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Fall Asleep to the Book of Jubilees Explained _ Creation_ Angels_ and Sacred Time · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: To night, you are tired, not the kind of tired
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: that a good night of sleep will fix. Something deeper
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: than that, something that has been accumulating, not just across
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: to day, but across many days, the slow weight of
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a life lived at a pace that does not leave
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: room for the question underneath all the other questions. The
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: question is not complicated. It sounds almost too simple when
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: you say it plainly. Is any of this held by
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: something larger than me? To night, we are going to
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: read a book together. It is an ancient book written
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: two thousand years ago by people who were asking a
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: version of that same question, under conditions far more urgent
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: than yours. It is called the Book of Jubilees. It
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: is layered and honest and carefully constructed, and it has
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: been traveling through time, through desert caves and highland monasteries
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: and the hands of people who decided it was worth keeping.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: To arrive in this quiet room on this particular night,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: you do not need to know anything coming in. You
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: do not need a theology degree or a background in
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: ancient history. You only need to be here, breathing, willing
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: to listen. We will begin slowly, and we will go
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: all the way through chapter one, the Book at the
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: edge of the shelf. There is a particular kind of
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: book that most people never read, not because it is
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: difficult exactly, not because it is too long, or too
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  Speaker 1: strange or too demanding, but because it sits just outside
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: the circle of things that get recommended, things that get
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: passed down from parent to child with the instruction that
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: this one matters. It sits at the edge of the shelf, present, unclaimed,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: old enough that even the forgetting of it has been forgotten.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: The Book of Jubilees is that kind of book. If
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: you grew up attending church, you almost certainly never heard
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: it mentioned on a Monday morning. If you studied scripture
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: in any formal setting, it was not in your curriculum.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: If you have spent years reading the Bible carefully, you
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: may have come across a footnote reference to it at
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  Speaker 1: the bottom of a page, a small italic notation that
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: appeared and disappeared before you had time to ask what
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  Speaker 1: it was. That footnote does not tell you what it should.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: The Book of Jubileese is one of the most complete
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  Speaker 1: and carefully constructed texts to survive from the ancient Jewish world.
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  Speaker 1: It is not a fragment. It is not a collection
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  Speaker 1: of disconnected sayings or partially preserved wisdom. It is a full, sustained,
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  Speaker 1: deeply intentional work of theological writing that spans fifty chapters
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  Speaker 1: and covers the entire sweep of sacred history, from the
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  Speaker 1: creation of the world to the giving of the Law
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  Speaker 1: on Mount Sinai. It was composed with a specific purpose
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: by people living in a specific crisis, and it carries
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  Speaker 1: within it an argument that is still worth hearing two
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: thousand years after it was first made. Most readers who
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: encounter it for the first time feel something unexpected, not confusion,
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  Speaker 1: though there is complexity, not distance though it is old,
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  Speaker 1: something closer to recognition, The feeling of finding someone else's
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  Speaker 1: journal and realizing they had been in the same room
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: you have been in just a very long time before you.
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  Speaker 1: That feeling is worth following, and tonight we are going
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  Speaker 1: to follow it all the way through. Before we go further.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: It is worth knowing something about the world in which
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  Speaker 1: this book was born. Because context is not background noise.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: For the Book of Jubilees. Context is the key. The
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  Speaker 1: book was written sometime in the second century before christ.
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  Speaker 1: Scholars who have studied its language, its theology, and its
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  Speaker 1: relationship to other texts from the same period. Place its
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  Speaker 1: composition in the years surrounding one of the most acute
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: christs in the history of the Jewish people, the Seleucid
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  Speaker 1: king Antiochus the Fourth, had implemented a systematic program of
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  Speaker 1: forced Hellenization across the territories he controlled. For most populations
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: under Seleucid rule, this meant cultural pressure for the Jewish
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  Speaker 1: community in Israel. It meant something closer to erasure. The
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  Speaker 1: Torah was prohibited, Sabbath observance was made a capital offense.
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  Speaker 1: The temple in Jerusalem was rededicated to Zeus. Circumcision, the
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  Speaker 1: bodily sign of the covenant between God and the descendants
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  Speaker 1: of Abraham, was outlawed, and the calendar, the sacred system
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  Speaker 1: of weeks and months and appointed times by which the
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  Speaker 1: Jewish community had organized its worship and its identity for centuries,
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  Speaker 1: was being replaced by the Greek calendar. The count was
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  Speaker 1: being overwritten. Understanding that pressure is not a footnote, it
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  Speaker 1: is everything. When you know what the people who wrote
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: this book were living through, the book stops being an
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  Speaker 1: ancient curiosity and becomes something you recognize from the inside.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: It becomes the response of a community that was being
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  Speaker 1: told to forget who it was, and that refused. The
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  Speaker 1: formal title of the book in Hebrew is Cepher Hayovelim,
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  Speaker 1: the Book of the Jubilees. The word yovelin is the
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  Speaker 1: plural of joval, the Hebrew word for jubilee, and jubilee
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  Speaker 1: in the Biblical tradition is not simply a word for celebration.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: It is a specific and sacred institution. Every forty nine years,
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  Speaker 1: after seven cycles of seven years, the fiftieth year was
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  Speaker 1: declared a year of jubilee. Debts were canceled, slaves were freed,
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  Speaker 1: Land that had been sold was returned to its original families.
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  Speaker 1: The choffar the ramshorn was blown across the hills to
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  Speaker 1: announce that something was being reset, that what had been
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  Speaker 1: lost could be reclaimed, that the accumulated weight of time
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  Speaker 1: and its transactions was being lifted by the hand of God.
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  Speaker 1: The author takes this institution and applies it to all
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  Speaker 1: of history. Every event is placed within a precise jubilee cycle,
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  Speaker 1: a precise week of years, a precise year within that week.
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  Speaker 1: History in this book is not a river flowing without direction.
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  Speaker 1: It is a calendar, a measured progression of appointed times,
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  Speaker 1: moving toward an appointed end, held in the hands of
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  Speaker 1: the one who established the count before the world began.
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  Speaker 1: For a community whose calendar was being taken from them,
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  Speaker 1: this was not abstract theology. It was survival. If you
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  Speaker 1: can still tell the story of where you are in
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  Speaker 1: the Sacred Count, you have not lost your place. And
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  Speaker 1: if you have lost your place in the Sacred Count,
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  Speaker 1: you have lost something harder to recover than land, or language,
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  Speaker 1: or even life itself. There is a woman named Clara.
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  Speaker 1: She is thirty eight years old, and she lives outside
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  Speaker 1: of Nashville, Tennessee. She left the church she grew up
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  Speaker 1: in during her twenties, not in anger, but slowly, the
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  Speaker 1: way people leave things when the reasons for staying gradually
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  Speaker 1: become less audible than the reasons for going. She did
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  Speaker 1: not stop believing. She stopped believing that the version she
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  Speaker 1: had been given was the whole story. She started reading
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  Speaker 1: on her own, following threads wherever they led, and one evening,
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  Speaker 1: about a year ago, she found a reference to the
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  Speaker 1: Book of Jubilees in an academic article. She followed the
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  Speaker 1: thread for three hours, she ordered two books. She stayed
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  Speaker 1: up until two in the morning, reading about a community
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  Speaker 1: that had lived and written and prayed and fought to
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  Speaker 1: maintain its identity two thousand years ago. She told a
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  Speaker 1: friend the next day that reading about that community felt
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  Speaker 1: less like history and more like recognition, like finding evidence
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  Speaker 1: that someone had been in the same room she was
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  Speaker 1: in just a very long time ago. That is the
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  Speaker 1: experience the Book of Jubilees can offer when you come
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  Speaker 1: to it with patients and genuine attention. Now, let us
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: talk about what this book actually is, because understanding its
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: form is as important as understanding its content. The Book
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: of Jubilees presents itself as a dictation. An angel referred
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  Speaker 1: to throughout the text as the Angel of the Presence,
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  Speaker 1: speaks to Moses during his forty days and nights on
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  Speaker 1: Mount Sinai and recounts to him the full history of
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  Speaker 1: Creation and the patriarchs. He fills in details that Genesis
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  Speaker 1: left unnamed. He establishes dates that Genesis does not give.
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  Speaker 1: He emphasizes laws and practices that the author believed needed
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  Speaker 1: to be more clearly understood by a community under pressure.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: This literary device, the idea of a heavenly mediator. Clarifying
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: and expanding what was already given at Sinai was a
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  Speaker 1: well established convention in ancient Jewish literature. Scholars call the
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  Speaker 1: broader genre su de pigrapher, from the Greek meaning writings
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: under a different name. This is a discrete of a form,
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  Speaker 1: not a criticism of an intent. In the ancient world,
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  Speaker 1: writing in the name or voice of a revered figure
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  Speaker 1: was a recognized way of claiming that your teaching stood
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  Speaker 1: in continuity with the tradition that person represented. The author
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  Speaker 1: of Jubilees was saying in the language their audience understood.
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  Speaker 1: What I am about to tell you is not my
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  Speaker 1: private opinion. It stands in the line of what was
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  Speaker 1: revealed at Sinai. This distinction matters when modern readers discover
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  Speaker 1: that the Book of Jubilees was probably not written by
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  Speaker 1: Moses himself. The temptation is to dismiss it as a forgery,
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  Speaker 1: but that reaction applies contemporary standards of authorship to an
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  Speaker 1: ancient text in a way that serves neither the text
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  Speaker 1: nor the reader. The question worth asking is not who
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  Speaker 1: held the pen. The question is what the people who
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  Speaker 1: produced this book were trying to say, why they felt
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  Speaker 1: it needed to be said, and whether what they said
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  Speaker 1: has anything to offer to someone reading it in a
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  Speaker 1: quiet room two thousand years later. On all three counts,
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  Speaker 1: the answer is more interesting than you might expect. The
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  Speaker 1: Dead Sea Scrolls changed the scholarly understanding of this book
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: in a way that is difficult to overstate. Before their discovery,
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  Speaker 1: the complete text of Jubilees was known only through an
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  Speaker 1: Ethiopic translation preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tevahedo Church, which
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  Speaker 1: had included Jubilees in its Biblical canon and copied it
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  Speaker 1: faithfully across sixteen centuries. When the scrolls were discovered in
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  Speaker 1: the caves above Kumran beginning in nineteen forty seven, scholars
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  Speaker 1: found fragments of at least fifteen separate manuscripts of Jubilees
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  Speaker 1: written in Hebrew, fifteen copies in one community, more than
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  Speaker 1: some books that eventually entered the standard Biblical canon. The
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  Speaker 1: community that hid its library in those desert caves did
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  Speaker 1: not treat Jubilees as marginal. They treated it as essential.
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  Speaker 1: The Ethiopian Orthodox tewah Hado Church deserves more than a
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  Speaker 1: passing mention here. It is one of the oldest Christian
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  Speaker 1: communities in the world, with roots reaching back to the
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  Speaker 1: fourth century. The Ethiopian Church developed its own rich tradition
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  Speaker 1: of biblical scholarship, its own liturgical language in Gaez, and
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  Speaker 1: its own canonical list of sacred texts. That list, which
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  Speaker 1: is larger than the canons used by most Western Christian traditions,
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  Speaker 1: includes the Book of Jubilees, not as a supplement or
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  Speaker 1: a curiosity, as scripture. This means that for Ethiopian Christians,
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  Speaker 1: Jubilees is not an ancient footnote. It has been read
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  Speaker 1: in churches and copied by monks, and taught to children
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  Speaker 1: and woven into the fabric of faith for over sixteen
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  Speaker 1: hundred years. When people in the West encounter Jubilees as
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  Speaker 1: a strange and unfamiliar text, the strangeness is not in
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  Speaker 1: the book, it is in the distance that Western readers
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  Speaker 1: have traveled from the world that produced it. There is
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  Speaker 1: a student named Marcus. He is twenty two years old
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: studying history at a university in Ohio, and his grandmother
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  Speaker 1: came from Addis Ababa. She attends an Ethiopian Orthodox church
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  Speaker 1: two towns from where he grew up. In his junior year,
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  Speaker 1: he took a course on ancient Jewish literature and encountered
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  Speaker 1: a lecture that mentioned Jubileese. Something clicked. He texted his
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  Speaker 1: grandmother that night and asked if she had ever heard
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  Speaker 1: of it. She called him back in seven minutes and
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  Speaker 1: talked for forty five. She told him the name in Geez.
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  Speaker 1: She told him she had grown up hearing portions of
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  Speaker 1: it read during certain feast days. She told him her
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  Speaker 1: own grandmother had known passages of it by heart. He
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: sat with the phone in his hand after they hung up,
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  Speaker 1: thinking about the distance between a footnote in an academic
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  Speaker 1: article and forty five minutes of his grandmother's voice. That
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  Speaker 1: distance is part of what this book carries. It survived
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  Speaker 1: not because institutions protected it, but because people loved it
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  Speaker 1: enough to keep copying it. When coppying was slow and
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: there was no guarantee that anyone in the future would care.
