ИСТИНА

Last decades of scholarship of post-biblical texts have remarkably shown the fundamental influence which specific social and hermeneutical practices of Reading and Writing had on the early Jewish exegetical material . I suggest that our understanding of the origin and purpose of Jubilees – a prominent and often discussed ‘sectarian’ work, structurally dependent on some form of the Torah – should also begin from an analysis of its hermeneutics in a socio-cultural perspective. The calendar is one of the most explicit point of Jubilees’ polemical interest; but these polemics over different ways to measure the sacred Time, in which the book’s creators were engaged, were primarily exegetic. In the present paper I would investigate different exegetical tools and operations, underlying calendric statements in Jubilees – in order to clarify and systematize our vision of its hermeneutics and textual politics. I hope that such clarification would contribute to a discussion of what historical practices and literary productions could be labelled as ‘commentaries’.