God’s Oracle to the Watchers 1 En 15,8 – 16,4
The Fate of the Giants
In his Oracle to the Watchers God pronounces their Doom, to be imprisoned in the Underworld until the Day of Judgment when they will be consumed by a Purging Holy Fire. For their offspring, the giants, it is a different story.
But now the giants who were begotten by the spirits and flesh—
they will call them evil spirits on the earth,
for their dwelling will be on the earth.
The spirits that have gone forth from the body of their flesh are evil spirits,
for from humans they came into being, and from the holy watchers was the origin of their creation.
Evil spirits they will be on the earth, and evil spirits they will be called.
The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling;
but the spirits begotten on the earth, on the earth is their dwelling. 1 En 15,8-10 Nickelsburg
The questions spring forth. Why are the Giants being treated differently than their divine fathers? Earlier the Giants were said to have destroyed themselves through their ravenous hunger for all living things. Here there is some kind of “afterlife”. The secret seems to be that they are by nature hybrid creatures born of the union between spirit and flesh. The fleshly part for them can be destroyed but not the spirit. But though they survive as spiritual beings they are condemned to dwell on earth until the day of Judgment.
And the spirits of the giants lead astray, do violence, make desolate, and attack and wrestle and hurl upon the earth and cause illnesses. They eat nothing, but abstain from food and are thirsty and smite. These spirits (will) rise up against the sons of men and against the women, for they have come forth from them.
From the day of the slaughter and destruction and death of the giants, from the soul of whose flesh the spirits are proceeding, they are making desolate without (incurring) judgment. Thus they will make desolate until the day of the consummation of the great judgment, when the great age will be consummated. 1 En 15,11-16,1 Nickelsburg
Notice what you don’t find here. Satan being cast out of Heaven and his angels being turned into demons. That idea is centuries away. Here the spirits of the Giants are imprisoned on earth, able to wreak havoc until Judgment Day. Why the difference? This account serves to explain the presence of evil spirits which were held responsible for most mischief by the ancients. It’s hard for moderns to appreciate the obsession of the Ancient Near East with malevolent spirits. They must be constantly appeased and banished. Power over them was a sign of spiritual strength. (Now go back and reread the Gospel of Mark where we find not the ethical Teacher of Matthew but Jesus the apocalyptic exorcist.)
Then rather tacked on for the rest of chapter 16, v2-4 –
And now (say) to the watchers who sent you to petition in their behalf, who formerly were in heaven,
‘You were in heaven, and no mystery was revealed to you;
but a stolen mystery you learned;
and this you made known to the women in your hardness of heart;
and through this mystery the women and men are multiplying evils on the earth.’
Say to them,
‘You will have no peace.’”
As I pointed out earlier in the original episode of the Fall of the Watchers humans were victims. But to justify the Flood some human culpability must be claimed so here is the effort to involve humans in the blame. Of course it’s the women’s fault! Give them googaws and knick-knacks and they lose their heads every time. Let them paint themselves and god knows what will come of it.
The reference to a “stolen mystery” is interesting. Especially when you compare this account to Jubilees where it is hinted that God sent the Watchers to deliberately inform humans. Behind these variations there is apparently a common store of legend. We don’t have the original but only the variations survive. But that’s true in pagan myth as well. Contrast the Babylonian fishman Orannes who purposely brings knowledge to humans with Prometheus who is punished by Zeus for bringing fire down from Heaven.
You will have no peace.
I suppose I’m still enough of a Christian to be slightly taken aback at this utter lack of mercy. As I pointed out the Watchers seem genuinely repentant. But no matter. Their Doom is pronounced from On High.
So we’ve seen Divine Rebellion, interspecies sex, ravenous cannibalistic giants, and lifted by the Winds to the Very Throne of God.
Now, the Book of Enoch gets weird.
Following Enoch’s vision of the Divine Throne, proceeding from chapter 17 until chapter 36, the end of the Book of the Watchers, he is carried on a series of dream/vision journeys through the ancient Hebrew cosmos even unto the very end of creation itself. Unfortunately for us though the author is often spare with the information he provides to describe this cosmic geography. Either he is being deliberately mysterious or he is simply assuming a certain level of knowledge on the part of his audience.