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  Speaker 1: The Ethiopian Church kept it. The community at Cumrane sealed
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  Speaker 1: it in clay jars in the desert, And when a
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  Speaker 1: Bedouin shepherd boy threw a stone into a cave in
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  Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven and heard the sound of breaking pottery,
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  Speaker 1: the world recovered what the desert had been holding in
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  Speaker 1: silence for nearly two thousand years. The jars held to night.
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  Speaker 1: We are going to open them together. There is no rush.
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  Speaker 1: The night is long, and the book has been patient
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  Speaker 1: for two thousand years. Settle in, Let everything else wait
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  Speaker 1: on the other side of the door. The book begins
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  Speaker 1: where all the great books begin, at the beginning chapter two.
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  Speaker 1: A map before the journey. Before you walk into a forest,
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  Speaker 1: it helps to know something about its shape, not every trail,
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  Speaker 1: not every tree, just enough to understand that what you
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: are entering has structure, that it was designed by someone
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  Speaker 1: who knew where they wanted you to arrive, and that
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: the paths inside it are not random, even when they
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  Speaker 1: feel that way. The Book of Jubilees is that kind
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  Speaker 1: of forest. It has a shape, and spending a few
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  Speaker 1: minutes with the architecture before we go deeper will make
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  Speaker 1: everything that follows more connected and more useful to carry
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  Speaker 1: with you when the night is over. The first thing
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  Speaker 1: to understand is the Jubilee system itself, because it is
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  Speaker 1: not just the title of the book, It is the
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  Speaker 1: skeleton of everything inside it. In the Hebrew tradition, the
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  Speaker 1: number seven carries enormous weight the seventh day is the sabbath.
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  Speaker 1: The seventh year is the sabbatical year, when the land
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  Speaker 1: rests and debts are released, and after seven cycles of
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  Speaker 1: seven years, after forty nine years comes the Jubilee. The
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: fiftieth year the year of release and return, and the
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: sounding of the Ram's horn across the hills. The author
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  Speaker 1: maps this system on to all of human history. Every
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  Speaker 1: event is placed within a specific jubilee period, a specific
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: week of years within that period, a specific year within
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  Speaker 1: that week. Creation happens in the first week of the
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: first jubilee. The births and deaths of the patriarchs fall
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: within precisely counted cycles. Noah's flood occupies a precisely numbered jubilee.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Abraham's call comes at a specific point in the count.
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  Speaker 1: This precision is not decorative. It is the argument made
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  Speaker 1: not in a sermon, but in the architecture of the
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  Speaker 1: text itself. History is not haos. Time is not a
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: river flowing without direction. Every moment has a position, every
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  Speaker 1: event has a place in the sacred count, and the
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  Speaker 1: God who established the count at the beginning of creation
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  Speaker 1: is the same God present in every jubilee, every week
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  Speaker 1: of years, every ordinary day, that feels as though it
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  Speaker 1: might not matter for a community watching its world come
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  Speaker 1: apart under political pressure. This was not a comforting abstraction.
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  Speaker 1: It was a life line. You are not lost. You
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  Speaker 1: are exactly where you are in the count, and the
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  Speaker 1: count is held by someone who does not lose track.
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  Speaker 1: The second thing to understand is the narrator. The book
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  Speaker 1: opens with Moses on Sinai and the Angel of the
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  Speaker 1: Presence speaking to him directly. This figure, the angel who
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  Speaker 1: stands nearest to the divine Presence in the Hebrew prophetic tradition,
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  Speaker 1: is not invented for this book. It appears in Isiah
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  Speaker 1: and elsewhere as the most intimate of heavenly intermediaries. The
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  Speaker 1: author's choice of this particular narrator is a deliberate claim,
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  Speaker 1: not merely that the information in the book comes from heaven,
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  Speaker 1: but that it comes from the innermost circle of heaven.
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  Speaker 1: You cannot revise what was said there without claiming an
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  Speaker 1: authority greater than the mountain itself. The third thing to
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  Speaker 1: understand is what scholars call rewritten Bible, and it shapes
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: how you receive everything in the book. Rewritten Bible is
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: a term for ancient Jewish texts that take existing scriptural
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  Speaker 1: material and retell it with expansions and interpretations woven so
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  Speaker 1: seamlessly into the narrative that the result reads as a single,
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  Speaker 1: coherent story. The authors were not replacing the Torah. They
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: were illuminating it, defending particular interpretations of it, drawing out
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  Speaker 1: the legal and theological implications that lay beneath the surface
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  Speaker 1: of the narrative, visible to those who knew how to look.
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  Speaker 1: The author of Jubilees is a master of this practice.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: When the book retells the creation story, it adds dates
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: that connect Genesis to the legal code of Leviticus, suggesting
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: that the two were never as separate as they appeared.
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  Speaker 1: When it retells the story of Noah, it expands the
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: account of what went wrong before the flood, providing the
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  Speaker 1: context that Genesis deliberately left unexplained. When it retells the
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: story of Abraham, it gives him a childhood, a moment
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: of awakening, a specific gift of sacred language. Every edition
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: serves the book's central concern. Every detail is there because
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: the author believed it helped the community understand who they
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: were and why it mattered. There is a man named David.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: He is forty seven years old, and he has been
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: a high school history teacher for twenty two years. He
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: picked up a scholarly edition of Jubilees a few years
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: ago out of professional curiosity, and what caught his attention
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: first was not any particular passage, but the dating system.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: He spent an evening working through the Jubilee calculations for
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: the first ten chapters and came away with the feeling
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  Speaker 1: he gets when he sees a well designed piece of architecture.
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  Speaker 1: Some one spent a very long time thinking about how
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: to build this. The structure is not accidental. There is
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: a mind behind it. He is right, and part of
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: what we are doing to night is learning to see
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: that mind at work. The Book of Jubileese moves in
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  Speaker 1: four broad movements, though the author does not name them.
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  Speaker 1: The first covers Creation through the Flood, the primordial history
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  Speaker 1: of the world from its first moment through its near destruction,
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  Speaker 1: and the renewal that followed. The second covers Abraham and
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  Speaker 1: the founding Generation, the period when the covenant between God
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  Speaker 1: and a particular people was established in formal terms for
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  Speaker 1: the first time. The third covers Isaac, Jacob and Joseph,
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  Speaker 1: the carrying of the covenant through generations marked by failure
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  Speaker 1: and forgiveness, and the complicated love that family stories always contain.
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  Speaker 1: The fourth covers the descent into Egypt and the long
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  Speaker 1: road towards Sinai, the crisis and the response, the moment
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  Speaker 1: when everything that was promised had to survive contact with
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  Speaker 1: the worst that history could produce. Each movement has its
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  Speaker 1: own weight. The first is vast and cosmological. The second
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  Speaker 1: is intimate and foundational. The third is conflicted and deeply human.
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  Speaker 1: The fourth is urgent, almost breathless, because the people reading
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: it knew what was coming. They knew that after Sinai
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  Speaker 1: came the wilderness, and in their own time, the wilderness
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  Speaker 1: had already arrived. What the book offers across all four
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  Speaker 1: movements is this. The same God is present in the
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: first creation day and in the last chapter before Sinai.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: The same commitment to covenant runs from Adam to Moses.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: The same sacred count measures every generation. And if you
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: are a reader being told that your story does not matter,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: that your calendar is wrong, that your God is one
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: option among many, then that consistency is not a literary feature.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: It is a declaration you are not a footnote in
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: some one else's story. You are the continuation of a
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: story that began before the world existed. You are a
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: line in the count, and the count is being held
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: by the same hands that held the first morning. Those
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: hands have not let go. That is the map, That
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: is the shape of the forest. Now let us step
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: inside Chapter three, in the beginning again, every tradition has
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: a creation story. Every culture that has ever looked up
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: at the sky and wondered where it came from has
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: arrived at some account, some framework for understanding how the
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: world began and what that beginning means for the people
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: now living in it. The questions that creation stories answer
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: are not scientific questions, though science has its own answers.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: They are the questions that persist underneath the scientific answers.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Why is there something rather than nothing? What does it
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: mean that the world exists? And what does the existence
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: of the world suggest about the nature of the one?
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: If there is one who made it? The author of
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Jubilees has a creation story, and what makes it remarkable
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: is not the and it differs dramatically from Genesis. It
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: covers the same six days, the same sequence of light
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: and sky and land, and stars and creatures, and humanity,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: and the Sabbath rest on the seventh day. If you
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: know Genesis, you will recognize every landmark. But recognition is
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: not the same as understanding. And the places where the authors,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: retelling quietly parts from the Genesis account are precisely where
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: the deepest concerns of the book become visible. Let us
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: go through the weeks slowly. The first day, God speaks
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: light into existence. Most readers of Genesis know this well
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: enough to recite it. But the author of Jubilees places
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: something in the first Day that Genesis does not mention,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: the angels. The author sets the angels at the beginning
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: of everything present, in the first morning, before any creature breathed,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: before any seed fell, before the first light touched the
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: first water, and their creation is described in a careful hierarchy.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: The angels of the presence, who stand nearest to God,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: the angels of sanctification. The angels set over the various
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: domains of the natural world, each with a specific station,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: each with a function that is theirs alone. In Genesis,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: the angels simply appear when they are needed, without any
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: account of their origin. The author of Jubilees answers the
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: question that Genesis leaves open, and in answering it makes
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: a claim that shapes everything that follows. The spiritual world,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: as the author constructs it is not populated by arbitrary
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: beings whose loyalties are unclear. It is ordered. It is
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: structured the same way the calendar is structured, the same
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: way the Jubilee system is structured. Everything has a place,
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: everything has a function, and at the summit of all
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: of it, above every order of spiritual being is the
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: one who created them, and whose purposes run through everything
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: they do. For people living in a world that offered
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: many competing spiritual frameworks, many gods, and many spirits, all
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: claiming authority, this was a significant thing to say. The
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: spiritual world is not a democracy of competing forces. It
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: is a creation with an architecture, and the architect is
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: not one option among many. The second day brings the firmament,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: the third day brings dry land, and the first green things.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: The author follows Genesis closely in both, but pays particular
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: attention to the pattern of reproduction. The grasses and trees
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: are not just created, they are given the capacity to
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: continue themselves, seed bearing seed. Each generation carrying the pattern
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: of the one before it forward into time. Creation is
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: not a single event that happened once. It is a
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: system designed to perpetuate itself across every season that follows.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: The fourth Day is where the author makes the most
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: significant departure from Genesis, and it is the departure that
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: the entire book will spend fifty chapters defending Genesis. Describes
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: the fourth day briefly. The sun, moon, and stars are
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: placed in the firmament to give light, to separate day
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: from night, to serve as signs for seasons and days
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: and years. This is the Genesis account, suggestive but brief.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: The author of Jubilees lingers here in the retelling. The
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: great lights are not simply sources of illumination. They are
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: time keepers, the instruments by which the sacred calendar is
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: measured and maintained, and the calendar they mark in the
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: argument the author constructs is a solar calendar of three
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty four days, divided into four seasons of
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: ninety one days each, thirteen weeks per season, fifty two
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: weeks per year, a year that divides without remainder, a
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: year in which every sabbath falls on the same day
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: of the month. Every festival returns to the same point
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: in the same week, and the sacred rhythm never drifts.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: The Hebrew word the author uses for seasons in this
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: passage is modim, the same word used throughout the Torah
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: for the appointed times of the festivals, the sacred occasions
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: when the community gathered to worship and remember. The author
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: is embedding an argument in a single word. The sun
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: and moon were not created to help you decide when
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: to plant your crops. They were created to maintain the moaedim,
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: the appointed meetings between a people and their God. This
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: is the theological heart of the creation account in Jubilees,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: and it is impossible to understand the rest of the
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: book without it. The calendar is not a human invention,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: the author insists. It is not a political tool subject
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: to revision by whoever holds power. It was written into
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: the structure of creation on the fourth day by the
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: same God who spoke light into existence on the first.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: To abandon the ap pointed times, the author argues, is
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: not a minor administrative adjustment. It is a departure from
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: the order that was established before any human institution existed.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: For people living under a king who had replaced the
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: sacred calendar with a Greek one. This was not an abstraction,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: It was the ground under their feet. The fifth day
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: brings sea, creatures and birds, and the blessing of reproduction.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: The sixth day brings land, animals, and finally humanity. Here
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: the author pauses, as genesis pauses, because the creation of
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: humanity is different from everything that came before. Every other
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: created thing is spoken into existence, but humanity is created
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: with deliberation, with a consultation that implies, even in the
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: terse language of the text, that something more is happening here,
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: not just another creature being added to the list, a
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: creature in whom the Creator is somehow reflected. The author
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: does not elaborate extensively on the theology of the image
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: of God, but the retelling does something subtler. It places
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: the creation of humanity at the end of a fully
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: prepared world. The light and sky and land and creatures
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: and calender were all in place before humanity arrived. The
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: preparation preceded you. You were not an afterthought. The world
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: was set before you like a table. The seventh day
