the other—St. Philip—all the other people whose speeches he recounts in the book of Acts would not at all. What is the more…? Let's just Occam's Razor as to why this one would be different in that regard than all the other ones.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that maybe St. Stephen was thinking about the book of Jubilees a lot or knew it very well, and so it comes up.

Fr. Stephen: St. Stephen, who was a student of Gamaliel… We'll see St. Paul in his sermons in Acts doesn't reference the book of Jubilees, but does in his epistles. It seems to me that just the most obvious explanation for this kind of thing that you find when you look at the text closely is: this bears some connection to the historical St. Stephen and what he actually said that makes it different—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because different preachers have different emphases.

Fr. Stephen: —than the other things being recounted. So, that said, yes. One of these is in Acts 7:15-16, where he references the burial of Jacob and Joseph and the patriarchs at Shechem, which is not actually recorded in Genesis or the Torah later but is mentioned in Jubilees 46:9.

Fr. Andrew: And you might think, "Okay, well, why is that an important detail?" Well, it's not super important, like there's no doctrine to base on this, but, remember, they're all in Egypt at that point, so the idea that they would all get taken back to be buried in some other place is an extraordinary action. They didn't just stick them wherever they— the nearby cemetery or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: And St. Stephen's sermon in Acts 7, he's running through sort of the early history of Israel, so he's sort of running through the material that the book of Jubilees runs through. What we see is that, as he runs through those stories and runs through that material, he just throws in these details that are also in the book of Jubilees and doesn't— He doesn't pause and say, "Wait, guys. This is just a tradition; this isn't actually in the Bible, but…" [Laughter] He references Moses being 40 years old when he killed the Egyptian in Acts 7:23, which is in Jubilees 47:10-12. He references Moses having spent 40 years in Midian in Acts 7:30, which is in Jubilees 48:1. And then probably the biggest one—and I say the biggest one, because this not only is mentioned by St. Stephen but this shows up two other places in the New Testament—is St. Stephen's reference in Acts 7:53 to the law having been given by angels.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's explicit there; it's explicit in Jubilees. There is— I think there was some reference to God coming at Sinai with all of his holy ones or something like that, but it's not quite the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that's Deuteronomy 32, and that's sort of— That's a notoriously hard to translate passage, but anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it's not explicit that the Law was given through angels in the Old Testament, although it is explicit in the New Testament and it's explicit in the book of Jubilees. This is one big detail that's wrong in the Cecil B. DeMille movie.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because not only does St. Stephen mention it in Acts 7:53, St. Paul mentions this in Galatians 3:19, and it's mentioned in Hebrews 2:2. So this is repeated. A Jewish friend of mine, when he looked at St. Paul saying it, got really mad about this, believe it or not, and said, "Oh, see, this is the New Testament trying to marginalize the Torah—"

Fr. Andrew: What!?

Fr. Stephen: "—by saying it was given just by angels and not by God." And finally I had to say, "Dude, that's just the book of Jubilees, man. It's just all in the book of Jubilees!" And he was all like: "Oh. Okay." [Laughter] But, I mean, it's not just that that's not a detail mentioned in the Torah in the Old Testament; it's that there are people who would even be offended by that idea, because they don't know where that tradition is from. That's a tradition that's foreign to the Old Testament, but that is recorded in Jubilees at least. Again, we can't say that comes from Jubilees, because Jubilees probably received it from somewhere.

Another sort of mini-nexus of references is in 2 Peter, which is a pretty short text, but we find three— well, two references and a quote, frankly, in 2 Peter. In 2 Peter 2:5, [it] refers to "Noah, the preacher of righteousness."

Fr. Andrew: Which, again— Read Genesis, everybody. To whom does Noah preach in Genesis?

Fr. Stephen: Nobody!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It's not there.

Fr. Stephen: He was righteous, but there's nothing about him preaching.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. But St. Peter says he was a preacher of righteousness.

Fr. Stephen: Right, preacher of righteousness. If you go to Jubilees 7:20-39, you not only hear about Noah preaching, but it's got one of his sermons.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Like, printed there that he preached to people. And then when 2 Peter 3:13 talks about the restoration of creation, the restoration of the created world, he uses language— Even if you don't want to say this is a quote, he uses language that's pretty clearly drawn from at least the same well?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it's very reminiscent.

Fr. Stephen: Uses language that's— Yeah, that if it's not quoted, if it's not a direct reference, it's definitely drawn from the same well as the book of Jubilees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So in 2 Peter 3:13, he says, "But according to his promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." That should be very familiar to everybody. So here's the passage from Jubilees 1:29. This is not the whole verse, but—

From the day of creation to the day of the new creation, when the heaven and earth and all their creatures shall be renewed according to the powers of heaven and according to the whole nature of earth, until the sanctuary of the Lord is created in Jerusalem upon Mount Zion.

So probably not a quote, but definitely kind of a very similar thought, although St. Peter says it in a much briefer way! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, pulling language of "the new heavens and the new earth" and "the dwelling of God." And then 2 Peter 3:8: folks may be familiar with St. Peter pointing out that one day is like a thousand years. He's not the first person to say that. That's in Jubilees 4:30. And Jubilees may also not be the first person to say that, but that's the first place where we find it, in Jewish literature. Again, when we see a little nexus like this in 2 Peter, of multiple things, it seems to make a pretty good case that the author was familiar with the book of Jubilees and was kind of drawing on that language.

Fr. Andrew: Any one of them you might say it's kind of a coincidence, but multiple close similarities like that...

Fr. Stephen: In a very short letter.

So there are a couple of places where Christ seems to, I would say essentially quote, but at least draw on the language of or use the language of. This first one especially to me I think is a quote; I would argue is a quote.

Fr. Andrew: In Luke 11:49, the Lord says, "Therefore also the Wisdom of God said—"which—that's him! [Laughter] "Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute.' " Again, very familiar for those who know the New Testament. And then Jubilees 1:12—so this is right at the beginning of the book—

And I shall send to them witnesses so that I might witness to them, but they will not hear, and they will even kill the witnesses, and they will persecute those who search out the Law, and they will neglect everything and begin to do evil in my sight.

So again a longer [version] in Jubilees, almost a quote.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. When I say that's a quote, you have to remember a bunch of things. St. Luke's gospel is written in Greek, and the translation of Jubilees we just read is from Ge'ez.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and these are both into English, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's also important to note, though, that Christ says that in Luke 11:49, quoting the Wisdom of God—"The Wisdom of God said this." In Jubilees it's the Angel of the Presence who says that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So another one—this is from John 14:26. "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to remembrance all that I have said to you." Again very familiar. And then Jubilees 32:25-26a, like the first half of 26:

But you write down everything just as you have seen and read it, and Jacob said, "O Lord, how will I remember everything that I read and saw?" And he said to him, "I will cause you to remember everything."

So this is a very similar thought with a lot of the same words.

Fr. Stephen: This is after Jacob's vision at Bethel, of the ladder to heaven, or the ziggurat, as we've talked about. This is this encounter between him and God, that kind of artificial mountain, at the mountain.

