Sexual union and sexual offences in jubilees

In two recent articles A. Shemesh has argued that the Qumran community viewed the act of sexual intercourse alone as affecting the marital bond. The present paper demonstrates that Jubilees, in its reformulation of the biblical narrative, maintains a position very similar, and possibly identical, to that proposed by Shemesh. On this fundamentally ontological view, the physical union itself is determinative in connection with both permitted and proscribed unions, as reflected in several aspects of Jubilees' narrative.