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: is the Sabbath, and this is where the author's argument
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: arrives at its most important destination. The Hebrew word shabbat
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: does not primarily mean rest in the sense of stopping
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: because you are tired. It carries the sense of completion,
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: the deep satisfaction of having finished something and standing in
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: the moment of its wholeness before the work of using
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: it begins. The author is not describing a God who
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: needed to recover from six days of creative effort. The
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: author is describing a God who stood in the moment
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: of completion and declared it wholly, who separated the seventh
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: day from all other days, not because nothing happened on it,
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: but because what happened on it was different in kind.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: What happened on the seventh day was wholeness itself, and
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: the decision to let that wholeness be enough. Shabbat completion,
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: not the end of something, the arrival of it. The
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: author then makes the claim that gives the entire book
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: its argumentative spine. The Sabbath, in this insistence, was not
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: given first to Israel. The author argues that it was
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: established in heaven before the world was made. The angels
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: of the Presence kept the Sabbath before there was an
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: earth to rest on, and when the Sabbath was eventually
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: given to Israel at Sinai, it was not the creation
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: of something new. It was the extension of something ancient,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: the bringing of a heavenly practice down into the world
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: of human time. If the Sabbath is a human institution,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: it can be replaced by other human institutions. But if
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: it is a heavenly one, the author argues, written into
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: the structure of creation before the first Morning, then no
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: human authority can revoke it. Not a Greek king, not
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: a Roman emperor, not any council or edict that any
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: power has ever issued or will ever issue. The Sabbath
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: belongs to the order of creation, and the order of
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: creation belongs to God. There is a woman named Elizabeth.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: She is fifty four years old and she lives in
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: a small town in western Oregon. She is a nurse,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: which means she has worked more Saturdays and Sundays than
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: she can count, and the concept of Sabbath has always
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: felt to her like something designed for people with more
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: ordinary schedules. She found her way to this section of
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: the book late one night after a twelve hour shift,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: through a reference in something she had been reading slowly
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: for months. The phrase that stopped her was not the
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: legal language. It was the idea that the seventh Day
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: is about completion, that rest is not recovery, that it
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: is the experience of standing in the moment of something
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: being finished and letting that be enough. She set down
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: what she was reading, she sat in the quiet of
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: the house, where everyone else was already asleep, and for
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: a few minutes she simply stopped. Not because anything was resolved,
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: not because the weaker head was any less demanding, but
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: because the word Shabbat had given her something she had
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: not known. She was missing a name for the thing
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: she had been trying to reach at the end of
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: every long shift, and never quite arriving at. Completion. Not performance,
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: not productivity, not even rest, exactly the experience of having
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: been present, of having done what the day asked, of
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: being finished for now and letting that be enough. The
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Creation week, as the author of Jubilees tells, it, contains
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: more than the physical world. It contains the structures that
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: make it possible for all things to be relationship with
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: each other and with their creator. The calendar, the Sabbath,
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: the appointed times, the ordered hierarchy of beings, the dignity
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: of humanity as the creature for whom everything was prepared
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: in advance. It is a great deal to fit into
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: seven days. But then, in the count of Jubileese, the
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: first week is not just seven days. It is the
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: first movement of a rhythm that will run for all
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: of history, the first seven beats of a song that
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: is still being played. You can hear it if the
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: room is quiet enough. The rhythm of the first week,
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: the rhythm of completion, the rhythm of a world made
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: not just to exist, but to be inhabited by creatures
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: who could recognize it as gift. You are one of
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: those creatures, and the gift is still being given. Chapter four,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: The Garden and what was lost there. There is a
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: story that almost most everyone knows. A garden, a man
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: and a woman, a tree. They were told not to touch,
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: a serpent with a different suggestion, a choice that changed everything.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: Most people who know this story think they know it completely.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: They heard it young, in a church or a classroom,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: or from a parent reading at bedtime, and the version
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: they received has stayed with them in roughly the shape
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: it arrived. The garden, the fruit, the fall, the exile.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: The author of Jubileese tells this story differently, not in
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: ways that contradict Genesis, in ways that slow down and
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: look carefully at what Genesis passes over in a sentence,
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: in ways that answer questions Genesis does not ask. And
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: when you read the two versions alongside each other, something
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: unexpected happens. The story does not become simpler. It becomes
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: more honest, more specific, more recognizable human, in the way
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: that the best old stories always become more human when
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: someone takes the time to look at what is actually there.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: The first edition the author makes to the Eden story
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: is dates. Genesis does not tell you when Adam had
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: entered the garden. It does not tell you how long
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: he was there before Eve was created. It gives you
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: the sequence of events without a temporal framework. The author
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: of Jubilees gives you the dates. Adam was brought into
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: the garden of Eden on the fortieth day after his creation.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Eve was brought in on the eightieth day Why forty
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and eighty A reader steeped in the Torah would recognize
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: the connection immediately. The Book of Leviticus, in its laws
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: about purification after childbirth, specifies that after the birth of
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: a male child, the period of purification is forty days.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: After the birth of a female child, it is eighty days.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: The author is drawing a deliberate bridge between the creation
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: narrative and the legal code, suggesting that the laws of
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: Leviticus are not arbitrary human regulations. They are descriptions of
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: a pattern written into the structure of creation itself. The
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: law does not create order. The law describes an order
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: that was already there. For a community being told that
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: their laws were outdated and provincial. This was not a
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: minor scholarly point. It was a foundation. The second edition
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: is a name for the adversary. Genesis calls it simply
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: the serpent and describes it as more crafty than any
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: other wild creature God had made. Its origin is not explained,
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: Its motivation is not examined. It speaks, it tempts, it
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: is cursed, and then it largely disappears from the narrative.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: Genesis is not interested in developing the serpent as a character.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: It is interested in the choice made in response to
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: what the serpent said. The author of Jubilees is more
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: interested in where the adversarial presence comes from. In the retelling.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: The serpent is connected to a figure called Masteema, whose
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: name comes from the Hebrew root meaning hostility or enmity.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: He is the adversary, the one whose function in the
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: universe is prosecutorial. He tests, he opposes, he accuses. He
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: is not identical to the Satan of later Christian tradition,
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: though the family resemblance is clear. In the framework the
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: author constructs, he is something more specific, a figure given
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: a limited domain of operation within the created order. He
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: can tempt and afflict, but only within boundaries that the
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: creator establishes and maintains. In placing the Eden temptation within
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: the sphere of Mastema, the author is doing something pastorally important.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: What happened in the Garden was not simply a story
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: about human weakness and a forbidden fruit. In the author's telling,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: it was a move in a conflict that was already
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: in motion before the man and woman were created. The
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: garden was a theater of that conflict, and the human
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: beings at its center were being watched by forces on
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: both sides of a divide they could not fully see.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: This does not remove the responsibility of the human choice.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: The author is very clear that Adam and Eve made
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: a real decision with real consequences, but it places that
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: decision in a context that makes the stakes visible. And
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: for people living under an empire that felt like an
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: overwhelming force arrayed against them without reason, the acknowledgment that
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: opposition was not God's design but an intrusion into what
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: God had made was a meaningful thing to hear. The
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: third edition is the most extensive. It is an account
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: of what was actually lost. Genesis lists the consequences of
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: the fall efficiently, pain, difficulty, conflict, exile, death. Eventually, the
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: narrative moves quickly from the fall to the expulsion, and
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: then the story of history begins. The author of Jubilees
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: slows down here, and what the retelling describes as lost
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: is something that most readings of Genesis leave unnamed before
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: the fall. In this telling, Adam and Eve knew no shame,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: not because they were ignorant of right and wrong, but
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: because there was nothing in them that required concealment. They
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: were fully known and fully at ease with being known.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: They did not need to manage how they appeared to
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: God or to each other. They did not need to
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: construct a version of themselves that was more acceptable than
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: the version that actually existed. They simply were what they
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: were in the presence of the one who made them,
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: and what they were was enough. After the fall, that
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: transparency is gone, and its loss is not merely a
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: moral consequence. It is an existential one. The experience of
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: being known without concealment, of existing without the labor of
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: self presentation, of resting in the fact that the one
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: who sees you completely is the one who made you
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: completely and has not turned away. That is what the
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: garden once contained. There is a man named Jonathan. He
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: is thirty one years old and he lives in Seattle, Washington.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: He works in a field that requires him to spend
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: most of his working hours performing a version of himself
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: that is optimized for the context he is in, choosing
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: which thoughts to express and which to withhold, calibrating his
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: communication for the audience and the platform and the relationship.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: He is very good at it. He has been doing
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: it since he was a child, and it is largely
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: unconscious at this point. He read the author's account of
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: the Garden late one night after a particularly exhausting week.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: The phrase that stopped him was not anything about serpents
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: or sacred dates. It was the description of being known
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: without concealment. He sat with that phrase for a long time,
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: not because he thought it described something recoverable in his
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: ordinary life, but because it names something he recognized as missing,
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: something he had not had language for until that sentence
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: gave him one. That is what the best old stories do.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: They give names to things you have been carrying without
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: knowing what to call them. And everything that follows. In
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: the author's telling, every covenant, every Sabbath, every appointed time,
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: every encounter between God and a human being that results
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: in renewed relationship can be understood as a move in
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: the direction of what the garden once held, not a
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: replacement for paradise, a road that points toward it. The
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: early chapters of the book, continuing after the expulsion from Eden,
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: trace the generations from Adam to Noah with a precision
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: that Genesis handles more briefly. Each generation is placed within
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: the Jubilee count, and through all of these generations the
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: author traces a pattern that troubles the retelling at every turn.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: The past is forgetting, not a single dramatic moment of rebellion,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: not a day when someone decided to walk away something
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: quieter and more honest than that. Imagine a fire built
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: in a field on a cold night. While it is burning,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: everyone can see it, everyone knows where the warmth is.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: But fires require tending. And if the people who built
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: it become absorbed in other things, if the night grows
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: busy with other demands, if one generation of tenders is
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: replaced by the next without careful instruction, then what was
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: a fire becomes embers, and what were embers becomes ash,
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: And by the time the next cold night arrives, no
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: one can remember exactly where the fire was or how
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: to build it back. That is what the author of
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Jubilees is describing, not apostasy neglect, the slow cooling of
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: what was once warmly known the sacred calendar erodes, the
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: appointed times drift, the sabbath becomes harder to observe when
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: the pressure of ordinary life pushes back against it, And
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: no single generation wakes up one morning and decides to
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: abandon the count. They simply attend to it a little
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: less carefully than the generation before them did, and the
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: generation after them attends to it a little less carefully. Still,
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: every community knows this drift. Every family knows it. Every
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: individual who has ever tried to maintain a practice that
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: required consistent effort against the pull of everything else knows
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: what it feels like to look back and realize you
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: are standing somewhere you did not choose to arrive. The
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: garden is the image the author returns to for what
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: that loss feels like. Not the dramatic exile, not the
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: angel with the flaming sword, but the quieter, longer loss,
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: the slow erosion of transparency, the gradual increase of distance,
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: and the ancient hope carried in this book says the
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: distance is not the end. That the road back has
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: been open since the morning after the exile began. That
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: every covenant, and every Sabbath, and every morning that arrives
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: after a night that felt too long is a step
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: in the direction of what was lost, not a return
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: to innocence, something better than innocence, a return that knows
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: what it was searching for. The road is open, and
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: you are on it. Chapter five, Enoch, the Man who
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: would not be forgotten. There are people in every tradition
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: who seem to belong to a different category than the rest,
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: not saints exactly though that word gets used, not profits exactly,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: though that word gets used too, something harder to name.
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: People whose relationship with the sacred seems less mediated than
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: everyone else's, less dependent on the usual structures and institutions.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: People who seem to move through the ordinary world while
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: simultaneously occupying some other register of existence that most of
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: us only touch occasionally in our quietest and most honest moments.
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: Enoch is that kind of person in the Hebrew tradition.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: In Genesis, he appears in the middle of a genealogy.