So I think it would be helpful before we begin the journey to discuss the view of the cosmos being assumed by the author. Luckily we have other sources to help us construct an image of this ancient outlook. Here are a couple links with graphics depicting the ancient near eastern view of the universe. This is the view being assumed by the writers of the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. (The second graphic lists some Bible sources.)
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
This three-tiered view of the cosmos is primordial. Also, interestingly, some variation on it can be found, not only in cultures spread across Mesopotamia, but all over the world. The Egyptians and the Babylonians imagined the earth as a disk resting on a cosmic ocean. The sacred mountain at the center of the world supporting the abode of the gods was symbolized by respectively, the Pyramid and the Ziggurat. But consider the view in Ancient China of the earth as a flat plain covered by an umbrella-like heaven. The Indians report a similar outlook. Why would this view be so ubiquitous in the ancient world?
Try an experiment. Walk outside, look around, and describe what you see. You find yourself standing on a circular disk covered by a luminous dome. Over time you note that water both drops out of the sky and seeps up out of the ground, forming streams and rivers and lakes and even vast oceans. There are mountains that reach up into the sky. At certain places you find openings into the earth that are dark and hot. Two bright lights dominate the sky joined at night by myriad smaller ones. All these lights move in a measurable order.
In all its variations this ancient view of the cosmos is simply the existential, functional, empirical, common-sense perception of people who have nothing but their eyes with which to measure their world. No telescopes. No satellites. We often fail to appreciate what a conceptual breakthrough it was for humans to first learn not to trust the evidence of their senses.
As early as the Fourth and Fifth Centuries BCE, Greeks like Pythagoras and Aristotle speculated that the earth must be round, but mostly for philosophical reasons, the sphere thought to be the most perfect and fundamental shape. It was in the Third century that Eratosthenes provided a method for calculating the earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes noticed that at the Summer Solstice, precisely at noon, a stick placed vertically in the ground at Alexandria cast a shadow, while a similar stick at Syene (modern day Aswan), 500 miles away, cast none. Eratosthenes reasoned that if Earth was a sphere, the sun’s rays were parallel as they reached Earth. So it followed that the Sun must be directly overhead at Syene but at an angle at Alexandria.
Eratosthenes calculated the difference in angle at about 7 degrees. A circle being 360 degrees this meant the angle was about 1/50th of the earth’s circumference. Using the distance between the cities he determined that the circumference of the earth must be about 25,000 miles (500 miles x 50 ). Pretty good! (I include this description for any flat earthers out there who still need convincing. Don’t take my word for it! Do this experiment yourself. Then get some binoculars and spend an enjoyable day at the beach watching ships disappear over the horizon.)
Sorry if this begins to sound like a lecture. My larger point is that as we consider these ancient cultures we are not simply going back to a time when humans had less facts than we do now. We are entering a different conceptual universe. For the author of 1 Enoch, earth wasn’t a place in the cosmos – it was the cosmos. Theology = eschatology = cosmic geography. Everything existed for a purpose. Its meaning was its function. We retain this kind of thinking really only in our arts and religion. Perhaps it is only through the imagination that we can have any real contact with these ancient peoples.
Since we’re about to embark on extensive cosmic journeying perhaps now would be a good time to pause for bibliography. While I am following the two volume Nickelsburg critical commentary for Hermeneia, my enjoyment has been enhanced by other works:
** you do not have permission to see this link **
While this book is focused on the Apocalypse of John, it spends a lot of time examining its sources which definitely included the Book of Enoch, especially the cosmic voyages.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
I’ve recommended Kelley Coblentz-Bautch’s fine works before and here she issued a monograph devoted exclusively to chapters 17-19 which we are about to plunge into next. This is a deeeep dive and essential for someone with my level of interest but be aware it is a scholarly monograph and therefore assumes much on the part of the reader. She does not translate the Aramaic and Greek passages she quotes, for example. (This is not insurmountable for those of us without the languages. I just follow her references in Nickelsburg and Robert Alter – and now Ron Hendel, thanks Jill!)