And then St. Paul, interestingly, in 2 Corinthians 6, he's got— he gives— As St. Paul is wont to do, he'll give sort of a whole pile of Scripture quotes from several different places all in a row, sort of a catena of quotations from different places. And at the end of his group of Scripture quotes, there's a quote that really seems to be coming from the book of Jubilees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. 2 Corinthians 6:18, he says, "And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty." In Jubilees 1:24: "And their souls will cleave to me and to all my commandments, and they will do my commandments; and I shall be a father to them, and they will be sons to me." So again, very similar language.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if you look in your English Bible—because your English Bible realizes that this is a list of Scripture quotes, so they'll have the references for the series of quotes—when they get to verse 18, they will reference that to 2 Samuel—I think it's 2 Samuel 7—to the covenant with David, where God says to David, "I will be a father to you, and you will be a son to me," in the singular. It just says "sons," not "sons and daughters." It says, "I will be a father to you; you will be a son to me," talking about him being the king, the king is the son of God. Because they're trying— They can tell St. Paul is quoting something here. Everything else is Scripture. So they try to find something close. But in Jubilees, it's in the plural and, like the way St. Paul uses it, it talks about everyone who keeps the commandments of God, not talking about the king—and it's in the plural.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, so it's rather closer to Jubilees than to—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it seems more like he's quoting Jubilees. Just from certain points of view regarding the Bible, that would be highly problematic for him to quote that in a list of Scripture quotations—not from mine, mind you, but from a lot of people's. [Laughter]

Here's why it wouldn't be problematic. Cards on the table, here's why I don't think it's problematic. I don't think that is any more problematic for St. Paul than St. Stephen narrating through Genesis and adding these other things that aren't in Genesis. He doesn't feel the need to stop and say, "Okay, wait. This bit isn't in the Bible."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: Because he has received the Scriptures within a greater body of tradition. The Scriptures have been handed down to them; so has a means of interpreting and applying and understanding them, and that's all of a piece. The same thing's true for St. Paul, so he doesn't feel the need to distinguish between what comes out of the text of Scripture and what is a traditional interpretation of it.

So then there's a bunch of places where St. Paul just draws on language that we also find in the book of Jubilees. In 2 Thessalonians 2:3—this is where he's talking about the man of lawlessness, the coming antichrist; we talked about this in our antichrist episode, but one of the terms he uses to refer to the man of lawlessness besides "man of lawlessness" is "the son of perdition." And in Jubilees 10:3, "the sons of perdition," that's a title that's given to the giants.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, by the way, there's giants, everybody! There's giants, by the way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we'll get to that.

Fr. Andrew: More on that later!

Fr. Stephen: There are giants in the book of Jubilees. Get excited.

In Galatians 2:15, St. Paul makes the comment, "We are not Gentile sinners," that phrase, which seems kind of odd from St. Paul, and that we don't find elsewhere in the New Testament, but you do find that in Jubilees 23:23-24.

One of the most telling ones—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, I love this one!

Fr. Stephen: This is one that gives people fits and has spawned so many lousy journal— I mean, so many journal articles. [Laughter] A lot of them in JETS; a lot of them in the Journal of Evangelical Theological Society. It's that in Galatians 3:17, St. Paul says that there were 430 years from Abraham to Moses. Why is that a problem, you might say? Well, you go and add up the years in Genesis and Exodus: it's not 430 years from Abraham to Moses. In fact, if you go by Genesis and Exodus, the Israelites spent 430 years in Egypt. Abraham, of course, was, you know, a century before that. Nobody's going to say, "Oh, St. Paul made an oopsie." [Laughter] Okay, that's not true. Most Old Testament scholars say, "St. Paul made an oopsie!" Most Old Testament scholars say, "Oh, St. Paul got that wrong. That's an error in the Bible." But obviously, for certain people, as I mentioned, the Evangelical Theological Society, certain folks, their approach to the Bible won't let that sit, so they have to find a way to make that work, up to and including—I've even read articles about this where they say St. Paul was right and Genesis and Exodus are wrong!

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: That the text of Genesis and Exodus got corrupted somehow, and St. Paul is correcting it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but it turns out that this number matches a passage in Jubilees: Jubilees 15:4. Now, this might be something where he's literally referencing Jubilees, he got it from Jubilees, but it may also be simply that, as we said, Jubilees represents— when it quotes the Scriptures, it seems to represent a separate Hebrew manuscript tradition than any other we know about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that could be it, too.

Fr. Andrew: So it could be that.

Fr. Stephen: But Galatians 3:17 seems to directly contradict Exodus 12:40, but matches Jubilees 15:4. I, first of all— All this dating stuff just makes my eyes roll back in my head.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: Boring! But also, we've talked before on this show a bunch of times about numbers, and numbers being preserved in texts in languages that don't have numerals. St. Paul is referencing a tradition about the amount of time. There were probably— As Fr. Andrew alluded to, there were probably Hebrew texts and Greek texts with all different numbers. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and we know this independently of all this. If you compare the old Greek to the Hebrew texts that we have, various numbers don't match each other.

Fr. Stephen: The numbers are all over the place.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they don't match.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And then there's a couple of places where there's language used in the book of Revelation that matches very closely with language used in Jubilees. One of those is— In Revelation 1:6, in Revelation 5:10, God talks about making the Church "a kingdom and priests"? Which is… uncommon. What you find in the Old Testament is "a kingdom of priests," and that, when it makes its way into Greek, is often read as "a royal priesthood." You can see how: "kingdom of priests," "royal priesthood." Same idea. But that's "of," not "and." Whereas Jubilees 16:18 uses the "and" conjunction.

And then in Revelation 4:5, 11:19, and 16:18—I'm Jack van Impe-ing it up again—it refers to the angels of the voices and of the thunder and of the lightnings. These angels are referenced in Jubilees 2:2 and not directly referenced in any of the canonical Scriptures. So, yeah, Revelation in general—we're going to see this someday when we talk about the book of Enoch—is a repository for a lot of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature themes and that kind of thing, even from outside the Old Testament Scriptures.

And then just a couple of notes to finish out this half of this half of the show, a couple of liturgical things. There's a prayer that Noah says in Jubilees, after the flood—

Fr. Andrew: We'll read the whole thing a little bit later.

Fr. Stephen: Later on, yeah, we're going to come back to this. But it's a prayer about protection from demonic spirits, for himself and his descendants. And it begins with, "O God of spirits and of all flesh," which, if you've been to a memorial service in an Orthodox church, you'll notice the central prayer of our memorial for the departed begins the same way.

And we also have, in Jubilees 16:30, our earliest-known reference to crowning, to the couple being crowned in terms of a wedding service, as a traditional practice at weddings.

Fr. Andrew: Pretty cool. All right. Well, the lightning round is over, so we're going to go ahead and wrap up this second half, and we'll be right back with the third and final half of The Lord of Spirits!

***

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back. It's a good book, by the way, that was just advertised.

Fr. Stephen: I have a grievance—!

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —with Namee's book: the subtitle.

Fr. Andrew: Oh.

Fr. Stephen: He references The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly there.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: I'm willing to bet Lee Van Cleef is not even in that book. [Laughter] Charles Bronson, maybe; Yul Brynner, maybe—no Lee Van Cleef.

Fr. Andrew: Yul Brynner was an Orthodox Christian, by the way.

Fr. Stephen: So was Charles Bronson.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that's right! He's Ukrainian, isn't he?

Fr. Stephen: That's why they might be in the book. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you just add a little extra on my YouTube channel, you can actually see me interview Matthew about the book, and he tells some of the fun stories that are in it.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, here comes the shameless self-promotion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly! Hey, I'm the Stan Lee—

Fr. Stephen: "Click like and subscribe, everybody, and hit that bell to get notifications when he drops a new video!"

Fr. Andrew: That's right! Excelsior! [Laughter] All right! Well, we're talking about the book of Jubilees, and now we're going to talk about, in more detail, some of the contents directly, not just quotes that are found in other things or references or whatever, but actually some of the direct contents of what you can find in the book of Jubilees. So this is sort of a preview, and, again, I recommend everybody read it.

Fr. Stephen: I'm surprised nobody's called in about all these shocking revelations.

Fr. Andrew: I know!

Fr. Stephen: Or to argue with me about something.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They're all just listening in rapt attention.

Fr. Stephen: No, they're all going to talk smack on social media, because they know I'm not there. [Laughter] Cowards! Call in and fight me! Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: He does read it all, that's right. He wanders around, looking for someone to debate. [Laughter] Yes. Okay, so it's a vision given to Moses. It begins with the Creation, big shock.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because it's going through Genesis. So what we're going to go through in this third half— And unlike the third half of Thomas Aquinas' Summa, this is actually going to be us. It would have been a funny joke, that three people would have gotten, if you and I had left for the third half and someone had just tried to do the third half on their own from our notes.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: A little too subtle for most people, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, too subtle for the Western mind. [Laughter] We're going to be really going through, in this third half… We're obviously not going to be able to— Because, I mean, come on, people: you've heard Whole Counsel of God. If I tried to go through the book of Jubilees in detail, we'd be here for weeks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, these are some highlights, not even all the possible. highlights.