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: He is listed as the seventh generation from Adam, the
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: son of Jared and the father of Methuselah. He lived
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty five years, notably shorter than the
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: vast life spans of the other patriarchs listed around him.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: And then Genesis says something it does not say about
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: any one else in the list. It does not say
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: that Enoch died. It says that Enoch walked with God
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: and he was not, for God took him five verses,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: one sentence that stands apart from all the others. And
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: then the genealogy continues, moving on to Methuselah and Lamek
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: and Noah. As though what just happened was unremarkable, but
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: it was not unremarkable, and the tradition knew it. The
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: phrase walked with God God appears only twice in Genesis,
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: once for Enoch, once for Noah. It implies something more
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: than obedience, more than moral rectitude, more than the ordinary
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: faithfulness credited to other figures in the text. It implies
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: a quality of intimacy, a sustained proximity to the divine,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: a life lived in such close alignment with the purposes
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: of God that the usual distinctions between the sacred and
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: the ordinary ceased to operate in the usual way. And
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: then God took him. That phrase generated centuries of reflection
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: in Jewish literature because it opened a door that the
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: text itself did not close. Where did he go? What
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: was his status after the taking? Was he given a
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: continuing role? Was he simply and finally at peace in
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: a way that ordinary human life does not allow. The
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: author of Jubilees has specific and purposeful answers in the
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: retelling Enoch, the first human being to learn to write.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: Before Enoch, the knowledge accumulated by human beings existed only
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: in memory, passed from person to person, generation to generation.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Through the fragile medium of speech and recollection. Enoch was
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: the one who understood that knowledge needed a more durable form.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: He was the one who began to inscribe it, to
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: give it a physical existence that could survive the death
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: of the person who carried it, to make it possible
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: for what one generation learned to be available to a
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: generation that had not yet been born. The Hebrew word
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: for this kind of writing and recording is related to
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: zakhah to remember. To write something down is to give
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: it a form that can be remembered beyond the capacity
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: of any single human memory. In the ancient world, the
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: person who could write was not a clerk. They were
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: a custodian of what was worth keeping, a guardian of
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: the community's memory against the erosion that time produced in
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: everything it touches. Enoch, in the telling of this book,
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: is entrusted with the memory of everything. The author places
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: Enoch in the company of angels who taught him the
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: movements of the sun and stars, the structure of the
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: sacred calendar, the history of creation from its first moment,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: the significance of the jubilee cycles. He received the comprehensive
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: knowledge about the Sacred order of things that the Book
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: of Jubilees itself is presenting, and he wrote it down.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: This is not a coincidence of content. It is deliberate architecture.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: The author of Jubilees is presenting Enoch as the original
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: version of what the book itself is, a comprehensive record
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: of the sacred order received from Heaven, preserved in writing,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: available to every generation that comes after, as a guide
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: and a map and a remembrance of what the world
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: was made to be. The Hebrew name Channoch, which we
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: render in English as Enoch, comes from a route meaning
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: to dedicate or to initiate, to prepare something or someone
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: for a specific purpose. Enoch is the dedicated one, set
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: apart from ordinary human life and given over entirely to
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: a particular function. His function is to be the keeper
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: of the record. And then, in the author's telling, he
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: was taken to the garden of Eden, not to a
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: heavenly throne room, not to some abstract spiritual realm, to
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: the garden, the same garden that was closed after the fall,
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: the place of original transparency and intimate relationship, the location
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: of what was lost when the first choice was made.
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: The garden is still there. In the author's imagining of things,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: it is not destroyed, it is not emptied, and in
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: the author's telling, it is inhabited by the one human
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: being found faithful enough to return, who sits there, still
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: writing down what he knows so that it will not
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: be forgotten. Every generation that maintain aims the sacred memory,
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: that keeps the calendar, that observes the Sabbath, that tells
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: the old stories to the children is participating in the
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: work that Enoch began. Every act of preservation, every decision
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: to carry the tradition forward rather than let it fall,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: is a continuation of his task. Someone is still writing.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: The record is still being kept. There is a woman
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: named Ruth. She is sixty seven years old and she
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: lives in Portland, Oregon. She spent her career as an
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: archivist at a university library, which means she spent forty
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: years in rooms full of things that someone decided were
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: worth keeping. Old letters, unpublished manuscripts, photographs of people whose
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: names were written on the backs in fading pencil, maps
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: of places that no longer exist in the form they
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: were mapped. She retired three years ago, and she still
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: volunteers one day a week, because she says she is
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: not ready to stop being in rooms where the past
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: is present. She found the author's account of Enoch through
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: a colleague who mentioned it in passing, and she looked
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: it up that evening. The image of Enoch in the garden,
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: still writing, still preserving, still maintaining the record, long after
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: the world had moved on, was not strange to her
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: at all. It was the most accurate description she had
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: ever read of why the work she had done for
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: forty years mattered. Someone has to stay in the room
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: with what is worth keeping. Enoch stayed. Now, let us
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: look at what the author of Jubilees understood Enoch to
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: have known, because the content of his knowledge is as
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: significant as the fact of his preservation. Enoch, in this
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: retelling is an astronomer in the ancient sense, not someone
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: calculating orbital mechanics, but someone who understands the movements of
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: the heavenly bodies as a sacred language, the ongoing speech
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: of the Creator made visible in the nightly sky. He
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: understood the pattern of the soul, the three hundred sixty
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: four day calendar, the four seasons of thirteen weeks each,
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: the great Lights moving in their appointed paths, without deviation,
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: without error, without the need for human correction. And this
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: knowledge was not for his own benefit, it was for transmission.
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: He wrote it down so that after he was gone,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: the community would still have access to what the sky
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: was saying, so that the calendar could be maintained not
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: just by those who had received it directly from heaven,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: but by those who received it through the written record
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: of someone who had The Hebrew scriptural tradition has a
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: word for this kind of transmission, masura, the thing passed
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: from hand to hand. The Massoretic tradition of Biblical copying
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: is one of the great acts of sustained human faithfulness
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: in the history of recorded knowledge, the letter by letter
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: passing of a text from one generation of scribes to
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: the next, preserving not just the words, but the precise
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: form of the words, the spacing, the notations, the way
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the text is meant to be read and heard. Enoch
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: in the author's telling is the origin of that instinct.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: The first person who understood that faithfulness to what has
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: been received requires writing it down, not trusting memory alone,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: making the record, giving it to the future in the
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: most durable form available, so that the future can decide
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: for itself whether the thing was worth keeping. The Book
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: of Jubilees itself is an act of mesura. The authors,
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: writing under pressure in the second century before Christ, chose
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: to write down what they knew, to preserve it, to
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: give it to every generation that came after in a
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: form that could survive the destruction of the community that
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: produced it. The community at Cumran that preserved fifteen copies
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: of this book in sealed jars was doing the same thing.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: The Ethiopian monks who copied it across sixteen centuries were
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: doing the same thing. And to night, reading it, attending
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: to it, letting it speak. You are somewhere in that line.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: You are among the people who decided that what Enoch
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: began was worth continuing. That is not a small thing.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: Before we leave Enoch, there is one dimension of his
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: story in the author's retelling that deserves careful attention. We
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: are told that not all of the angels remained faithful.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: Some in the period before the flood descended from their
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: proper place in the order of creation and made choices
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: that disrupted the world in ways that would eventually require
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: a drastic response. Enoch knew this was coming, He warned
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: against it, he recorded it, and his faithfulness stands in
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: deliberate contrast to the faithlessness of those who abandoned their station.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: The word for the proper place of an angelic being
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: in ancient literature is often rendered as station or order.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Every being in the frame work this author constructs has
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: a station, a specific function within the created order, a
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: role that is theirs and that fits them the way
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: a particular key fits a particular lock. When a being
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: abandons its station, the order it was maintaining begins to fail,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: and the failure of one station creates vulnerability in everything
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: adjacent to it. Enoch kept his station. He was given
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: a function, and he fulfilled it. He wrote and preserved,
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: and witnessed and continued, and in keeping his station through
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: a world that was losing its shape around him, he
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: became the image of what faithfulness looks like when faithfulness
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: is the only thing holding the line. There is a
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: teacher named James. He is forty three years old, and
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: he has taught middle school English in a school in
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: rural Kentucky for seventeen years. He is not famous, his
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: students are not famous. But every year, without exception, he
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: reads aloud to them from books he believes contain something
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: worth preserving. Old books, books no one on any bestseller
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: list is currently recommending. He reads them, because he believes
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: that the act of giving them to the next generation
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: through the physical act of his voice in a room,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: is the thing he was made to do. It is
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: his station. He has never heard of Enoch, he has
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: never read the Book of Jubilees. But he is doing
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: what Enoch did. He is keeping the record. He is
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: staying in the room. He is passing what he knows
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: to the people who come after him in the only
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: form that truly works. A person who cares about something
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: standing in front of other people, refusing to let it
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: be forgotten. Enoch walked with God, and then God took him,
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: and in the garden where the first transparency was lost,
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: the author imagines him still there, writing in the oldest
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: and most faithful act of witness. The tradition knows to
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: night before you sleep, let that image rest. So somewhere
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: in you, the record is still being kept, The thread
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: is still in some one's hands. And you, right now,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: lying in the quiet of this particular night, are part
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: of the count that has been running since the first morning.
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: You are in the count. You have always been in
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: the count. Sleep will come, and when it does, it
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: will come to someone who has been seen and named
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: and written down in the oldest record there is. You
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: are held rest now Chapter six, The Watchers and the
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: World that Drowned. There is a kind of failure that
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: does not begin with bad intentions. It begins with good ones.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: It begins with a commission, a purpose, a genuine desire
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: to help. It begins with someone moving toward another person
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: with the honest intention of being useful. And then somewhere
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: in the middle of that movement, something shifts. The original
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: purpose quietly recedes, something else moves into its place, and
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: by the time the failure becomes visible, the distance between
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: where the person started and where they ended up is
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: so great that it is difficult to trace the exact
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: moment when the drift began. The author of Jubileese tells
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: a story about this kind of drift before the flood,
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: and it is one of the most psychologically honest accounts
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: of moral failure in all of ancient literature, precisely because
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: it does not begin with wickedness. It begins with obedience
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: that lost its way let us go back to where
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: the story starts. In Genesis. The account of what happened
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: before the flood is brief and strange. The sons of
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: they took wives from among them. Their children were the Nephelim,
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: the mighty ones. And then almost immediately God looks at
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: the earth and sees that human wickedness has become so
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: great that the thought of every human heart are only
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: evil continually, and then the flood. Genesis gives you the
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: events without the explanation, the what without the why, and
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: the why as the author of Jubilees constructs the story,
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: is one of the most important questions the text raises.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: The angels who would become the Watchers were not rebels
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: from the beginning. The author places them in the world
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: with a specific commission. The early human generations after Eden
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: were struggling. The knowledge of the sacred calendar. The awareness
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: of the created order and humanity's place within it was eroding.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: People were forgetting the Sabbath, they were losing track of
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: the appointed times. They were drifting from the practices that
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: connected them to the order written into Creation, and in
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: the author's retelling. God sent angels to help to teach,
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: to remind the human community of what had been given
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: and was being lost. This was the origin of the
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: watchers in the author's telling, not rebellion commission. They were
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: doing their job and then something changed. The shift is
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: described not with the language of dramatic sin, but with
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: the language of reorientation. The angels saw the daughters of men.
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: They were beautiful, and the angels began to want something
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: that was not theirs to want, not because desire is
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: inherently wrong, but because these were beings whose proper place
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: was the order of heaven, whose function was defined by
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: their relationship to the commission they had been given, and
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: they began to reorient themselves around something outside that commission,
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: something they had encountered in the process of doing their work,
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: something that felt in the moment like a reasonable addition
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: to what they were already doing. That is how drift works.
