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Genesis 8 and its retelling in Jubilees describe Noah offering sacrifices after the flood, but Jubilees reinterprets this act as atonement for the earth’s impurity. Priestly traditions, such as Leviticus, shaped how Jubilees reread the flood.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 8:20
Hebrew Bible
19 Every living creature, every creeping thing, every bird, and everything that moves on the earth went out of the ark in their groups. 20 Noah built an altar to the Lord. He then took some of every kind of clean animal and clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And the Lord smelled the soothing aroma and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, even though the inclination of their minds is evil from childhood on. I will never again destroy everything that lives, as I have just done.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Jubilees 6:2
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
1 And on the new moon of the third month he went out from the ark, and built an altar on that mountain. 2 And he made atonement for the earth, and took a young goat and made atonement by its blood for all the guilt of the earth; for everything that had been on it had been destroyed, except those that were in the ark with Noah. 3 And he placed its fat on the altar, and he took an ox, and a goat, and a sheep and young goats, and salt, and a turtledove, and the young of a dove, and placed a burnt sacrifice on the altar, and poured on it an offering mixed with oil, and sprinkled wine and scattered frankincense over everything, and caused a pleasing aroma to arise, acceptable before the Lord.
Date: 170–125 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The perversity and wickedness referred to in the first strophe is here construed as defilement or impurity. The reference is very likely to the bloodshed described in chapter 7, and its rectification requires cultic purification. Such purification could be the flood. On the other hand, this passage may be an interpretation of Genesis 8:20. According to Jubilees 6:2 and Genesis Apocryphon 10:13 after it, Noah sacrificed in order to atone for the earth ... some connotation with Leviticus 16:30 is here, given the parallels in Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon ..."
George W. E. Nickelsburg, A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch Chapters 1-36, 81-108 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 227–228.
* 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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