Fr. Stephen: Things that are interesting to me, supplemented by things that are interesting to Fr. Andrew. That's what you get here, from the book of Jubilees.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: Within the creation account—within that story, in the story of paradise, of the garden of Eden—there's some interesting details—interesting to me. As we've talked about before, Jubilees, like everything else— [Laughter] Literally everything else except Milton—

Fr. Andrew: I should say, we've gotten a reaction on YouTube about the fact that no one's called. One person says— Actually, I think this is from a priest: he says, "I'm too shocked to react." So there it is. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, that's possible. People are just in abject horror.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right! [Gasps dramatically]

Fr. Stephen: Like everything else except Milton, the book of Jubilees does not have angels being created and/or falling before the creation of the world. In Jubilees, they are created on the first day. As we've talked about before, the first day and the fourth day are the most common in Second Temple literature and the Church Fathers; sometimes you also get the second day, interestingly, but usually the first day or the fourth day.

Fr. Andrew: The first day is obvious because it's the formation of light and the stars and this kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Well, light. The stars—

Fr. Andrew: Light, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: The fourth day is the stars, so that's good. Those days are connected and everything.

There are some interesting things. When Woman was created—she wasn't named Eve yet—immediately after the story of her creation from Genesis, it gives the commandments regarding a woman's purification after childbirth. So this is one of those inserts we were talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Which— There's no babies yet!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. We're nowhere near Cain being born. We're nowhere near her getting pregnant, let alone giving birth. But these commandments are brought in and put here. As I mentioned, this is a good test case. I mentioned it's not accidental where the author puts these things. This is part of how he communicates. What he's doing this to communicate is in part his interpretation, which we've also given before on this show, of what's going on with the creation of woman, specifically with what it means when God says, "It is not good for man to be alone." Our very modern, psychological, individualist interpretation of this is: "Oh, Adam was lonely. He didn't have anyone to talk to. He named all the animals, but animals can't talk." [Laughter] Well, we're going to find out that's not true, either! [Laughter] But even thinking about just in the biblical text, all by itself, he was with God. God is there. The angels— Why would he be lonely?This is not a big psychological thing.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, are you going to say God wasn't enough for him? I mean, come on! [laughter]

Fr. Stephen: "It's not good that he's alone" is referring to the fact that all the plants and animals that God created were reproducing after their kind. The zebras were making more zebras; the elephants were making more elephants; the oak trees were making more oak trees. Adam couldn't make more adamses. He couldn't make more humans. This is why woman is created, so that together they can make more humans. And so talking about childbirth right after that is a way of conveying that emphasis and that interpretation.

There's another interesting detail that's given in that same context, and that's that Adam, according to Jubilees, was in the land where he was created for 40 days before he was brought to Eden.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, in Genesis it does say that God created them and then put them in the garden. So the chronological order works, but then you get this other detail of he was 40 days outside of Eden and then he's brought in.

Fr. Stephen: So what's that about? Well, we talked about, back in the Lent episode most recently, that 40 days represents a period of purification and preparation. So he was being purified and prepared after his creation to enter into Eden, to enter into the presence of God. This has deliberate priestly overtones and is related to the idea of Eden as temple. And it also gives, chronologically— says that man and woman were in paradise for seven years before the expulsion from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Which is a number of perfection.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it's one sabbath of years, one sabbath year: these cycles. So that's the first seven years, they're in paradise. When it's going through the expulsion from paradise and the curses that were placed on them, it says regarding the serpent and only the serpent, God says that he will be angry with him forever.

Fr. Andrew: No repentance...

Fr. Stephen: Or his wrath will be on him forever, not man or woman. Immediately after he's expelled from paradise, Adam offers a sacrifice, and the sacrifice he offers is a morning incense offering.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, celebrating orthros.

Fr. Stephen: It lists the type of incense that he burns. And of course this is— Again the first commandment in Exodus about the worship of God is the offering of incense at morning and evening. So this is pushed backward. Adam starts this as soon as he's out of paradise. This cycle of worship starts, this daily cycle of worship. It's also mentioned there that, when they're expelled from paradise, all the animals lose their ability to talk. Before that apparently they could all talk.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they ruined Narnia. And it's interesting, you know, Adam offering incense: that's a very sort of priestly thing to do.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, he's the man; that's his job.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah. And the whole thing with animals not talking—this isn't supposed to be a Disney thing or whatever: "Dr. Doolittle has lost his powers." [Laughter] That's a way of representing the fact that, after the expulsion from paradise, man is sort of alienated from the rest of the creation. So being able to converse with a cow is an image of: man is connected to the rest of creation; there's this cooperation, whereas after the expulsion, now animals become dangerous to humanity, and there is this separation and alienation and breaking of the relationship with creation.

At the time of the creation of the angels—

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: —on the first day, the angels get assignments. Angels get assigned to all kinds of stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— In the Bible, there are kind of references to this. It's just sort of assumed, and often you get it in lists in the psalms where David or whoever is writing the psalm is talking to the angels, and then, by the way, starts mentioning elements of creation, like in the same list, as though they're all kind of one group. You get stuff like that. But in Jubilees it's made explicit, so when God makes them [he] then sets them over different things. I'm going to read that passage because I think it's just really interesting. This, then, connects us back. We mentioned earlier those references in the book of Revelation: "angels of the voices" and "the thunder of the lightning." So this is where that comes from. This is Jubilees 2:2.

For on the first day he created the heavens which are above and the earth and the waters and all of the spirits which minister before him, the angels of the presence and the angels of sanctification and the angels of the spirit of fire and the angels of the spirit of the winds and the angels of the spirit of the clouds and darkness and snow and hail and frost and the angels of resoundings and thunders and lightning—

There's that thing that's referenced in Revelation.

—and the angels of the spirits of cold and heat and winter and springtime and harvest and summer and all of the spirits of his creatures which are in heaven and on earth.

So it's notable, among other things, that there are angels in charge of each of the four seasons. As I have said in occasional public speaking engagements, if I ever get to meet with the angel—

Fr. Stephen: Are the angels in charge of the hotel or of that landscaping service?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes! Some of both.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: Who is the patron angel of landscapers? Call in!

Fr. Stephen: No racist answers, please.

Fr. Andrew: No! Yeah, no. Come on. Yeah, we do have a caller, actually, but we'll see what this caller has to say. If I ever get a chance to speak to the angel of autumn, I would say, "Look, number one, I love your work. You're the b— Don't tell the other ones, but you're the best seasonal angel. And, number two, the question I have is: Pumpkin spice lattes, was that your idea or is it some kind of twisting of the original deposit of goodness of autumn?" Yeah, let's find out what our caller says about that.

Fr. Stephen: Now, wait. I can answer that second question.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, can you? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I think pumpkin spice is the evidence that that angel is fallen. [Laughter] Like, when we get to the book of Enoch, we'll find out each of the Watchers communicated this secret, terrible knowledge to the women they seduced. And somewhere there is a white woman who was seduced and given the terrible secret of pumpkin spice.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! See, this might be the thing that finally gets you cancelled, Fr. Stephen! [Laughter] All right, well, we do have a caller. We have Gregory calling from Florida, I believe. So, Gregory, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Gregory: Thank you for bringing me on.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: You're the proverbial Florida man.

Gregory: Yes, well, no, I'm a transplant. I'm in the military, so I got put here.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Gregory: Well, so in regard to the angel of autumn, I would have to say firstly that: Why does he have favorites? because he definitely doesn't visit here. And secondly, the whole pumpkin spice thing has got to be that ancient wisdom from before the flood that people are trying to rediscover through technology, because you can't make that without a machine, you know?

Fr. Andrew: There you are!

Fr. Stephen: See, he's on my side.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I'm not taking a side here! I'm just asking!