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: It rarely presents itself as abandonment. It presents itself as addition.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: The children of the watchers and the the human women
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: are called in the authors telling by two names, the
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: giants for their physical power, and the spirits that remained
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: after the flood took the giants for what they became
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: in the world that followed. Because when the giants died
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: in the flood, the author tells us, their spirits did
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: not simply cease to exist. They remained disembodied, restless, still
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: carrying the distorted desires of beings who had been made
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: for one thing and had given themselves over to another.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: And these spirits, in the framework the author constructs, are
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: the ongoing source of the pressure and corruption that press
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: against human life in every generation after the flood. This
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: is where mustaymer reappears. When God commanded that these spirits
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: be bound and removed from the human world, the author
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: tells us that Masterma petitioned for a portion of them
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: to remain. He argued that without them he could not
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: perform his function in the created all. He could not test,
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: he could not oppose, he could not carry out the
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: work of adversarial examination that was within limits, part of
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: the structure of the world as it actually is. And
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: in the author's telling, God agreed, nine tenths of the
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: spirits were bound, one tenth remained under Mastermer's authority to
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: continue their work among human beings. This passage is one
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: of the most theologically charged in the entire book, and
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: it is worth sitting with it carefully. In this ancient framework,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: the existence of ongoing adversarial pressure in the world is
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: not a failure of divine power. It is a permitted
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: and bounded operation within the divine order. The adversary has
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: a prince, The prince has a function. The function has limits,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: and the limits are maintained by the same God who
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: permitted the function in the first place. This does not
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: make the pressure good. It does not minimize the suffering
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: it causes in human life. It does not resolve every
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: question about why a good God would permit any of this.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: But it refuses to allow the darkness to be understood
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: as autonomous, as a power equal in scope to the Creator,
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: as something operating entirely outside the awareness and governance of God.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: In the framework the author constructs, there is no suffering
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: that has escaped the attention of the one who separated
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: light from darkness on the first morning. That is cold
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: comfort when you are in the middle of the darkness.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: The author knows this, but it is not nothing. And
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: for people living under occupation, watching their children be drawn
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: away from the practices that had defined their identity for generations.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: The affirmation that the darkness was bounded rather than sovereign,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: was a foundation to stand on when the ground everywhere
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: else felt unstable. Now let us come to Noah. Noah,
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: in the author's retelling, is a more fully realized character
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: than the Noah of Genesis. Genesis gives us a man
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: who found favor in God's eyes, who was righteous in
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: his generation, who built an ark and survived the flood,
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: and planted a vineyard afterward. The broad strokes are present,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: but the interiority is largely absent. We are given his
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: obedience without his experience. What the author of Jubilees emphasizes
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: about Noah is not primarily his moral character, though that
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: is confirmed. It is his knowledge. Noah knew the calendar.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: Noah understood the sacred count. In a generation where the
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: transmission of heavenly knowledge had been corrupted and the human
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: world had lost its orientation to the sacred rhythms of creation,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: Noah was the one who had maintained what everyone else
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: had abandoned. He knew when the Sabbath fell, he knew
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: the appointed times. He knew how to count the weeks
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: of years. This is a significant interpretive move. The flood,
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: in the author's construction, is not just a story about
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: the punishment of wickedness. It is a story about the
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: catastrophic consequences of losing the sacred knowledge that holds a
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: community in right relationship with the created order. The world
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: that drowned was a world that had forgotten how to count,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: and the world that was preserved was preserved through a
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: man who had refused to forget. After the flood, the
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: author gives us a covenant scene richer and more detailed
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: than the Genesis account. The rainbow covenant in Genesis is
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: beautiful and brief. The author of Jubilees includes all of it,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: but adds a legal dimension that Genesis leaves implicit. The
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: covenant made with Noah in this retelling includes obligations that
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: apply not just to Israel, but to all of humanity,
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: to every descendant of Noah, which means every human being
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: who has ever lived. After the flood, the rainbow is
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: the sign, and the author is careful to establish that
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: the rainbow is not a meteor alae logical phenomenon to
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: which God has retrospectively assigned, meaning it is a deliberate inscription.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: God writes the Covenant into the sky in light and water,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: so that every human being who looks up after the
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: rain will have access to the reminder, regardless of whether
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: they know the book that contains the Covenant's text. The
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: sky itself is a page. The rainbow is a sentence,
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: and the sentence says the same thing it has always said,
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: in every century, in every language, over every landscape, where
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: rain has fallen and the sun has come back. I
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: have not forgotten, the Covenant holds, you are still here
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: because I have not let go. There is a man
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: named Samuel. He is fifty eight years old and he
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: lives in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up without a sustained
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: religious practice of any kind. Three years ago, his youngest
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: daughter was in a serious accident. She recovered fully, but
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: the months of uncertainty changed something in him in a
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: way he has never been entirely able to articulate. He
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: found himself paying attention to things he had not paid
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: attention to before, the quality of light at certain times
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: of day, the fact that his daughter was alive, and
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: that her being alive was not something he had arranged
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: by his own effort. He started reading. He found his
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: way to the Noah story in this book through a
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: reference in something else he had been reading. The Covenant
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: scene stopped him for a long time. Not the rainbow itself,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: which he had seen thousands of times without thinking about it,
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: but the idea that the rainbow was a sentence written
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: in the sky for every one, that you did not
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: have to know the book to receive what the sky
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: was saying, that the covenant extended to all of Noah's descendants,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: which is all of us, which is every one who
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: has ever stood in a parking lot, or a hospital garage,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: or an open field and looked up after the rain
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: and seen the colors spreading across the gray. He texted
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: his daughter a fi photograph of a rainbow two weeks
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: after he read that passage. She called him back and
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: asked what it was for. He said he was not
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: entirely sure, but it felt important to send. That is
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: the Covenant of Noah, older than any tradition available to
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: any one who looks up. The flood recedes, the ark
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: rests on the mountains, the animals come out, and Noah
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: plants a vineyard. The final image of Noah in the
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: author's retelling is not his drunkenness, which Genesis records and
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: which has generated much commentary across the centuries. The final
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: image is the planted vineyard itself. The act of planting,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: the commitment to a future you will not fully live
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: to see, the decision to put something into the ground
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: and trust that the ground will hold it, that the
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: seasons will continue, that the harvest will come in its time,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: even though the planter cannot guarantee any of it. That
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: is what it looks like to live on the other
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: side of the flood. Not certainty, not the resolution of
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: every question, but the planted vine, the seed in the ground,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: the choice to continue, one harvest at a time, trusting
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: the covenant written in the sky. The world that drowned
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: was a world that had forgotten what it was for
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: the world that began again was a world that remembered imperfectly,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: with setbacks and failures and one regrettable evening in a tent,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: But it remembered, and the remembering was enough to keep going.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: It is enough for you too, Chapter seven. Abraham, the
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: man who asked the right question. His name at the
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: beginning was Abram, and he grew up in a city
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: that worshiped things he could not make himself believe in.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: This is not how Genesis begins the story of Abraham.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: Genesis begins in the middle with the call, with God
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: speaking to Abram and telling him to leave his country
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: and his kindred and go to a land that God
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: will show him. Genesis is not interested in who Abram
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: was before the call. It is interested in his response
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: to the call he left. That is the Genesis account
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: of Abraham's beginning. The author of Jubilees is interested in
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: who he was before. Abram was born in a city
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: called Er of the Chaldeans. His father Terror made idols.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: The city was full of them. The religion of Er
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: was a religion of objects of carved stone and shaped
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: wood and molded metal, of figures that represented divine personalities
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: the people of Er believed governed the world. This was
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: not unusual. It was the religious landscape of the ancient
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: Near East. Virtually every city had its gods, its temples,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: its system for maintaining the favor of the powers that
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: controlled rain and harvest and war. Abram grew up inside
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: all of that, and something in him could not accept it.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: The author gives us a scene that Genesis does not
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: contain a young Abram alone at night, looking up at
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: the sky, watching the stars, and thinking. The stars in
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: the ancient world were not merely beautiful. They were considered
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: divine agents, powers that governed the world from their positions
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: in the heavenly vault. The astrology of the ancient Near
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: East was a serious system of thought, widely believed socially important,
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: the framework through which educated people in Abram's world tried
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: to understand the forces shaping human destiny. If you wanted
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: to know what was going to happen, you looked at
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: the sky, and Abram, watching the sky, had a thought
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: that changed everything. If the stars govern the world, he reasoned,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: then what governs the stars? It sounds almost naive when
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: you stated plainly, but in the religious world Abram inhabited,
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: it was a question with a revolutionary answer, because the
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: only answer that satisfied it was something greater than the stars,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: something that the stars themselves obeyed, something whose authority was
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: not localized in any particular object or place or culture,
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: but extended to the entire created order. This is what
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: the author of Jubilees wants you to see about Abraham.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: He did not receive his faith as a sudden divine
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: intervention descending on an otherwise ordinary man. He reasoned his
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: way toward it, standing under the sky, watching the lights
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: move in their appointed paths, refusing to stop at an
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: answer that was too small for the question. The Hebrew
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: word for this kind of careful working through is keshbon
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: calculation reckoning, the act of thinking something out completely and
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: arriving at the conclusion that the evidence demands. Abram did
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: the cheeshbon, and the cheesh bon led him to God
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: before God formerly called him. There is a woman named Caroline.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: She is thirty four years old and she lives in Austin, Texas.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: She was raised without religion, in a household that was
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: not hostile to faith, but simply indifferent to it. She
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: studied biology in college, then environmental science in graduate school,
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: and her professional life has been organized around the careful
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: observation of systems, how things worked together, how the smallest
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: elements maintain relationships with the largest, how disruption in one
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: part creates consequences in parts that seem entirely unconnected. She
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: told a friend once that the longer she had studied
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: living systems, the harder it became to believe that the
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: complexity she was observing was accidental, not because she had
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: arrived at a specific theological conclusion, but because every system
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: she examined had the quality of something designed, something that
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: required an intelligence to comprehend it, and the intelligence required
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: to comprehend it seemed to point quietly and persistently toward
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: an intelligence that had created it. She does not know
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: the story of Abram under the stars, but she has
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: had his experience. She has stood in the middle of
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: something too coherent to be random and ask the question.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: His question implies who made this? And she has not
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: found a satisfying answer that does not begin with someone
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: who knew what they were doing. That is Abram before
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: God spoke to him, a person who had already arrived
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: at the question, who was ready for the answer when
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: it came. Now, let us follow him into the answer.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: The call in the author's retelling follows the same broad
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: shape as the call in Genesis. God speaks to Abram,
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: he is told to leave, He is promised land and
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: descendants and blessing. He goes, But the author adds a
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: dimension to the call that Genesis leaves implicit. The call
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: includes the restoration of the Hebrew language to Abram in
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: the framework the author constructs across the whole book. Hebrew
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: was the original language of creation. Adam spoke it the
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: patriarchs before Babel spoke it. It was the language in
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: which God and human beings communicated. Before the catastrophe of
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: the Tower, when Babel scattered humanity into many languages, Hebrew
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: was lost to most of the world. As a living tongue.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: It survived in hidden form, preserved in a few places,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: but it was no longer the universal language it had
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: once been. When God called Abram, one of the first
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: gifts given in the author's telling was the restoration of
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: this language. An angel was sent to teach Abram to
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: read and speak Hebrew again, and the author tells us
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: that Abram mastered it in six months, not because he
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: was exceptionally gifted, but because it was not entirely foreign
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: to him. It was the language of his deepest nature,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: the language his soul had been shaped to speak, the
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: language of the God he had already been turning toward
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: under the stars. The the idea embedded here is quietly powerful.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: Your deepest nature is not formed by the culture. You
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: happen to be borne into however fully that culture shapes you.
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: It is formed by a relationship that existed before your culture,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: before your city, before your language, before everything that is
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: contingent and local about the circumstances of your birth. And
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: when that original relationship is renewed, when the call comes
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: and you respond, something in you recognizes the language you
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: are being spoken to in, because it is the language
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: you were made for. Most people who are honest about
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: their inner life have had a version of this experience.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: A sentence in a book, a phrase heard unexpectedly, a
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: moment of sudden clarity in an ordinary afternoon that felt
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: less like new information and more like recognition, like being
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: addressed in a language you had somehow always known and
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: had been waiting without fully realizing it to hear again.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: The author is describing that experience when the text says
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: that Abram learned Hebrew in six months, it was not learning,
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: it was remembering. The covenant God makes with Abraham in
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: this retelling is more elaborate than the one in Genesis,
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: not different in substance, more carefully articulated, and the Hebrew
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: word for covenant is worth pausing on before we go further.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: The word is berit. It does not mean contract in
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: the sense of a transactional agreement between parties of equal standing.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: It means something closer to bond, a relationship established not
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: primarily by mutual benefit, but by commitment, by the choice
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: of one party to be bound to another in a
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: way that persists regardless of changing circumstances, that cannot be
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: dissolved by disappointment or failure or the passage of time.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: When God makes a beret with Abraham, it is not
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: a business arrangement. It is a declaration of permanent and attachment.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: I am yours, you are mine, and that is not
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: contingent on your performance. It is prior to your performance.
