The Book of Jubilees, sometimes known as Little Genesis, is an ancient Jewish pseudepigraphal work from the Second Temple period. Rather than simply reproducing Genesis, it retells and interprets the biblical narrative from Creation through the Israelites’ departure from Egypt, presenting its material as revelation communicated to Moses by the Angel of the Presence on Mount Sinai.

Time and chronology are central to the book. Events are organised according to “jubilees” of forty-nine years, themselves divided into seven-year periods. Jubilees also advocates a 364-day solar calendar and connects festivals, Sabbaths and other observances with a heavenly order that it presents as established long before the giving of the Law at Sinai.

Across its fifty chapters, the work revisits many familiar figures and events from Genesis while supplying details absent from the biblical account. Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah and the Flood, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph all appear within this expanded sacred history. The narrative also develops traditions concerning angels and the Watchers, the origins of evil spirits, circumcision, dietary and purity practices, covenants and sacred festivals. In Jubilees, commandments later associated with the Mosaic Law are frequently projected back into the lives of the patriarchs.

The text survives completely in Geʽez, but its original language was Hebrew. The discovery of Hebrew fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed that the Ethiopic text preserves a work with roots in ancient Judaism rather than a later Ethiopian composition.

R. H. Charles’s English translation belongs to an important period in the modern scholarly recovery of Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature. Although subsequent discoveries, particularly the Qumran manuscripts, have considerably expanded modern understanding of Jubilees, his edition remains historically significant in the English-language study of the work. For readers of biblical literature, Jewish history and ancient religious traditions, Jubilees offers a striking example of how Genesis and Exodus were interpreted and rewritten during the Second Temple period.