Fr. Stephen: He who controls the pumpkin spice controls the white women. That's all it is.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter]

Gregory: He has a point.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So, Gregory— [Laughter] What is your question?

Gregory: When it comes to time and the experience of time of ours being kind of based on ourselves—we base our experience on ourselves—I'm wondering— So far I've gotten the understanding that God is outside of that. But I'm still really shaky and unsure about saints and the departed and angels and demons specifically. Let's say other worshiping groups as a kind of broadening it maybe too much, but if you look at people like the new whole Norse pagan movement, when they participate in rituals that sort of re-enact times that are long since past, is it just not working? Are they doing something similar? Is this a valid question?

Fr. Andrew: All questions are valid, or validly asked anyway. Yeah, I mean, well, ritual works. I mean, some, of course, are kind of lame and made-up, but if they're done in seriousness, and especially if there is some kind of spirit that wants to be involved, there is a thing happening. If a Norse Neopagan wants to sacrifice to Thor and then eat that food, there's no reason a demon won't show up and want to be part of that, because demons' desire is to drag us down into their darkness. The worshiper may understand himself as participating in something related to Norse paganism. But the point is not "Is he participating in Ragnarok?" although I hate to imagine what that sacrifice would look like! But that's not the point. The point is: What does it mean to participate in these realities?

So for a Christian to participate in the Eucharist, we receive the benefits of Christ's death and resurrection. That's what it means to participate in the Eucharist. For a pagan to participate in demonic stuff, it's about communion with those demons, whatever the narrative packaging that it's put in. That is the reality, and certainly spiritual beings function in a trans-temporal way. They don't experience time and space the way that we do. We don't know exactly because we don't know what it's like to be a flying mammal, much less a demon or an angel. So that's what I think about that. I don't know, Fr. Stephen, what do you have to say to Not-Florida Man?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I mean… Yeah. In keeping with what Fr. Andrew said, we have to keep in mind that most modern pagans are trying to participate in these spiritual realities in the most soy way possible, and I mean that somewhat literally, because a lot of them are vegans.

Fr. Andrew: Alas.

Fr. Stephen: They're not going to sacrifice a horse and drink its blood. You want to be a Norse pagan, that's step one. If you can't do that, if you can't kill a horse, you're right out. Sorry, ladies.

Gregory: No pumpkin spice.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] It's not pumpkin spice horse blood; it's just straight up horse blood. So we have to distinguish that kind of LARPing from those black metal musicians in Scandinavia who are legit burning down churches and killing each other and participating in actual ritual sacrifice of things. That's not to say that the LARPing and stuff is harmless. As Fr. Andrew said, even the kind of dumbest and lamest things like that, there's some demon willing to try to take advantage of that, even though it's not as clearly demonic as some of those other examples. But, yeah, it's… Yeah, at most they're kind of building a community with those demonic spirits, and those demonic spirits are shaping them. The more intense— Just like we would say with Christianity, the more intensely you follow the Christian way of life, the more you're going to be transformed by it. The same thing is true on the other side. There's a difference between someone who identifies as a pagan and someone who's deeply participating in pagan rites, and you can see that in the behavior of people and the way in which they are transformed by those things.

But the things that they're participating in, they're participating in these spirits, these demonic spirits, and their qualities or attributes are shaping them, but obviously those demonic spirits are alienated from eternal realities. That's why they can't grant any kind of eternal life, because they don't really have it. They're disconnected, because the only truly eternal reality is God, and they're alienated from him. So that's why going down that road just brings destruction. You don't become an eternal evil; you just find destruction. There's not sort of equal parity.

And in terms of the experience of time, we'll do more episodes on this in the future. We need to do one where we talk about the way our experience of time is related to memory, because that is deeply associated— our memories… So there have been studies recently, for example— We tend to think, and I have even tended to think in the past, that time seems to go faster and faster as you get older. You're probably not as old as [I am], but maybe you've already experienced that a little bit. And I always thought that was because, well, when you're five years old, one year is 20% of your life, and when you're 50 years old, one year is two percent of your life, so it just seems quicker. That was my thought. But studies have actually shown that St. Augustine was right in Books 10 and 11 of The Confessions, and our entire experience of time is deeply tied to our memory, and that the reason time seems to go so much more slowly when we're young is that we're constantly having new experiences.

Gregory: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: And the fact that we're constantly having new experiences means we're constantly forming new memories, whereas by the time you're an old man like me, your life has kind of fallen into this consistent cycle of the same things, over and over again every day. So you're not forming these new memories at the same rate, because the experiences are not as new. The things kind of blur together, and that causes time to seem to move more quickly. If you actually deliberately go out of your way—this is part of the studies— If you just said, "I'm going to take a two-week vacation. Every day I'm going to do something I've never done before, or go somewhere I've never gone before," that two weeks would seem really long to you, even looking back on it later, because of all the new memories that you've made.

But anyway, at some point in the future, we'll do an episode about our experience of time where we talk about that link with memory, maybe explore what St. Augustine says about it. I was going to say, St. Augustine's way of working that out is actually still— in philosophy is still basically what everybody uses.

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Gregory: That's exciting. Again, the new-experience notion, I've kind of been touching into that with my newborn son, but I've not really formulated that notion all the way yet. As far as that Norse pagan thing goes, I just generally don't often run into them, but in the military you do see a fair enough amount, because they all want to have beards and they don't let us have beards unless you're a Norse pagan. [Laughter] But I guess —

Fr. Stephen: I'm a Sikh, I swear!

Gregory: —there was the idea of sacrificing a horse versus a pumpkin spice latte and calling it blood is like us calling something a pleasing aroma before the Lord in the Old Testament versus strange incense before the Lord. To them, to these demons, it's like: "Ehh, a pumpkin spice latte really isn't my flavor. I'd prefer human blood" or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. It's a question of how far and how fast you're going down the same road. It's the same road, but there are people who are kind of dabbling and tip-toeing, and there are people who are just running in that direction.

Gregory: Well, thank you so much for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Thanks for calling, Gregory. So we actually do— We're suddenly getting people calling, so I guess people are inspired here.

Fr. Stephen: Are they angry white women, based on my comments?

Fr. Andrew: I don't know! I don't know!

Fr. Stephen: Are they calling from a Starbucks inside a Target?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We'll find out, but our next caller is Maureen. So, Maureen, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Are you here to ream Fr. Stephen out? Maureen, are you there?

Fr. Stephen: Speak to us, Maureen! Who did this to you? [Laughter]

Maureen: Yeah, because I was—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, there we go!

Maureen: You can hear me now? Oh, good.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Yes, welcome!

Maureen: Okay! I missed a little bit of the last two minutes because I was in the process of making the connection here. I'm on my phone and listening through my phone, too. While you were talking about the pattern of the different Judaisms—and I heard this before, but it suddenly dawned on me that the many threads or rivers or whatever in the society then, we sort of have the same pattern today in our modern society in a number of different ways. I thought about my cultural enlightenment paradigm of looking at the world and pseudo-scientific "there must be a right answer," and it dawned on me—and this may need correction—is there maybe not a right answer, because we're talking about things above our pay-grade, I guess you'd say? And maybe it's [theologoumena] or whatever you call it, or something along the Western mystics like Julian of Norwich or St. John of the Cross, where it inspires us to lift our hearts to God and be open to new insights without being sure that it's absolutely correct or whatever? I'm sorry. This is very foggy, but my thoughts are foggy and I'm trying to sort them out.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So one of the things that you said that I— Hopefully I understand this correctly. You talked about patterns of behavior that are in the ancient world that seem to be repeating even now, that human society still kind of works in a lot of the same ways. I mean, I definitely think that that's true. Certainly there's big differences. There's a huge difference, for instance, between the ancient world dominated by paganism and the modern world deeply influenced by Christianity everywhere, but nonetheless people are still people. We're sinners; we still commit the same kinds of sins, basically. And so even though they get expressed different ways within different cultures, definitely, humans are humans.

