of the Book of Jubilees had written it. That it is not a merely scientific interest which impels the writer to give expression to his astronomical theories may be seen from the words at the conclusion of the section: ‘Blessed are all the righteous, blessed are all those who walk in the way of righteousness, and sin not as the sinners in the reckoning of all their days, in which the sun traverses the heaven, entering into and departing from the portals for thirty days ...’ (lxxxii. 4-7). Herein one can discern quite clearly the tendency of the writer. He desires the adoption of the solar year, while his contemporaries wrongly followed a different reckoning and therefore celebrated the feasts at the wrong time. The ‘sinners who sin in the reckoning of the year’ are the Pharisees; and the righteous ones who are blessed, the _Zaddîkim_,[284] who walk upon the paths of righteousness (_Zedek_), as the name was made to imply, were the Sadducees.” Leszynsky works out his argument in much detail, the study of the whole of which is necessary to grasp the full force of his contention. The other portions of the book he does not hold to be Sadducæan. In the concluding portion he sees a bitter polemic by a Pharisee against the Sadducees (see especially cii. 6 ff.). Regarding the important section called the “Similitudes” (xxxvii.-lxxi.) Leszynsky has nothing definite to suggest other than that it is not Christian, still less Jewish. He says: “We know too little about the sects which existed about the time of the beginning of Christianity to be able to say to what circle the author of this writing belonged.”