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Leviticus prescribes death as the penalty for adultery. In Jubilees, Joseph is described already knowing this command generations earlier, taught by Abraham and ordained in heaven, long before the Torah was given at Sinai.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Leviticus 20:10
Hebrew Bible
9 “‘If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or mother; his blood guilt is on himself. 10 If a man commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife, both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death. 11 If a man goes to bed with his father’s wife, he has exposed his father’s nakedness. Both of them must be put to death; their blood guilt is on themselves.
Jubilees 39:6
Pseudepigrapha
5 Now Joseph was well-formed and very handsome. The wife of his master looked up, saw Joseph, loved him, and pleaded with him to lie with her. 6 But he did not surrender himself. He remembered the Lord and what his father Jacob would read to him from the words of Abraham — that no one is to commit adultery with a woman who has a husband; that there is a death penalty which has been ordained for him in heaven before the Most High Lord. The sin will be entered regarding him in the eternal books forever before the Lord. 7 Joseph remembered what he had said and refused to lie with her.
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Notes and References
... Leviticus 20:10 mandates the death penalty for adultery: “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.” However, identifying the woman as “the wife of his neighbor” can be understood to restrict the law to an Israelite (see Milgrom, Leviticus, 2:1747–48) so that it would not be applicable to a case like that of Joseph and the Egyptian woman. ...
VanderKam, James C.
Jubilees 2: A Commentary on the Book of Jubilees Chapters 22-50
(p. 1010) Fortress Press, 2018
* 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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