Also, above us or beneath us or beside us or whatever, you also have spiritual beings which are influencing us. They're still around. It's the same bunch influencing us in one way or another. So, yeah, there definitely are patterns that one can see repeating throughout history, individually in humans and then in humans as groups as well. That's the bit that I would respond to of what you said. Is that helpful at all?

Maureen: Well, it is in a way. It's helping me articulate what I'm trying to say, but I've got the training in the enlightenment paradigm that says there must be a right answer and "follow the science" and all that stuff, which is actually scientism, not actual science. But in order to grasp all the wonderful— I love this stuff; it's really cool. I do wonder if we aren't looking for answers, we're just looking for some spiritual insights that might mean something to us without necessarily having the full facts because we're mere human beings and we can't know that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so… Go ahead, Father. Yeah, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think I get what you're getting at. We have a tendency as modern people to want to know things in kind of an external way. We've talked before on this show that there are multiple ways of knowing. Modernity kind of only has one. It wants to turn everything into a science: mathematics-based science is the only way to really know things. And people even approach religion that way. Sometimes people who inquire into the Orthodox Church whom I've talked to approach things in that way. They're like: "Well, I'm interested in the Orthodox Church, but I don't know about topics X, Y, Z, A, B, C." And they sort of want me to kind of argue them into believing what the Orthodox Church teaches is the right answer about X, Y, Z, A, B, C. And then, if I give arguments and explanations that satisfy them, then they'll say, "Oh, okay, I'll join the Church." And then I'll tell them to wait a year, and they won't get one. They'll be like: "No, I'm ready! I decided!" [Laughter]

And you can't really know very much, at least very much that's worth anything, that way, in that external way, because you don't get any wisdom that way. You can't explain this to anyone under 25. Sorry, guys. I know some of you are very mature, but… When I was under 25, I thought I knew everything from reading books, and therefore I knew everything and I was smarter than other people and knew things they didn't know. I realized at a certain point that pretty much everyone older than [I was] actually knew more than I did, but they knew it in a way that I didn't have access to because I hadn't lived much yet.

The way that we come to know God, not know about God— You can read books that will say things about God, some of which will be more true than others, but none of which will actually let you know God, any more than reading a thousand magazine articles about a celebrity will cause you to actually know the celebrity: you'll just know a bunch of things about them that are more or less true. The way you come to know God is by living with God. So the way we come to understand and to know spiritual things is not by reading about them or learning them or having them demonstrated or proven to us, but by living them. And that means entering into a way of life, the kind of cycles and patterns that we've been talking about in the book of Jubilees, structuring our life around God and around these cycles, all of which bring us into his presence, bring us into contact with him, over and over again and shape our lives.

And as we do that, and as we do that over time, we start to understand these things. And even— even in the case of X, Y, Z, A, B, C, you can talk to folks in my parish, and I'm sure in most other Orthodox parishes in the United States, who came into the Orthodox Church from outside. You'll find plenty of people who: "Ah, I didn't get that whole Mary thing and da-da-da-dah," and maybe they wanted to get someone to argue with them about it, they wanted to read 20 books about it, whatever, when they were coming into the Church. But what they'll actually tell you is after two years, three years, four years, five years of being Orthodox, it just clicked one day. "I just got it. It just made sense."

People don't believe things— People don't hold onto ideas or have ideas or produce ideas because they're true. If that happened, no one would ever be wrong about anything. Ideas become believable because they become useful in explaining our experience and in structuring our lives. So if you're living a very modern, very worldly, different way of life, then there are tons of things that the Orthodox Church has to teach you that you will never understand from outside. You can only understand them once you become a part of them, because being part of the community and its way of life and those rhythms and those cycles will shape you until they just make sense, because you've kind of lived them.

So I think, yeah, we need to get away from what we've been taught in terms of enlightened modernity about "I understand, therefore I can believe; I understand, therefore I can be faithful" and get back to—here's St. Augustine; see, I'm saying all these nice things about St. Augustine all of a sudden!—what St. Augustine actually said, which is: "I am faithful so that I will understand."

Fr. Andrew: Well, Maureen, I hope that helps a little bit.

Maureen: A little bit. I hope that my floundering around and your excellent insight will be of benefit to others besides me and my foggy brain.

Fr. Andrew: May it be blessed! [Laughter] May it be blessed. Thank you very much for calling!

Maureen: Christ is risen!

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen. All right. Pumpkin spice—no. [Laughter] You know, you didn't even say where people should send their hate mail. I'm kind of surprised, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. It's Father Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com.

Fr. Andrew: That's right. Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: I had them sending you something else, by the way. It's coming up, The Whole Counsel of God. Here in a couple of months, you'll get something.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, great! I look forward to it. Right, okay, so angels in charge of various things. What else've we got in terms fun details from the book of Jubilees? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We get an explicit almost-screed about the calendar when it talks about actual Enoch. We've talked about before on this show that Enoch, of course, is the seventh from Adam, as we're reminded by St. Jude. Not coincidentally, the seventh figure in the Sumerian Kings List creates the calendar. Not coincidentally, Enoch is said to have lived 365 years. So there is this deep association, in the text of Genesis itself when you understand it in the Ancient Near Eastern context with a calendar, a solar calendar. But here in Jubilees, that's made explicit about the 364-day Enochic calendar, expressly the 364-day calendar and the dangers of not following the 364-day calendar that was revealed through Enoch to the world. Again, this is a revelation. So book of Jubilees seeing that calendar as being the actual structure of a year, as God created a year, which is being revealed to us through Enoch but is built into creation.

And then, once we get a little closer to Noah, we get Mastema!

Fr. Andrew: All right! I mean, ohh… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, not everybody's favorite devil-figure from Second Temple Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: He's a really interesting devil-figure. I mean, I'm not a fan of devil-figures, but he's—

Fr. Stephen: But one of them, out of all of them, he is one of them! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, what's crazy about this devil-figure is that he's human, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yeah. He's a giant.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's a giant. He's a giant. You know, in Jubilees, the way that the flood goes is the flood comes because of the giants. This is in Genesis, too, as well, but it's really explicit in Jubilees, that the flood comes to wipe out the giants, and they're dead but their spirits are all there. Immediately they begin to attack Noah and his sons, and Noah basically says to God, "I thought you sent the flood to deal with this problem, and here they are attacking us, but they're just disembodied spirits." And God— You know I'm paraphrasing here. He says, "You know, you're right. I'm going to go send them all into the abyss so they'll leave you alone." So then one of these spirits steps forward, and this is Mastema, and he says, "Hold on! Hold on a second, Lord!"

Fr. Stephen: "Let's make a deal!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, exactly. "Let's make a deal! You can send— Go ahead and send most of them down into the abyss, but how about ten percent of my boys and I get to hang out here, and we promise we're going to afflict the wicked. Only the wicked."

Fr. Stephen: "You don't like the wicked. We don't like the wicked. You know…" [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. And God essentially says, "Okay, you have a deal. But, when the time comes, you have to go down into the abyss with the rest." So this is this bargain that Mastema makes.

Fr. Stephen: Now Mastema's making this deal. From the demons' perspective, this is because they're haters. They just hate humans. But the reason God agrees to the deal is that he is going to use them afflicting the wicked to bring the wicked to repentance, because God actually loves the wicked and wants them to repent.

Fr. Andrew: Right, this is that theme of the left hand of God, God using demonic activity to bring about his purposes, namely, repentance and holiness and salvation of mankind.

So, yeah, this is interesting, because in Jubilees it's presented in a literal way that angels mate with humans. Go see our giants episode from way back in 2020 for the whole nine yards about all this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: The whole sordid affair!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly, exactly. But in Jubilees it's presented in literal fashion, that fallen angels mate with humans and they produce giants. The fallen angels that do this are chained up down in Tartarus—this parallels the whole Titans story from Greek mythology—chained up down in Tartarus, so the presence of evil spirits on the earth is dead giants. So the fallen angels are down there where they can't hurt anybody, but it's dead giants that are the presence of— that are the demons.