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: It is the ground on which your performance takes place.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: The sign of the Covenant in this retelling is circumcision,
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: as in Genesis, and the author is insistent that circumcision
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: is not merely a ritual marker or a tribal identification.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: It is the Covenant made flesh, a physical inscription of
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: the permanent attachment in the body of every male member
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: of the community. And the author connects it not just
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: to Abraham, but to every generation that enters the covenant
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: after him. Every generation enters through the same door wears
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: the same mark. This insistence has a context. The Maccabean
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Crisis included specific edicts against circumcision. Mothers who circumcised their
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: sons were executed the children with them. This was a
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: direct assault on the bodily sign of the beret. In
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: that context, the argument the author constructs that circumcision is
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: the heaven ordained creation rooted sign of the covenant is
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: not abstract theology. It is resistance. You can kill our bodies,
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: you cannot break the covenant that the bodies carry. Now,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: let us come to the moment in the Abraham story
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: that the author handles with the most theological care, the
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: binding of Isaac. In Genesis, God tells Abraham to take
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: his son, his only son, the son he loves, and
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: offer him as a burnt offering. Abraham goes, he binds Isaac,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: he raises the knife, and then the Angel of the
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: Lord stops him, and a ram is found in a
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: nearby thicket, and Isaac lives. This is the Genesis account,
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: and it has generated more theological reflection than almost any
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: other passage in the Hebrew Bible. The question it raises
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: is one of the most troubling a text can raise,
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: why would a good God ask for this? What does
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: the asking reveal about the nature of God? How do
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: we hold this story honestly? The author of Jubilees has
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: an answer, and the answer reframes the entire scene. In
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: this retelling, the binding of Isaac does not originate with God.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: It originates with Masteema. The adversarial figure approaches and proposes
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: the test. He is not revealing a hidden weakness in Abraham.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: He is proposing a formal examination of the fidelity that
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: Abraham has been claiming his whole life. And God, in
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: the author's telling, agrees to the test, not because God
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: has any doubt about Abraham, but because the demonstration of
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: Abraham's faithfulness under the most extreme possible pressure produces something
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: that private assurance could not produce. It produces a witness,
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: a record that cannot be argued with because it did
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: not happen behind closed doors. It happened on a mountain top,
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: with a knife raised and a fire laid, and a
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: sun bound with everything that Abraham had been promised at
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: risk of total destruction, and Abraham held the ram in
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: the thicket is provided the sun is returned the voice
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: from Heaven stops the knife. And that voice, in the
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: author's construction, is not the voice of God reversing an
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: earlier command. It is the voice of God declaring that
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: what Mastama proposed as a test of destruction has become,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: through Abraham's faithfulness, a demonstration of a relationship so deep
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: and so durable that nothing, not even the fear of
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: total loss, could break it. The bear it is not
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: damaged by the test. The test reveals the depth of
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: the roots. Every extreme pressure that the adversary can bring
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: against the Covenant only shows more clearly how far down
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: those roots go. There is a father named Michael. He
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: is forty nine years old and he lives in Denver, Colorado.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: His oldest son was diagnosed with a serious illness when
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: he was seven. The treatment was long and the outcome
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: was uncertain for many months. Michael is not a formally
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: religious man, but he found himself in the small hours
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: of too many mornings in conversations with whoever was listening,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: that he could not quite call prayer, and could not
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: quite call anything else, not bargaining, not demanding something closer
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: to the Abraham moment, The willingness to hold out what
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: he loved most and say, I do not understand this,
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: I cannot make it make sense. But I have not
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: let go of you. His son recovered. Michael does not
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: claim that his holding on caused the recovery. He does
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: not make theological arguments about outcomes, but he says that
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: the willingness to keep the conversation going during those months,
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: to continue reaching toward whatever is ultimate, even had nothing
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: to bring to it, But his fear and his love
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: of changed something in him that has not changed back.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: He came out of it closer to the truth than
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: he was going in. That is Abraham. That is the burrit.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: That is what it looks like when the test that
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: was designed to break the covenant only deepens it. The
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: author closes the account of Abraham not with the binding,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: but with his death. He dies at a hundred and
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: seventy five years of age, having seen four generations of
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: his descendants, having watched the promises begin to take visible
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: shape in the world. He calls Isaac and Jacob to
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: him before he dies and gives them a final instruction.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: Walk in the ways of God, observe the Sabbath, keep
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: the appointed times, do not follow the nations in their
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: calenders and their festivals. Hold to the count, stay in
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: the rhythm. Remember who you are. That is the last
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: thing Abraham says in the Telling of Jubilees. Not a
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: summary of his theology, not a list of his achievements,
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: Just the most practical and most loving instruction a man
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: can give to the people who will continue after him.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: Remember who you are. You are in the Covenant, you
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: are in the Count. You are the descendants of the
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: man who looked at the stars when he was a
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: teenager in er and refused to accept an answer too
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: small for the question the stars were asking. The stars
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: are still there to night. The question is still open,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: and the one the question points toward has not changed.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: Chapter eight, jacob Esou and the Weight of Inheritance. There
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: is a question that every generation has to answer for itself,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: not out loud, usually not in a single moment of
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: formal decision, but in the accumulation of small choices, in
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: the things you keep and the things you let fall,
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: in the practices you maintain when no one is watching,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: and the ones you quietly abandon when they become inconvenient.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: The question is simply this, what will you carry forward?
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: The story of Jacob and Esau in the author's retelling,
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: is the story of two brothers who answered that question differently,
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: and the way the author tells that story is more
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: careful and more honest than most readers of Genesis would expect.
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: It refuses to give you a simple villain and a
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: simple hero. It refuses to let you walk away with
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: the comfortable feeling that you have understood what happened, without
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: understanding why. Let us begin where The author begins this story,
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: not with the famous birthright scene, not with the stolen blessing,
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: but earlier, with the pregnancy of Rebecca and the words
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: she received before her sons were born. Genesis tells us
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: that Rebecca inquired of the Lord when the children struggled
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: within her, and received the word that two nations were
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: in her womb, two peoples that would be divided, the
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: older serving the younger. The Genesis account is brief and
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: decisive and sets up everything that follows. The author of
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: Jubilees gives the prophecy to Rebeccah in a more expanded
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: form and places it in her mouth in a later
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: scene where she speaks directly to Jacob. Before the events
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: of the blessing. This is a significant narrative choice. In Genesis,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: the prophecy belongs to God and is recorded by the narrator.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: In this retelling, it belongs to Rebeccah and is spoken
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: to her son. The effect is to make Rebecca not
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: just a witness to the divine plan, but an active
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: participant in its transmission. She knows, she has always known,
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: and the knowledge has shaped every decision she has made
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: in relation to her two sons across decades of a
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: complicated and demanding life. Rebecca in this retelling is not
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: a scheming mother who favors one son for personal reasons.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: She is a woman carrying a revelation that was given
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: to her before her sons drew their first breath, acting
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: on what she was told in the most intimate communication
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: she ever received. What it costs to carry knowledge like
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: that through an ordinary life alongside a husband who does
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: not fully share it. Watching two sons grow in directions
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: you can see more clearly than any one else because
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: you have been given a map that no one else
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: has read. The author honors that cost without minimizing it.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: Now let us come to Esau, because Esaure is where
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: the author does the most careful and the most important work.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: In popular readings of the Genesis narrative, Esau tends to
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: be a somewhat sympathetic figure, earthy, physical, impulsive, a man
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: who was wronged by his brother and his mother. The
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: tears he sheds when he discovers that the blessing has
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: been given to Jacob generate genuine sympathy in most readers.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: It is hard not to feel something for Esau in
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: that moment. The author of Jubileese does not deny the grief,
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: but the retelling reframes what Esau lost and what he
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: had already done with it long before the stew and
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: the goat skins. The birthright in this retelling carries something specific.
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: It carries the covenant, the responsibility of maintaining the sacred calender,
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: the Sabbath, the appointed times, the knowledge that Abraham received
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: from heaven and passed to Isaac, and that Isaac was
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: responsible for passing to whichever son received the inheritance. Esau
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: sold the birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: Genesis records this, but the author is explicit about what
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: Esau understood when he made that trade. He knew what
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: he was selling. He was not simply impulsive in the moment.
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: He was acting on a settled disposition toward the Covenant
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: and its obligations. He found the practices burdensome. He was
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: oriented outward toward the world of the nations, toward ways
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: of life defined by different rhythms and different loyalties than
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: the Covenant required. The Hebrew word that appears in connection
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: with Esau's choice is buzza too despise to treat as worthless,
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: to assign a value so low to something that what
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: follows from that valuation is not felt as loss. Esau
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: did not sell the birthright because he was starving and desperate.
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: He sold it because he had already decided, in the
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: privacy of his own orientation, that it was not worth keeping.
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: The stew was not the cause. It was the occasion
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: for a decision that had already been made. This distinction
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: changes the moral weight of everything that follows. When Jacob
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: receives the blessing, he is not stealing something that rightfully
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: belongs to his brother. He is receiving something his brother
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: had already abandoned. The blessing cannot go to the one
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: who despised the Covenant, because the blessing is the Covenant,
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: and the Covenant requires someone who values it enough to
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: carry it. Jacob was not a perfect man. His methods
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: in the blessing scene were deceptive, and the damage to
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: his relationship with his father was real. The author does
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: not minimize any of that, but the retelling insists that
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: the Covenant found the right home not because Jacob was
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: morally superior to Esau in every dimension, but because Jacob
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: wanted what the Covenant carried. He wanted it enough to
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: pay for it with a bowl of stew, enough to
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: risk his father's anger and his brother's fury to receive it. Formerly,
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: wanting the Covenant in the framework of this ancient text
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: is not a small thing. It is the beginning of everything.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: The Hebrew name Yakov Jacob comes from the root meaning heel,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: because he was born grasping his brother's heel. But the
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: same route carries another meaning to follow closely, to pursue,
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: to stay on the path of something moving ahead of
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: you and not let it get away. Jacob is the
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: one who follows closely, the one who will not let
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: the Covenant outpace him. Now, let us come to the
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: encounter at the river Jabok the night when Jacob wrestled
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: with the angel and receive the name Israel. Genesis gives
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: this story in one of its most compressed and mysterious passages.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: Jacob is alone by the river. A man wrestles with
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: him until the break of dawn. The man cannot overpower
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: him and touches the socket of his hip, putting it
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: out of joint. Jacob holds on. The man asks to
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: be released. Jacob refuses unless he receives a blessing. His
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: name is asked, his name is given, and then he
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: is told that his name will no longer be Jacob,
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: but Israel. The man leaves. Jacob names the place Penniel,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: the face of God, because he has seen God face
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: to face and lived. The author of Jubilees frames this
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: encounter as a covenant renewal. Jacob is crossing back into
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: the land of Promise after twenty years in Haran, twenty
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: years away from the land where the Covenant was rooted.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: He is returning to face Esau, who may still want
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: to kill him. He is returning to the land of
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: his father's He is returning to the Covenant, and on
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: the night before he crosses, the Covenant comes to meet him.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: The wrestling, in the author's construction, is not an attack.
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: It is an initiation. It is the Covenant pressing itself
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: into the body of the man who carries it, marking
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: him with the wound that will make him limp for
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: the rest of his life, changing his name to reflect
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: what he has become. The Hebrew name Israel. Israel contains
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: the route sarah to strive or to wrestle, and the
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: divine name l Israel means the one who strives with God,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: or perhaps more accurately, the one who persists with God,
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: who does not let go, who holds on through the
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: long night until the blessing comes. And the blessing comes
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: not because the holding on was without cost. It comes
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: because of the cost. The limp and the name arrived together.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: You cannot have one without the other. This is one
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: of the most important things the author of Jubilees has
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: to say, and it says it not in a sermon,
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: but in the body of a man walking away from
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: a river bank at dawn, favoring one leg, carrying a
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: new name. Faithfulness to the Covenant is not painless. It
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: does not leave you unchanged It marks you. It reshapes
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: you in ways that are visible, that you carry in
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: your gait and your posture and the way you move
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: through the world for the rest of your life. Jacob
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: limped for the rest of his life, and the limp
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: was not a punishment. It was a testimony. There is
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: a woman named Helen. She is fifty one years old
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: and she lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the third
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: of four children, and she is the one who took
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: care of her aging parents in the last years of
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: their lives, who maintained the family traditions, who made sure
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: the holidays were observed and the stories were told, and
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: the photographs were labeled with names and dates before the
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: people who knew the names and dates were gone. Her
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: siblings are not absent or malicious. They are busy, they
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: are scattered. But Helen is the one who wanted the
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: thread and picked it up and did not put it down.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: She is not always appreciated for this, she is sometimes
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: resented for it, but she continues because she has decided
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: in the same way Jacob decided that the thing is
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: worth carrying, even when the carrying is not easy or recognized.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: Jakob is Helen and Helen is Jacob. And in every family,
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: and every community, and every tradition, there is someone who
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 1: grasped the heel and would not let go. The Jacob
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: story does not end at the river. It ends with Joseph.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. This is
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: one of the facts that everyone who knows these stories knows.
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: The author of Jubilees does not soften it. The brothers
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: saw Joseph coming across the field, they conspired. They stripped
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: him of the coat that marked him as his father's favorite.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: They threw him into a pit, and when the traders came,
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: they sold him a boy, exchanged for the price of
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: a minor transaction. And then they dipped the coat in
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: goat blood and brought it to their father. The grief
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: of Jacob at the loss of Joseph, in the author's retelling,
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: is extended and emotionally honest. He tears his garments, he
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: refuses to be comforted. He descends into a mourning that
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: has no bottom, because the loss of Joseph is not
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: just the loss of a child. It is a crisis
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: of covenant continuity, the covenant that runs from Abraham through
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: Isaac through Jacob is supposed to reach the next generation
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: through all twelve sons. Losing Joseph is losing part of
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: the structure. And yet the author tells the story with
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: the calm of a narrator who knows what the reader
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: does not yet know. That Joseph will survive, that the
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: cruelty of the brothers will become through a sequence of
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: events that no human being could have designed, the mechanism
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: by which the entire family is preserved from famine. That
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: the pit was not the end of the story. It
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: was the passage to a part of the story that
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: nobody in it could have written. The Hebrew word for
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: this kind of movement is Yeshuah salvation deliverance. The word
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: carries the image of being pulled from a narrow place
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: of breath, returning to a body that was running out
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: of it, of standing on solid ground after the water
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: had been overhead, to be saved in the root meaning
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: of this word is to be brought through the thing
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: that seemed like the end and set down on the
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: other side of it, still breathing, still holding still. In
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: the count Yeshua, the word that names what happened to
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: Joseph in the pit, the word that names what the
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: whole story from Creation to Sinai is finally about. The
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: Covenant was brought through, carried in the bodies of twelve
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: sons who would become twelve tribes, who would spend four
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: hundred years in Egypt, becoming a nation, who would come
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: out of that formation under Moses and receive at Sinai
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: the full articulation of everything that had been preserved through
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and all the
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: unnamed faithful ones who kept the count through the long
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: years of waiting. What will you carry forward? Jacob carried
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: the limp and the name. He carried the grief of
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: a father who lost a son and did not know
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: for decades that the son was alive. He carried the
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: Covenant through all of it, imperfectly, with the marks of
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: every night he had wrestled visible in the way he moved.
