The Beginnings and Ends of Sacrifice: A Shared Reimagining of the Cultic Past in the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document

Abstract

Abstract: The Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document are two works of Jewish literature from the Hellenistic period that recount events from the lives of Israel’s ancestral heroes. These two compositions are rarely analyzed in relation to each other, despite their many striking similarities. In this article, we offer a sustained comparison of some of their shared features and themes, with a special emphasis on their retrojection of Israel’s sacrificial regulations into the pre-Sinaitic past. These points of contact in vocabulary, phraseology, and topical foci are so compelling as to suggest that these two compositions have a direct literary relationship and were almost certainly authored within a common social setting. In our view, the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document are part and parcel of a much broader Hellenistic-era Jewish Aramaic scribal tradition, representing the literary output of highly educated priests associated with the Jerusalem temple.