Fr. Stephen: Those spirits roaming around and possessing people and stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they're the demons—

Fr. Stephen: In Tobit and the New Testament, and yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And we should just emphasize here that we're telling you that this is what these texts present. We're not saying that this is Christian dogma. I'm not aware of any kind of—

Fr. Stephen: It hasn't been dogmatized anywhere.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Now, it is the presupposition of the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: It's the presupposition of the synoptic gospels, I should say. The synoptic gospels, in various ways, presuppose this. You get the demons expressly asking Jesus not to cast them into the abyss, asking him, "Are you here to trouble us before the time?"

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— That's not a reference to anything in the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Referring to this bargain. So this is— And of course, this is the Archie Wright book, The Origin of Evil Spirits that I think is still in print, which is his dissertation on this, vis-à-vis the synoptic gospels.

Fr. Andrew: So from the point of view of Jubilees, then, this is not only the origin of evil spirits, of demons, on earth now, but also that sort of the main devil-figure is one of these, is a dead giant.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. We're going to see Mastema… So I'm pretty sure we've mentioned this before, but there's a whole bunch of devil figures.

Fr. Andrew: We should do— I think we should do an episode on devils at some point.

Fr. Stephen: So you've got Azazel; you've got the devil; you've got—

Fr. Andrew: The Satan.

Fr. Stephen: —the Satan, who shows up in Job. You've got Mastema; you've got Belial. So there's a bunch of these. We've got all these names. No source that you can find in Second Temple Judaism or early Christianity thinks that all of these are separate beings. They've usually got one or two of them, and sort of all the devil-figures in the Bible are sort of collapsed into one or two of them. 2 Enoch, Azazel is very clearly Azazel, like Day of Atonement Azazel, but he's also the serpent from the garden of Eden. So they just kind of collapse all the devil-figures into Azazel. Jubilees collapses most of them into Mastema.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We're going to see how Mastema shows up several more times here.

Fr. Stephen: He gets up to shenanigans throughout the rest of the book of Jubilees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's all kinds of fun stuff related to the flood here. Right after the flood, the wicked humans have been wiped out, but—

Fr. Stephen: The giants, yeah, and the rest of the humans, for that matter, except Noah and his family. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And yet Noah then makes this sacrifice. And it says "for the land."

Fr. Stephen: He atones for the land. He's atoning for the land. And this fits in again with what we talked about in terms of what atonement is—you can go back to those episodes—where atonement on the Day of Atonement is made for inanimate objects; spaces and objects in the world are atoned for.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, cleaned up. Cleaned up, purified.

Fr. Stephen: So this is about removing— The giants and all those humans that were doing all those wicked, evil things are gone. Now he's offering these sacrifices to sort of purify the land from the residue or the taint of their sin and their wickedness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, so we promised the prayer of Noah against the demons. This is right before Mastema shows up and says, "I'd like to— Let's make a deal." This is where Mastema and all—100%—of the giants are messing with him and his sons. This is what Noah says to God.

God of the spirits which are in all flesh, who has acted mercifully with me and saved me and my sons from the water of the flood, and did not let me perish as you did the children of perdition, because great was your grace upon me and great was your mercy upon my soul, let your grace be lifted up upon my sons, and do not let the evil spirits rule over them, lest they destroy them from the earth, but bless me and my sons, and let us grow and increase and fill the earth. And you know that which your Watchers, the fathers of these spirits, did in my days and also these spirits who are alive, shut them up and take them to the place of judgment, and do not let them cause corruption among the sons of your servant, O my God, because they are cruel and were created to destroy. Let them not rule over the spirits of the living, because you alone know their judgment, and do not let them have power over the children of the righteous henceforth and forever.

So that's Noah's exorcism prayer, basically. A prayer of protection against demons. And as we mentioned, that "God of spirits and of all flesh" which is at the beginning of this, we pray in the memorial. It's not— The memorial's not just sort of borrowing that phrase. The association of praying for the departed, and especially at a funeral, with exorcism, with warding off demons, that's totally a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There's tollhouse people out there getting super excited.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Not the same sort of excitement as with giants, though. It's a lot less joyful.

Fr. Stephen: But notice also what these spirits are about. They're about destroying humanity. They're about destroying humanity. That's the view of Jubilees, that's the view, frankly, of the Scriptures, about these demonic spirits, even the ones that are worshiped as gods by the nations. These aren't "competing religions." [Laughter] "They value the same thing." This is spirits that want to destroy humanity, and so converting someone from paganism to Christianity is saving them. That's why we use that word. It's not saving them from God being angry at them. God loves them. It's saving them from the demons who have control of them and want to destroy them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, setting them free from slavery.

Fr. Stephen: As we mentioned, it's also Noah who starts the feast of weeks, who starts celebrating Pentecost, but that's at the giving of the covenant with him. So the covenant with Noah is sort of this pre-participation in the eternal reality of the covenant with Moses, as Jubilees presents it.

It also fleshes out the figure of Canaan, Ham's descendant. Interestingly, it spells Canaan not the way it's spelled in Genesis, with two As; it spells it C-a-i-n-a-n, roughly, meaning it's like Cain as in "Cain and Abel" with an extra syllable at the end.

Fr. Andrew: Little Cain. Cainan is the new Cain.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And then he's deliberately recast as another Cain, after the flood. So Cain touches off in his genealogy this whole descent to the giants, the nephilim, and the flood. And then: Well, wait! There's giants after the flood. There's all this other stuff that goes down in the Torah, in the book of Joshua, even leading up to the Tower of Babel. Well, Canaan is the new Cain in the sense that he's the one who does this. And in Jubilees he does this in a very literal way. Cainan is taught how to read, and he goes and he discovers these inscriptions made in stone in certain mountains. And this is probably a reference by Jubilees to the kind of mountain-carving that the Persian Empire did, since this is a post-exilic text. But he finds all of this stuff written in stone in these mountains from before the flood. It's written in stone; that's how it survived the flood, on the mountains. And it's all the stuff the Watchers taught humanity, so he rediscovers it.

Cainan rediscovers it, and he goes and builds a city. And he builds this city— He has a descendant named Ur, which is kind of on the nose, since ur is the Sumerian word for city, and was of course the name of the city of Ur that Abraham came from. But Ur goes and builds the city of Ur in Jubilees. That whole narrative then culminates in the Tower of Babel, and the Tower of Babel in Shinar, according to Jubilees, is between Asshur and Babylon, which again is an anachronism, but it's between the capital of the Assyrians and the capital of the Babylonians, the great enemies of Israel later. So the idea is this whole Mesopotamian tradition—Babylon, Asshur, Ur, Uruk, all of this—is all being sort of balled together here as coming from Cainan who's the new Cain and recreates this situation of giants, of the claim to have these antediluvian secrets. All of that gets bundled into this figure of Cainan.

Also with Noah and his sons, the world gets apportioned by God to Noah and his sons. So from the perspective of this, it's not just— We get— In Deuteronomy 2, we get that Israel's going to have this piece of land and Edom's going to have this piece of land, the descendants of Abraham. But Jubilees pulls this back to Noah and says: No, God gives, like, Europe and Asia, really, to Japheth's children, and Africa to Ham's children, and the Middle East essentially to Shem's children. So all of them are sort of given these land allotments by God. Israel is called eventually to this very special role in terms of the nations, but the rest of the nations are to follow— This is the first place where you get what becomes prominent in Jewish tradition later, including Rabbinic Jewish tradition, the idea of the Noahide laws, where, again in Jubilees, the commandments we've talked about, the ones that apply not just to Jewish people but to Gentiles, from Leviticus and other places, those get extracted and pushed back here to Noah. So those are commandments that are part of the covenant with Noah that are given to all of his sons, whereas the Torah, then, is later given to Israel in particular. So the rest of the nations are responsible to follow those laws. But that's where they get associated with Noah, at least in our first extant text, is here in Jubilees.