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: And when the count was finally complete, when all twelve
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: sons were gathered and the family was whole, and the
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: old man could see in the last years of his life,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: that the Covenant had not broken, that it had bent
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: under every pressure and held, he blessed his sons, all
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: twelve of them by name, and the count continued. Chapter nine,
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: Moses Sinai and the reason the book was written. Every
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: book has a reason it was written, not the reason
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: stated inside the book, the deeper reason, the urgency that
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: made writing necessary, the sense that the moment demanded a
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: permanent form for something that was in danger of being
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: lost forever. We have arrived in following this ancient text
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: from creation through the patriarchs to the edge of Sinai,
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: at the place where we can finally see the book
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: from the outside, where we can understand not just what
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: it says, but why it was written at all. Why
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: the author or authors who produced it felt that this
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: particular book, in this particular form, at this particular moment
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: in history, was not optional. And the answer transforms the
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: Book of Jubilees from an ancient curiosity into something that
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: speaks directly to the experience of any one who has
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: ever tried to maintain something sacred in the middle of
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: a world that is actively working to make that maintenance
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: feel impossible. Let us go back to the world in
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: which this book was born. The second century before Christ
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: was for the Jewish people a period of existential pressure,
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: not the first such period and not the last, but
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: one of the most acute. The Seleucid king Antiochus the
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: Fourth had implemented a program of forced Hellenization that targeted
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: Jewish religious practice at its core. The Torah was prohibited,
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: Sabbath observance was a capital offense, the temple was rededicated
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: to Zeus, Circumcision was outlawed. People were being killed for
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: the practices that had defined their identity for generations, and
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: the calender was replaced. This detail is the one that
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: speaks most directly to the heart of the Book of Jubilees.
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: The sacred Calender, the system of appointed times that the
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: author insists was established by God on the fourth day
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: of Creation, inscribed in the movements of the Sun, and
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: maintained by every faithful generation from Adam to the present,
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: was being overwritten by the Greek calendar. The count was
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: being erased. For the community that produced this book. This
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: was not a political inconvenience. It was an attempt to
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: remove them from their place in the sacred order of creation,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: an attempt to make them strangers to the rhythm that
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: had defined their identity since before the world was made,
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: and they responded by writing. What the Book of Jubilees
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: does understood in this context is remarkable in its scope
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: and its strategy. It does not write a polemic against Antiochus.
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: It does not produce a political manifesto. It goes much
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: further back, all the way to the beginning, all the
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: way to the first day. It says, in the form
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: of a narrative spanning all of history, from creation to Sinai.
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: The calendar you are being told to abandon was not
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: invented by your ancestors. The author insists. It was established
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: by God before the world was made. It was practiced
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: by the angels in heaven before there was an earth
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: to practice it on. It was received by Adam, carried
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: by Noah, lived by Abraham, transmitted through Isaac and Jacob
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: and Joseph, and it is about to be formally articulated
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: at Sinai. In the encounter that the entire story has
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: been building toward. You are not being asked to give
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: up a tradition. You are being asked to give up
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: your place in the created order. The answer to that
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: demand is no. And the Book of Jubilees is that
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: no Written in the most comprehensive and most grounded form
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: available to its authors. This is why the framing device
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: of the Angel of the Presence dictating to Moses matters
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: so much. The author is not saying, here is my opinion.
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: The author is saying, here is what was revealed on
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: the mountain, not in living memory, not in the tradition
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: of a particular school or city. On the mountain, in
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: the encounter where the Torah was given by the mediator,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: who stands closest to the divine presence. You cannot revise
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: this without claiming an authority greater than Sinai, and no
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: empire has that authority. The argument is made not through
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: logical proposition, but through narrative, through fifty chapters of story
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: that roots the Calendar and the Sabbath and the Covenant
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: so deep in the structure of creation, so thoroughly in
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: the bodies and histories of the patriarchs who preceded the reader,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: that pulling them out would require pulling out everything else
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: as well. The community at Kumran, which preserved fifteen copies
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: of this book in desert caves, was itself organized around
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: a similar conviction. They had separated from the Jerusalem establishment,
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: in part over a dispute about the calendar. They believed,
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: on the basis of texts like Jubilees, that the official
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem calender was wrong, and that a community serious about
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: its faithfulness had to maintain the correct count, even if
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: it meant separation from the broader community. They were doing,
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: in their own time exactly what the Book of Jubilees
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: was calling the community to do, holding the count, maintaining
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: the rhythm, refusing to let the pressure of the surrounding
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: culture determine when they worshiped. Now, let us look at
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: Moses as the author presents him. Moses is the one
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: who sits with the Angel of the Presence and receives
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: the full history of creation and the patriarchs. He has
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in his ancestry, he has
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: the stories, he has the traditions. But here on the mountain,
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: with forty days and forty nights before him, he receives
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: the whole structure at once, the full pattern, the complete
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: shape of everything that the Covenant has been carrying through
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: the generations. The Hebrew name Mosha Moses is traditionally understood
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: to mean drawn out from the root, Mushia because he
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: was drawn out of the water by Pharaoh's daughter. But
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: Mushia carries another direction as well, the drawing out of
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: something that was submerged, the bringing to light of what
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: lay beneath the surface, the making visible of what was
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: hidden in plain sight all along. Moses is not primarily
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: a law giver. In the author's construction, he is a scribe.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: He is the Enoch of his generation, the one intrusted
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: with writing down what is in danger of being lost.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: And his forty days on the mountain are not forty
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: days of receiving new information. They are forty days of
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: being shown the full pattern that was always there, the
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: whole structure of which the law he is about to
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: carry down the mountain is the latest and most complete expression.
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: The laws of Sinai, in the author's argument, are not
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: God legislating for the first time. They are God formalizing
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: for Israel what was written into creation before the first morning,
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: practiced by the angels before the world existed, observed by
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: the patriarchs before it was commanded, now articulated in full,
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: so that no generation after this one has the excuse
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: of not knowing. Musha drawn out into the light not
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: invented revealed. The weight of this does not crush in
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: the telling of Jubilees. It grounds. You know what you
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: are carrying, You know where it comes from, You know
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: how long it has been in the world, and how
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: many generations before you have held it. You are not
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: the first, you will not be the last. And the
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: thing you are holding is not a burden placed on
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: you arbitrarily. It is the thread of the count, the
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: line that runs from the first day of creation to
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: the day you are living in, passing through every covenant
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: and every patriarch and every generation that refused to let
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: it break. There is a student named Elena. She is
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: twenty six years old, and she is in the first
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: year of a doctoral program in religious studies at a
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: university in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in a household
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: that was culturally Jewish but not observant, and she came
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: to her academic work through genuine intellectual curiosity rather than
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: through faith. She is not sure most days what she
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: believes about God, but she is deeply sure about what
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: she finds compelling in ancient texts, and what she finds
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: most compelling in Jubileese is precisely this, the audacity of it,
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: the scope, the willingness of a community under existential pressure
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: to respond not by narrowing, not by retreating into a
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: defensive minimalism, but by expanding, by going all the way
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: back to creation and saying, everything you are trying to
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: erase is older than you. Everything you are trying to replace,
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: was here before you arrived, and will be here after
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: you are gone. She said to a friend once that
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: reading Jubilees in the context of its historical moment felt
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: like watching someone stand up in the middle of a
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: very loud room and speak quietly but with absolute clarity,
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: not matching the volume of the disruption, not performing strength,
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: just speaking from the ground, from the oldest ground available,
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: with the calm of someone who knows exactly where they
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: are standing and is not going to be moved. She
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: is right. That is what Jubilees does. It finds the ground,
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: and then it stands on it. We are approaching the
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: end of the book.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: The narrative ends not with the giving of the Law,
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: which takes place in Exodus, but with the community of
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: Israel at the base of Sinai, having been brought out
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: of Egypt, having survived the wilderness so far standing at
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: the bottom of the mountain from which Moses is receiving
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: the revelation that has become the book we have been
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: reading tonight. The circle closes at Sinai. The history that
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: the Angel of the Presence has been narrating was always
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: leading here. Creation led to the patriarchs. The patriarchs led
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: to Egypt. Egypt led to the Exodus. The exodus led
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: to the wilderness, and the wilderness led to the mountain,
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: where the whole pattern is laid out in full, given,
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: permanent form, committed to the care of every generation that
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: would come after. You are in that care. You are
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: in that count, and the one who established it before
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: the world was made has not lost track of where
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: you are in it. Chapter ten, The Book that would
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: not Die. There is a particular kind of survival that
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: has nothing to do with strength. Not the survival of
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: the powerful, who endure because they have the resources to
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: resist what comes against them. Not the survival of the famous,
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: whose names are maintained because enough people decided they were important.
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: But the quieter, stranger, survival of something that should have
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: been lost by every reasonable measure, that passed through centuries
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: of neglect, and opposition and simple historical indifference, and came
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: out the other side, still intact, still readable, still capable
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: of saying what it was trying to say to some
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: one sitting in a quiet room a very long time
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: after it was written. The Book of Jubilees is that
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: kind of survivor, and the path it took through the centuries,
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: from the moment it was written to the moment it
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: became available to the world in the form we have
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: been reading to night, is one of the most remarkable
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: stories in the history of preserved knowledge. It is not
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: a story about powerful institutions protecting a treasure. It is
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: a story about ordinary faithfulness, about people in every generation
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: who looked at something worth keeping and decided, without fanfare
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: and without certainty about the outcome, that they were going
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: to keep it. Let us follow that path. The Book
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: of Jubileese was written in the second century before Christ,
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: almost certainly in Hebrew, almost certainly in the land of Israel,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: by a community living under the pressure we have been
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: discussing throughout this night. We do not know the author's name.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: We do not know precisely where or by how many
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: hands the book was written. Some scholars believe it was
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: the work of a single author with a unified vision.
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: Others believe it shows signs of composition in stages multiple
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: voices contributing to a single sustained argument over time. The
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: scholarly conversation on this question is ongoing. What we know
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: is that the book exists, and that it is more
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: coherent and more carefully constructed than most texts of its
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: age and genre. What we also know is that within
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: a relatively short period of its composition, the book had
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: reached the community that settled at Cumran, near the Dead
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: Sea in the desert of Judea. This community had separated
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: from the Jerusalem establishment and organized their life around a
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: strict interpretation of the Torah and the Sacred Calender. They were,
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: in the most literal sense, people who had gone to
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: the wilderness to hold the count, and they brought jubilees
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: with them. When the Roman army moved toward Jerusalem in
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: the first century of the Common Era, the Cumran community
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: apparently knew that their settlement was in danger. They gathered
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: their scrolls, placed them in clay jars sealed against the
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: desert air, and hid them in the caves above their settlement.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: They did not come back to retrieve them. Perhaps they
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: could not. Perhaps the destruction that swept through the region
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: in the year seventy reached them before they had the chance.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: The jars remained sealed in those caves for nearly two
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: thousand years. In nineteen forty seven, a Bedouin shepherd boy
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: named Mohammad ed Dib was searching for a lost goat
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: in the cliff above the Dead Sea. He threw a
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: stone into a cave opening and heard the sound of
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: breaking pottery. He did not know what he had found.
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: He had broken open what would become the most significant
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: archeological discovery of the twentieth century, the first of eleven
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: caves containing thousands of manuscript fragments, including pieces of nearly
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: every book of the Hebrew Bible and dozens of texts
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: that had not been seen for two thousand years. Among
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: the fragments recovered from those caves were pieces of at
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: least fifteen separate manuscripts of Jubilees fifteen copies in one community,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: preserved in clay jars in a desert for nearly two
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: thousand years, recovered by a thrown stone and a lost goat,
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: fifteen copies more than some books that eventually entered the
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: standard Biblical canon. The community that sealed its library in
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: those jars considered Jubilees among the most important texts It possessed.
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: Not a supplement, not an appendix essential, but the Kumran
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: path ended in those sealed caves. The path that kept
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: Jubilees alive and continuously readable across the full span of
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: the centuries ran through a different community. Entirely. It ran
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: through Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: the oldest Christian communities in the world, with roots reaching
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: back to the fourth century. The Ethiopian Church developed its
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: own rich liturgical language in Geze, its own deep tradition
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: of biblical scholarship, and its own canonical list of sacred texts.
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: That list, which is larger than the canons used by
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: most Western Christian traditions, includes the Book of Jubilees, not
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: as a supplement, not as a scholarly resource, as scripture.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: This means that Ethiopian monks were copying Jubilees in Gaeys
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: in the fifth century of the co E in the sixth.
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: In the seventh, when the rise of Islam was reshaping
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: the religious landscape of the entire region in the eighth century,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth,
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth,
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: and the nineteenth centuries. Through every political upheaval and every
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: challenge that the Ethiopian Church faced across sixteen hundred years
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: of continuous existence, they copied it because it was scripture,
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: because it was what you did with scripture, because the
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: community before you had given it to you, and the
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: community after you was going to need it. Some truths persist,
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: not because history is gentle, but because faithful people keep
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: carrying them. There is a monk named Tekle. He is
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: sixty three years old, and he lives in a monastery
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: in the highlands of Ethiopia, where the mornings are cold
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: and the eucalyptus trees outside his liad window aloud with
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: birds at dawn. He has been a monk for forty years.
