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Jubilees follows early Jewish traditions, also found in the book of Judith, that expands Genesis by giving additional backstory to Abraham and his family, explaining their departure from Mesopotamia as the result of rejecting ancestral gods.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Jubilees 12:7
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
6 And his father said to him, I also know it, my son, but what shall I do with a people who have made me to serve before them? 7 And if I tell them the truth, they will slay me; for their soul cleaves to them to worship them and honour them. 8 Keep silent, my son, lest they slay you.' And he spoke these words to his two brothers, and they were angry with him and he kept silent. 9 And in the fortieth jubilee, in the second week, in the seventh year of it, [1925] Abram took to himself a wife, and her name was Sarai, the daughter of his father, and she became his wife.
Date: 170–125 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Judith 5:8
Deuterocanon
7 They sojourned before this in Mesopotamia, because they didn’t want to follow the gods of their fathers, which were in the land of the Chaldeans. 8 They departed from the way of their parents, and worshiped the God of heaven, the God whom they knew. Their parents cast them out from the face of their gods, and they fled into Mesopotamia and sojourned there many days. 9 Then their God commanded them to depart from the place where they sojourned, and to go into the land of Canaan. They lived there, and prospered with gold and silver, and with exceedingly much cattle. 10 Then they went down into Egypt, for a famine covered all the land of Canaan. They sojourned there until they had grown up. They became a great multitude there, so that one could not count the population of their nation.
Date: 100 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... In Genesis 11:31 we are told that Terah, Abraham, Lot, and Sarai leave Ur of the Chaldeans on their way to the land of Canaan, but end up living in Haran, a city in northern Mesopotamia, and we hear nothing of the deities worshipped in Ur. Abraham is then commanded by God to go to Canaan (Genesis 12:1–5). In our passage, Achior fills in the gaps, and we learn that these migrations are connected to the rejection of ancestral gods and the worship of God. Achior states that the Israelites’ ancestors were expelled from their homeland because of their belief in the existence of the God of heaven rather than the gods of their fathers. While it is clear that Achior is referring to Abraham and his family, he speaks quite generally of the collective ancestors of the Israelites rejecting local gods and being summoned by God, and he does not mention Abraham by name. This general reference to the Israelite ancestors is in line with Achior’s deliberate portrayal of the people of Israel, rather than their leaders. At the same time, it eliminates any possible contradiction between Genesis 11:31, where Abraham’s entire family has already left Ur, and Genesis 12:1, where Abraham alone is told to leave his “homeland,” presumably Ur; see Nehemiah 9:7. Other post-biblical sources (Jubilees 11:16–17; 12:1–8, 12–14; Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 1.154–157) also state that Abraham recognized the true God and had to leave Ur because of his beliefs, but in these sources it is only Abraham who recognizes God. Indeed, in biblical (Joshua 24:2–3) and post-biblical (Jubilees 12:1–8, 14) sources Abraham’s father and brothers are said to worship other gods or idols ..."
Deborah Levine Gera, Judith (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 204.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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