The Tower of Babel gets blown down by a great wind in Jubilees 10:26.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— I mean, there's not a lot of Tower of Babel stuff in Jubilees. It kind of just tells the story very briefly, but it does have—

Fr. Stephen: You wouldn't think they'd listen to Ricky Rohan and all his nonsense… If that is his real name!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, there's not a lot in terms of text in Jubilees about the Tower, but it does have this cool detail of it being blown over by a great wind, which is— again, it's not in Genesis, but is echoed in Acts with the coming of the Holy Spirit, with this great wind. Liturgically, Pentecost is the undoing of Babel. So there's this Pentecostal character going on here. So in a sense of wind coming to blow over the Tower of Babel, it's sort of a "both now and not yet" on some level of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It's God who descends and brings this, and expressed here as a great wind. It's just kind of a fun detail that's just mentioned there very briefly, but it is there.

So let's do more Mastema stuff! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So Mastema shows up again in the story of Abraham. He shows up at the time Abraham's father, Terah, is born.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, he sends—and I love this in the text—a devastation of crows. Like, how many crows do you have to have to have a devastation of crows?

Fr. Stephen: I don't know!

Fr. Andrew: And they come and they—

Fr. Stephen: If you just have two or three, it's an attempted murder, but...

Fr. Andrew: There you go. That's true. But, yeah, they come and they— The reason they're called a devastation is because when the farmers are planting all their seeds, the crows come and eat all the seeds and snatch them away. So this brings a famine. Number one, fun parallel with the parable of the sower.

Fr. Stephen: Where the birds come and take away the seed, that's the devil coming and taking away the— Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, exactly. But then there's all these cool details about the youth of Abraham. Well, he's still Abram at this point. So it becomes clear early on that Abram realizes that he's surrounded by idolaters and is totally against that. He goes out, and he drives away the crows. Not only does he drive away the crows from around his family, but people kind of ask him to do the same for them, so he gets known as this sort of crow exorcist.

And there's this growing theme of Abram being against idolatry and being anti-idolatry, and even at one point going to his dad at one point and going: "Shouldn't we only be worshiping Yahweh?" and his dad saying, "Well, they'll talk badly about me if I'm not an idolater" or whatever. And then there's this really fascinating bit where Abram is shown Hebrew, but of course no one knows Hebrew by this point, which Jubilees says is the language of creation. I mean, there's some— I don't think it's in Jubilees, but there's some traditions about Hebrew being the language that everyone speaks before Babel, as to be the original language.

Fr. Stephen: You know, it's not actually true, but...

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. But God shows him how to read Hebrew, and he's able to gain knowledge of God by doing this. So there's this whole arc of Abram being the guy who's going to bring— He's anti-idolatry, and so he's going to sort of lead the way out of idolatry, is this cool theme that's in the Abraham stuff there, and Mastema shows up a lot as kind of his adversary.

Fr. Stephen: Nemesis, yeah. Yeah, Mastema shows up again. So before the whole episode of the sacrifice of Isaac, Mastema shows up and is seen reminiscent of the beginning of the book of Job, where Mastema shows up before God and says, "Hey, consider your servant Abraham. He really loves that Isaac kid. I bet you if you did something to that Isaac kid, he'd turn on you." This scene is added to tell why God told Abraham to go sacrifice Isaac, was sort of like, with Job, to prove a point to, in this case, Mastema. So Mastema here is sort of cast as the Satan from Job. Yeah. So Mastema's kind of lurking around, and he's filling— If you compare this to other Second Temple literature that we haven't talked about in detail on the show yet, usually this role bothering Abraham is Azazel. So there's a sense that Mastema and Azazel are here getting smooshed, even though the name Azazel doesn't occur, if you're familiar with some of the other literature.

Fr. Andrew: Another detail that I just thought was kind of cool, not just because it mentions Mastema, but, I don't know, I just kind of liked this: when Jacob is born in [the] book of Jubilees Abraham is still alive, even though that's his grandson, and he actually goes to bless his grandson. This is in Jubilees 19. He says:

And may the spirit of Mastema not rule over you or over your seed in order to remove you from following the Lord who is your God henceforth and forever. And may the Lord God be for you and for the people a father always, and may you be a firstborn son. Go, my son, in peace.

So it functions, in a little way, as a kind of prophecy of Jacob becoming the firstborn even though he's not the firstborn here as well.

Fr. Stephen: And presents that as— See, by presenting Abraham as blessing him, that makes it a little more legitmate-seeming than him getting the birthright through trickery, which is what's in the actual book of Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Fun.

Fr. Stephen: When Abraham eventually dies, he gives sort of a mini-testament. It's pretty short, but you get sort of his last words. And the important theme there, because we see this in a lot of Enochic literature, is that in the future there's going to be some super wicked generation that's going to precede the coming of the Messiah and the deliverance of the people, the same way—and that's paralleled with the generation of Noah's day that was wiped out. They're going to be wicked like that, right before the coming of the Messiah and the end of things and the final judgment. God's going to intervene at that point.

And that's just a running theme in Enochic literature. We see that crop up a lot, especially in the synoptic gospels, but other places in the New Testament. When Christ talks about "How long will I tolerate this wicked and perverse generation?" that idea of the wicked and perverse generation comes from Enochic literature like this. He's referencing this as like that generation, that's like the generation of Noah. Or when he talks about the days of the Son of Man being like the days of Noah, when people were married and given in marriage, and then judgment came upon them suddenly. That whole comparison, that whole set of ideas we see all through Enochic literature, but also here in Jubilees in sort of Abraham's dying words.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So there was one other bit about Mastema that I wanted to mention because, again, this is a fun kind of—ret-conning? of a very familiar story from the Scripture, and this is actually not Genesis; this is Exodus. This is the beginning of Exodus. As we said, Jubilees presents the history kind of up to Moses on Sinai, so you're going to have some Exodus stuff there, too. So Mastema gets involved in Exodus. Early on, Mastema tries to kill Moses, because Moses is going to lead his people out of Egypt, and so Mastema's trying to prevent that from happening. And God is said to bind Mastema to prevent that from happening, to prevent him from killing Moses so that the exodus can happen.

What's interesting, then, also is when the showdown begins with pharaoh, it actually says that Mastema is loosed, and the reason why he's loosed again is basically to allow him to participate with pharaoh and the Egyptians in pursuing Israel. So there's this idea that demonic power is what is pursuing Israel. It's not just pharaoh and the Egyptians; it's— well, in this case, as it says in Exodus, "the gods of Egypt," so Mastema is essentially presented as one of the gods of Egypt in this case, or the god of Egypt, really.

And then when it comes time for the firstborn to be killed at the Passover itself, it says that "the powers of Mastema are released to kill the firstborn," and so the image of that, what we would often describe as the angel of death, is associated with this figure of Mastema. So he's participating in all this kind of demonic sort of activity that's related to the exodus. A really interesting angle; a really, really interesting angle.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and you can see the pattern there, too, of God sort of having him on a leash. He can't actually act against God's will, but God occasionally setting him loose. Why? As a judgment, to judge the wicked. God removes that restraint at times.

And there's a couple of other little details that are kind of interesting. We talked last time in the testament of Levi about how sort of priesthood was projected back onto the figure of Levi, the person. That's here in the book of Jubilees also. Levi, because of his zeal in defending the honor of his sister and killing all the men of Shechem, receives priesthood as a reward. Also there's some interesting things with— In the text of Genesis, of course, Esau ends up being the good guy in the story if you actually read it—sorry, Calvinists.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And Esau and Jacob reconcile and everything, and everything's fine, and the Edomites are even fine in Deuteronomy 2 and everything. It's only later when Edom rebels against Judah at the time that Judah is going into exile, that's where everything goes wrong in terms of Edom; that's when God says Edom he has hated. And so that gets sort of pushed back from the perspective of the author, back into Genesis where, after Esau kind of has made peace with and forgiven Jacob, Esau's sons, his descendants, his sons and grandsons, are really ticked about it and decide, you know, Esau's a wuss for doing that. [Laughter] And so they go and start attacking Jacob and Jacob's family. That's a way of sort of projecting that, like: Yeah, Esau was okay, but his descendants were a problem. But that gets kind of retrojected back into Genesis itself in that way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, earlier generations. Well, that wraps up our kind of bonus round? I don't know, of some interesting details in the book of Jubilees that both of us wanted to talk about.

