Texts in Conversation
Leviticus requires proportional justice, saying that harm must be repaid in kind. Jubilees applies this retroactively to the story of Cain, introducing a tradition where he dies when his house collapses, crushed by stones, similar to how he killed Abel.
Share:
2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Leviticus 24:20
Hebrew Bible
18 One who beats an animal to death must make restitution for it, life for life. 19 If a man inflicts an injury on his fellow citizen, just as he has done it must be done to him— 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth—just as he inflicts an injury on another person that same injury must be inflicted on him. 21 One who beats an animal to death must make restitution for it, but one who beats a person to death must be put to death.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Jubilees 4:31
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
30 And he lacked seventy years of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore it was written concerning the tree of knowledge: 'On the day that you eat of it you shall die.' For this reason he did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it. 31 At the close of this jubilee Cain was killed after him in the same year; for his house fell upon him and he died inside his house, and he was killed by its stones; for with a stone he had killed Abel, and by a stone he was killed in righteous judgment. 32 For this reason it was ordained on the heavenly tablets: With the instrument with which a man kills his neighbor with the same he shall be killed; in the same way that he wounded him, in the same way they shall deal with him.'
Date: 170–125 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Search:
Notes and References
"... The book of Genesis does not report how Cain died; the original author of Jubilees similarly skipped the subject. As far as he was concerned, Cain’s story ended with his being cursed and exiled ... The Interpolator saw here another fine opportunity to connect something from Genesis with a law that appears later on in the Torah (and thus to assert that the law had always existed on the Heavenly Tablets). Leviticus 24:19-20 ... the means by which the harm was inflicted. Cain’s invented death through the collapse of his house upholds both halves of the verse: Cain was killed as punishment for Abel’s murder, and he was killed specifically by his house’s stones because with a stone he had killed Abel ..."
James L. Kugel, A Walk through Jubilees: Studies in the Book of Jubilees and the World of Its Creation (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 51.
* 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.
Your Feedback:
User Comments
Leave a Comment
Anonymous comments are welcome. All comments are subject to moderation.
User Comments
,
What is the biblical mean of testimony of the heavens? Jubilees 4:30
What is the biblical mean of testimony of the heavens? Jubilees 4:30