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: He has spent those forty years in a rhythm of
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: prayer and work and study that has not changed substantially
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: since the monastery was founded several centuries before he was born.
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: He shan't Ingay a language no longer spoken conversationally by anyone,
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: maintained in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Church with the
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: same care that the Hebrew scribal tradition maintained the Torah.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: He knows passages of Jubilees by heart, not because he
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: has studied it academically, because he has prayed it, chanted it,
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: heard it read in the context of worship across forty
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: years of a life organized around encounter with the sacred.
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: He does not think of himself as a preserver of
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: a rare ancient text. He thinks of himself as a
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: monk doing what monks do. But the text is preserved
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: in part because of people exactly like him, people who
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: did not decide to preserve it because it was important,
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: who preserved it because it was what you did in
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: the life they had given themselves to. And in doing
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: what you do in the life you have given yourself to,
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: without heroism and without announcement, you become the person through
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: whom something that needed to survive actually survives. In the
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: year eighteen hundred and seventy, an Ethiopian manuscript of Jubileese
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: was acquired by scholars in the West and translated for
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: the first time into a European language. For most Western scholars,
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: this was the first time they had been able to
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: read the complete text of Jubilees. Since late antiquity, the
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: book had been known by name, referenced in early Christian
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: and Jewish sources, occasionally quoted in fragments, but the complete
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: book had not been available in a language accessible to
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: Western scholarship for over a thousand years. Then the Dead
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: Sea scrolls were discovered and the Hebrew fragments from Cumruan
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: confirmed what the Ethiopian tradition had maintained for sixteen centuries.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: The Ethiopic text was a faithful translation of an ancient
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: Hebrew original. The monks had been copying accurately. The tradition
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: had held the book that had been hidden in desert
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: caves and preserved in highland monasteries was the same book,
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: the same words, the same count, the same insistence on
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: the calendar and the Covenant, and the sacred rhythm of Creation.
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: Two transmission paths, one through desert caves and one through
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: the highlands of Ethiopia had independently preserved the same text
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: across two thousand years. The redundancy was accidental. The survival
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: was not. Now let us ask the question that this
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: history raises, why does any of this matter? Not in
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: the academic sense, though it matters there as well, but
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: in the sense we have been exploring all night, in
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: the sense of what the Book of Jubilees after everything
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: we have traced together, from Creation to the patriarchs, to Sinai,
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: to the caves above the Dead Sea, to the highland
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: monasteries of Ethiopia, to a German translation to a Bedouin
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy and a throne stone, and the scholarly work
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: of eight decades since has to offer to a person
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: lying in a quiet room in the twenty first century.
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: Here is what I think it offers. And I want
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: to say it plainly, because the plain version is the
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: truest one. The Book of Jubileese was written by people
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: who were being told that what they were was not
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: good enough, that the rhythms they lived by were outdated,
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: that the calendar they kept was wrong, that the god
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: they worshiped was one option among many, and not a
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: very sophisticated option at that, that the world had moved
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: on and they should move with it or be left behind.
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: And their response was to go all the way back
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: to the beginning, to trace the thread from the first
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: day of creation to the moment they were living in
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: and show as carefully and as completely as they can
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: good that the thread was unbroken, that the sacred rhythm
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: was continuous, that the ground they were standing on was
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: older than the empire that was trying to move them
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: off it, that it would be there after the empire
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: was gone. That response did not save them from suffering.
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: The crisis was real, The suffering was real. People died,
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: but the book survived, and the book surviving is itself
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: a testimony. Some truths persist not because history is gentle,
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: but because faithful people keep carrying them. The text hidden
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: in desert jars was recovered by a throne stone. The
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: translation maintained in Highland monasteries in a language nobody speaks conversationally,
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: was the key that unlocked the meaning of those desert fragments.
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: The footnote in the academic article was the thread that
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: led Clara in Nashville to three hours of reading and
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: a feeling she recognized as recognition. The sacred rhythm held
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: through everything thing that tried to break it. The sacred
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: rhythm held. That is what This book tells you about
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: the nature of what is sacred. Not that it is invulnerable,
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: not that it cannot be threatened or suppressed or temporarily lost,
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: but that it has a quality of persistence that is
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: not proportional to the power of the institutions that support it.
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: That it survives in clay jars and monastery libraries and
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: the memories of monks chanting at dawn and the hands
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: of ordinary people who decided, without knowing exactly why, that
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: the thing was worth keeping. You are one of those people,
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: and the substance of what all those containers were carrying
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: is here now in this room, in this night. The argument,
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: the sacred rhythm, the insistence that you are part of
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: a world that was made with intention by a God
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: who has not forgotten the count, and that nothing that
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: has happened to you or to the world since the
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: beginning has broken the thread. You are still in it.
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: The thread runs through you as surely as it ran
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: through Abraham under the stars, and Jacob at the river,
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: and Joseph in the pit and Moses on the mountain.
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: The same count, the same covenant, the same patient and
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: indestructible care that has been finding ways to reach human
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: beings through desert caves and highland monasteries and footnotes in
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: academic articles, and quiet nights when someone who could not
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: sleep followed a thread into something old enough to hold
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: the weight of everything they were carrying. That is the
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: legacy of the Book of Jubilees. Not a calendar system,
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: not an alternative cannon, not a scholarly puzzle to be solved,
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: a testimony. We were here, We held the sacred rhythm
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: through everything that tried to make us forget it, and
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: we are giving it to you because you are going
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 1: to need it too. Here it is.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 2: Somewhere outside your window. Right now, the night is moving
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 2: through its appointed hours, the same hours it has moved
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: through since the fourth day of creation, when the great
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 2: lights were set in the firmament to mark the seasons
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 2: and the days and the years. The darkness outside is
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: not empty. It is full of the accumulated weight of
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 2: every night that has preceded this one, every night in
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 2: which a human being lay awake in a quiet room
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 2: and reached for something that could hold the weight of
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 2: what they were carrying. You have been awake for a
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 2: while now, and in that time you have traveled a
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 2: considerable distance from the first day when light was spoken
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 2: into existence and the structure of heaven and earth began
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 2: to take shape, to the garden where the original transparency
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 2: was lost and the long road back began. To the
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: world before the flood, and the man who refused to
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 2: forget the count when every one around him had to
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 2: the city of Or, and a teenager watching the stars
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 2: and refusing to stop at an answer too small for
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 2: the question. To the river Jabbok, and the man who
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 2: held on through the long night and walked away limping
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 2: and named to the pit, and the boy sold by
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: his brothers who became the instrument of their salvation. To
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 2: the mountain, and the scribe who received the full pattern
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: and wrote it down so that every generation coming after
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 2: would have access to it. To the desert caves and
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 2: the clay jars and the throne Stone, to the highland monasteries,
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 2: and the monks chanting at dawn into a language nobody
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 2: speaks conversationally any more, doing what monks do, preserving without
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 2: announcement what needed to be preserved. To the footnote in
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 2: the academic article and the three hours of reading that
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 2: followed it, and the forty five minute phone call between
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 2: a grandson in Ohio and his grandmother in Addis Ababa,
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: who had known this book her whole life, without ever
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 2: thinking of it as rare, to this room, to this night,
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 2: to you. The Book of Jubilees is not a comfortable book.
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 2: It makes demands, It insists on things. It is the
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 2: product of a particular community in a particular crisis, and
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 2: it carries the marks of that particularity. Some of what
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 2: it claims is contested by scholars, some of what it
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 2: argues is specific to its own historical moment, and some
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 2: of what it says about the nature of time and
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 2: the sacred order of creation has been debated by communities
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 2: of faith for two thousand years without arriving at simple resolution.
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 2: You do not have to resolve any of that to night.
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 2: You only have to breathe the ancient hope that this
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 2: book has been carrying for two thousand years, whispers it
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 2: still You are loved with a love older than the
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 2: first morning. That is not a claim the Book of
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 2: Jubilees makes about itself. It is what the book, in
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 2: all its ancient particularity, is pointing toward the way a
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 2: finger points toward the moon, without being the moon, the
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 2: way a road points toward a destination without being the destination.
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 2: The book is the road, and the road has been
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 2: traveled by more people than you can count, in more
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: centuries than any single tradition can claim, arriving at the
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: same recognition by different routes. The sacred rhythm is real.
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 2: The thread runs through you, and the one who holds
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 2: it has not forgotten where you are in it. Think
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 2: for a moment about every one who traveled with you
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 2: through this night. Clara in Nashville, who followed a footnote
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 2: into three hours of reading and found in an ancient
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 2: community the recognition she had been looking for without knowing
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: what to call it. Marcus in Ohio, who who texted
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 2: his grandmother and listened for forty five minutes and understood
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 2: for the first time that the distance between a footnote
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 2: and a living tradition can be measured in one phone call.
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 2: David in Kentucky, who saw the architecture before he saw
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: the content and recognized in the careful construction of the
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 2: Jubilee count the presence of a mind that had spent
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 2: a very long time thinking about how to build something
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 2: that would hold Elizabeth in Oregon, who sat in a
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: quiet house after a twelve hour shift and learned the
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 2: difference between rest as recovery and rest as completion. Who
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 2: understood for the first time what Shabbat was actually describing.
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 2: Jonathan in Seattle, who found in a two thousand year
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 2: old retelling of Eden a name for something he had
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 2: been carrying without language for it, who did not know
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 2: until that sentence gave him one what to call the
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 2: thing he was missing. Ruth in Portland, who spent forty
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 2: years in rooms with things worth keeping and knew immediately
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 2: when she read about Enoch in the Garden exactly what
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 2: it meant to be the person who stays. Samuel in Chicago,
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 2: who sent his daughter a photograph of a rainbow and
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 2: did not entirely know why, but felt in some part
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 2: of himself that did not require explanation, that it was
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 2: important to send. Caroline in Austin, who stood in the
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 2: middle of living systems too coherent to be accidental and
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 2: arrived by the same route Abram arrived at the question
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 2: that points toward its own answer. Who made it to
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 2: God through the door of biology and did not find
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 2: the door strange? Michael in Denver, who held on through
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 2: the long months and came out of it carrying something
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 2: he could not have acquired any other way. Who came
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 2: out of it closer to the truth than he was
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 2: going in. Helen in Minneapolis, who grasped the heel and
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 2: would not let go, who has been carrying the thread
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 2: through her ordinary life for years without anyone handing her
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 2: an award for it, who keeps carrying it because she
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 2: decided the same way Jacob decided that the thing is
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 2: worth the cost. Elena in Boston, who watched a community
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 2: under pressure respond not by narrowing, but by going all
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 2: the way back to the beginning, and recognized in that
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: response the only kind of courage she wanted to have.
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 2: Teckley in the highlands of Ethiopia, who rises before dawn
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 2: and chants in a language nobody speaks conversationally any more,
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: because the community before him gave him the words, and
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: the community after him is going to need them. Who
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 2: does not think of himself as a preserver of anything rare,
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 2: Who is simply a monk doing what monks do, and
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 2: who is, in the doing of it, one of the
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 2: great faithful ones of his generation. Their stories are versions
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 2: of yours, the same search running in different rooms with
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: different materials, arriving at the same recognition. The sacred rhythm
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: is real. The thread runs through you, and the one
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: who established the count before the world was made has
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 2: not lost track of where you are in it. You
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 2: are in the first jubilee of your life, or you
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: are in the middle of it, or you are closer
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: to the end than to the beginning. And from where
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: you are standing it may be difficult to see the
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 2: full shape of the whole, but the shape is there.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: The sacred rhythm is running. Every sabbath that has ever
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 2: been kept, every appointed time observed, every morning that has
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: arrived after a night that felt too long, every breath
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: drawn by a human being reaching for something true to
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: hold on to in the middle of a world that
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 2: makes holding on hard. All of it is in the count.
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 2: All of it matters. None of it has been lost.
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: Breathe in slow, feel the weight of the day lift
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: from the place where you have been carrying it. You
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 2: have been carrying it faithfully. You do not need to
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 2: carry it into the night. Breathe out. Let the sacred
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 2: rhythm continue without your supervision. It has been doing so
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 2: since before the first morning. It does not need your
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 2: management to maintain its cadence. The night is moving through
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 2: its appointed hours. The darkness outside is doing what darkness does,
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: which is to make room for the light that is
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 2: already on its way. The morning will come. It always
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 2: comes in the rhythm that was established before anything else
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 2: was established, in the cadence that the ancient text we
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: have been reading to night traces all the way back
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 2: to its source. You are in that rhythm. You have
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 2: been in it the whole time. You are in the count.
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: You are held by a care that existed before the
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 2: world was named. You are known by the one who
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 2: made you and has not turned away. And the morning
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 2: that is coming toward you right now across the dark
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 2: and quiet hours of this particular night will arrive at
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 2: its appointed time, as it always has, as it always will.
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 2: Sleep Now, the sacred rhythm continues, and you are in it.