I wanted to just talk here at the end about apocrypha in general. I know we've done that a lot, but particularly in terms of this book, because it would be tempting to read this and say, "Oh! This is the real story of Genesis and early Exodus." And then some people might hear this and say, "Wait a minute. Am I supposed to believe all this, that that's what really happened?" And especially the stuff that might trip people up is the origins of evil spirits and all this kind of stuff.

I know that, particularly this show we talk a lot about— we talk about a lot of kind of details and things that are probably new to a lot of people. So there can be a feeling of "Let me get hold of all of this knowledge," and some people really embrace that idea, and some people are all like: "Oh, this is all very dangerous," that kind of thing. I think that that—and this kind of connects a little bit with what, Father, you were saying to our second caller, to Maureen—it can get us into that area of treating these kind of things like they're pieces of data, that you need to get right or it needs to be rejected or whatever it might be. But I think that we have to remember what it is that apocrypha are.

So these are texts that are not read out loud in church as Scripture. Again, there is the exception of the Ethiopian tradition, but I'd be willing to guess that the vast majority of our listeners are not from that tradition, so this is not a canonical text for most of them; this is an apocryphal text. And that texts like this are useful to read at home, or useful to talk about on podcasts, meaning that they're not to be taken in the same way, with the same kind of authority as Scripture. It's something less, something lower. We have to sift them according to the larger Tradition of the Church. Some of the sifting will be things which we'll say, "Well, you know, that's not according to the Tradition of the Church. We're just going to leave that alone." Others will be things we can say, "Well, that's an interesting take on that. That's nice." Other things will provide us with very deep kinds of insight and context for the Scriptures and for the Tradition of the Church, a great example being that prayer that's used against the demons by Noah, then we use in praying for our departed, because the idea is we don't want them to be attacked by dark spirits in the passage from this life into the next: keep away.

I think the thing we have to remember—and this is a theme throughout all the stuff we've done in the podcast now for almost four years—man, it's hard to believe it's been almost four years: this is episode 92, everyone, by the way—is that the point of all of this is not to create a big stack of weird things to believe or teach or whatever. That's not the point at all. The point is to find in this the ways that we can become more faithful, the ways that we can become saints, the ways that we can become holy ones.

For me what Jubilees does is, because it kind of attempts to pull back the veil in a way that's a little bit more explicit than the canonical Scriptures, pull back the veil on the unseen world of the spiritual realities behind things, I think that it helps to give us better habits of mind when it comes to understanding what is in the Scriptures and when it comes to understanding what is in sort of these more central positions in Christian Tradition. That it gives us habits of thought, it gives us a— I don't know, I think the word "taste" might be a good one: it gives us a taste, and not just in the sense of meaning a sample, but "taste" in the sense of my tastes are formed in such a way that I can recognize and understand things that maybe were not as recognizable or understandable to me before, because we get a stronger feeling for what the world of ancient people was like, what the Ancient Near East was like, and what their spiritual neighborhood was like.

I think that Jubilees is a great text for a lot of those things all together, because it's very clearly apocryphal; it's not Scripture. But it's also very clearly engaging with Scripture. That's its real purpose, is it's engaging with what's in Scripture. It's giving us the author's thoughts and understandings and collections of traditions regarding what is in the Scripture, and so it helps to train us. I think that's perhaps the greatest value in this text, is it trains us of how to approach the Christian tradition in a way that's going to be, God willing, more salvific for us and also for those with whom we interact—that we become more saintly people; that's really the whole point of it, to draw closer to Christ, to become more like Christ, to become, as the Lord says in the gospel of Luke, "equal to the angels." And I think this text is great for all that. Fr. Stephen, your final thoughts on this?

Fr. Stephen: Aristotle was right that we are what we repeatedly do. We tend to look at the way we structure our lives and time and the calendar as kind of indifferent, as kind of unimportant. When we think about what we do or even what we repeatedly do, we don't tend to think of it in those terms, in terms of cycles and patterns and the calendar and the way we organize our days and our weeks and our months and our years. We tend to think about it just in terms of actions, like good deeds, bad deeds, good things we do, bad things we do, "I'm a good person because I do things; that person's a bad person because they do bad things."

But what Aristotle is actually talking about and what Jubilees is so focused on is exactly that kind of structuring. There was a period in my life in junior high where I basically lived from new comic day to new comic day, and Fredric Wertham was right: it turned me into a juvenile delinquent, somewhat literally… [Laughter] But there have been other periods of my life where I lived paycheck to paycheck, I lived summer to summer if you're in school or teaching school, birthday to birthday—take your pick. And all of those things will shape you.

They'll shape how you see yourself, how you understand who you are, how you relate to a community if you're even part of one, because part of what constitutes a community, part of what makes a community a community—not in the sense of this is when you can accurately apply that label, but in the sense of what actually causes a group of human persons to function together as a community—is that you have a shared rhythm of life, that you share in these patterns of life together. That's part of what binds you together and makes you actually a community, is that you're all being shaped together and drawn together by following this. So if you pick something that's just your own, it's not going to draw you together into any kind of community at all.

But whatever it is, it will shape you. It will change you. It will change how you see the world, how you experience life in the world, how you experience other people, how you experience your own interiority, how you think of and experience God. All of those things will be shaped. All of those things will be shaped. And this is why, at the core, what Christianity is is a way of life, and that way of life is made up of these patterns of life, of a weekly cycle that culminates in the celebration of Christ's resurrection on Sunday; a yearly cycle that culminates in the celebration of Pascha: Christ's resurrection on a particular Sunday; cycles of the regular feasts; of cycles both weekly and yearly of fasting and of feasting.

And, by the way, the feasting is more important. I'm just going to blow some Orthodox people's heads off. I don't care. [Laughter] The feasting we're doing right now to celebrate Christ's resurrection after Pascha is more important than the fasting we did during Lent. You want my evidence? What separated Orthodox Christians from Gnostics, from Manichaeans, from Encratites, from almost all the heretics of the ancient world was not fasting—they all fasted. They all fasted to a greater extreme than Christians did. What separated the Christians from all of them is that the Christians feast. The Christians have times of the year where they enjoy and exult in and receive joy from and give thanks to God for all the good things of his creation. They actually got married and had children; they didn't all practice celibacy, the actual Christians.

So we need to remember that. I think we need to keep that in perspective, that there are times of feasting and times of fasting. And it's not that the fasting is unimportant, just the feasting is kind of more important, giving thanks to God for his creation and his world.

But those cycles, they change us, in a good way. They mold us. They help us, as we were saying earlier, come to know God—not just know things about him, not just be able to win arguments about his attributes on the internet, but actually know him and be known by him and be transformed by that—to be drawn together into community that's practicing those same cycles so that we have not just other people whom we go to the same venue with once a week or so, but actual brothers and sisters, actual friends, actual people whom we share our lives: around most of the time, two fast days, couple days where I go to church, five or so days where I work, time I spend with my family, time I spend on other things: in this regular cycle, week after week. We have to leave the mountain after liturgy, but we come back to it; we come back into the presence of God. We have the leave-taking of Pascha, but then the next year we come back to it, over and over and over again.

And the eternal realities of God become more and more part of our life every cycle, every time around the bend, all building to that day when we leave this life, and all of those eternal realities, Lord willing, become our eternal realities, become the realities in which we live our eternal life. So those are my thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen! Amen. Well, that's our show for tonight, everybody. Thank you very much for listening, for joining us. If you didn't call us live, if you didn't listen to us live, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits, and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need need help finding a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. If you want to make a podcast like this, you can learn how to on Skillshare, who doesn't sponsor us, but I'd love to take their money!

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Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night, and may God bless you all. Christ is risen! He truly is risen!