Long before anyone had heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a book known as Jubilees survived by a thread. For centuries, the only copies scholars had access to were a Latin translation missing large sections and a Ge’ez translation preserved by the Ethiopian church. Then, in the caves near Qumran, everything changed.
Between 1947 and 1956, roughly fourteen or fifteen separate manuscripts of Jubilees turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, more copies than all but a handful of books in the entire collection. By manuscript count, Jubilees was one of the most-read texts at Qumran, trailing only a few books like Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah. Some scholars who study the scrolls believe the community there treated Jubilees as scripture in its own right.
What is Jubilees, exactly? It retells the story of Genesis and part of Exodus in far greater detail than the version most Bibles carry, organizing history into 49 year cycles called jubilees. It fills in names, timelines, and events the compressed version of Genesis leaves out entirely, like the names of Adam and Eve’s daughters and details about the earliest generations after creation. Ancient readers sometimes called it Lesser Genesis for exactly this reason.
Despite its popularity at Qumran and its clear influence on other ancient Jewish writings, Jubilees never made it into the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament that most people read today. The only complete copies of the text that exist anywhere in the world are Ethiopic manuscripts, preserved because Jubilees remained part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s 88-book canon without interruption. When scholars compared the Qumran fragments to the Ethiopic text centuries later, they found the Ethiopian version had preserved the book with remarkable accuracy.
In other words, a text that Second Temple Jewish readers treated as essential scripture would likely be lost today if not for one church that never stopped copying it.
The Complete Ethiopian Bible includes the full text of Jubilees in English, the same book found scattered in fragments at Qumran and preserved whole for centuries in Ethiopia. Read it alongside Genesis for yourself.