The Book of Jubilees is a substantial Jewish work of the second century BCE that retells the material of Genesis 1 through Exodus 12 within a specific chronological frame: fifty jubilees of forty-nine years each, from the creation of the world to the giving of the Law at Sinai. The text presents itself as revelation given to Moses on Sinai by an angel of the presence, supplementing what Moses receives in the canonical Mosaic material.
The book was composed in Hebrew (Hebrew fragments turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran). The full text survives only in Ge’ez (Ethiopic), translated from a now-lost Greek intermediary. Jubilees was treated as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and was a treasured text at Qumran; it did not become canonical in Jewish, Christian, or Latter-day Saint traditions.
Jubilees expands what Genesis tells succinctly. The Watchers narrative (comparable to but distinct from 1 Enoch’s treatment) covers the rebellion of two hundred angels and its earthly consequences. The patriarchal narratives are expanded with material absent from Genesis — Abraham’s youth, his struggle against idolatry, his final blessings to Isaac and Jacob; Jacob’s wrestling at the Jabbok and the patriarchal blessings he gives his sons. The Sinai material is reframed within a strict solar calendar — the so-called 364-day calendar — that Jubilees urges as the divinely-given one.
For Latter-day Saint readers, Jubilees is significant background for several reasons. The expanded patriarchal narratives parallel, in spirit, the expanded material in the Joseph Smith Translation and in Moses 1–8. The book’s strong angelic-revelation framework — Moses receiving material from an angel of the presence on Sinai — resonates thematically with the framing of Moses 1 (Moses 1↗), though the two compositions are independent in origin. Jubilees stands as one of the clearest Second Temple witnesses that ancient Jewish piety took for granted what Latter-day Saint scripture asserts directly: that the Mosaic record as preserved in Genesis is not the whole of what was given to Moses.