One who looks for this book will doubtless gulp at the asking price. Nevertheless, despite Brill’s rapacious greed, I strongly discourage anyone from going to ** you do not have permission to see this link ** and downloading it for free in whatever format you favor. I do understand if you succumb to the temptation however.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Wayne Horowitz’s book is, well, the Bible of the entire subject. Essential. Probably impossible to supersede. And he has mercy on his readers, demonstrated by the nice english translations of all the Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew and Greek sources.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
The difference between this book and Horowitz’s is that this one focuses on ancient astronomy, celestial divination, and astrology. And just like Horowitz, essential reading.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
I’ve mentioned Clifford’s book before but I add it here for relevance and completeness. And because the idea of the Cosmic mountain plays such a central role in ancient myths. Mt Sinai, remember. Or is it Zion? Or Hermon? Or Tabor? Or Zaphon, Or Mashu? Or Qaf? Or Meru? Or Kailash, Or…
Let me say here that I am doing this thread out of personal entertainment but I do hope someone else will find it interesting. Therefore I will do my best not to bore the living crap out of everyone, always a threat when someone gets going on a personal enthusiasm that not all share. But this is where I got on the bus. I have been interested in astronomy and space since I was a little kid. I have telescopes and charts and such. (Although I have to say the most fun I’ve ever had stargazing is lying in the grass in the backyard with a pair of pawn shop binoculars.) At some point I also developed an interest in ancient civilizations. And then, perhaps inevitably, I got my wires crossed and I became interested in the astronomy of ancient civilizations. Right from the beginning humankind has projected its hope and fears onto the cosmos. Only with modern astronomy, made possible by our devices, have we been able to view the cosmos as an environment apart from our dreaming. I think a lot of people are disturbed by the findings of science and are filled with a kind of nostalgia for an intimate knowable universe. These myths are the dreams (and yes, sometimes the nightmares) of the ancients.
later apocalypticists like Jesus and Paul came to believe that those who would enter into the Kingdom of God would be neither male nor female. Would only those who were able to rise above their sexual passion be found worthy? Are these those who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of God? Equal to the angels who did not fall? Worthy to worship and fight alongside the angels, like the purified celibates at Qumran? That’s my best guess.
I think it is the difference between an ancient Mesopotamian culture and a later Hellenized Judaism. In the Hebrew Bible the Kingdom of God consists mostly of an idealized round of earthly human life. In later texts the Kingdom is either another plane of existence or a divinized form of human life.
Of course this doesn’t solve the problem of why God would create divine beings (or humans) capable of being tempted by the flesh. Was sexual desire simply a primordial force that even God could not contain? Again, my best guess.
One of the true indicators of the difference between cultures are the questions we ask. It just seems never to have occurred to the ancients to ask questions that occur to us immediately.
Now it gets weird?
I was being ironical.
Endzeit = Urzeit is very common, but I’m unfamiliar with a temporal-local connection. Can you expand on this? Is it something like Jerusalem and the new Jerusalem being located at the center of the universe or on Mount Moriah, where Abraham was tested by God?
This is one of the most fascinating aspects about what is being called “cosmic geography”. As we travel with Enoch I think we’ll begin to see the Weltanschauung at play here. These moments where we enter another way of thinking about reality are what fascinate me most about this stuff. I think the answer to your question will reveal itself as we go along. (Or to put it another way, I have the same question.)
Paul’s ideas about the pneuma are very similar to the contemporary views of Middle-Platonism and the Stoics. We are getting Jesus filtered through Hellenized writers in the later First Century so who’s to say what his actual views of the Kingdom were? In the Hebrew scriptures we see the ancient near eastern viewpoint that believed that there really was little life outside the body. In the kingdom the faithful Hebrews would share an idealized human life supported by the immediate presence of God. Paul claims that in the Kingdom all fleshly distinctions would pass away – sex, gender, class, etc. Jesus could have gone either way.
I think we can still ask the question: Why didn’t they ask this question?
Patriarchy rests on a metaphysic. God and all divine beings were fundamentally male. Presumably even though it was not intended for the Watchers to have females of their kind they still had the capacity to procreate. Humans were first created without females. It was only after it became apparent that they were required that they were created.
But surely we both agree that that the authors of the Enochic literature, Jesus, and Paul were all indebted to Jewish apocalypticism in one fashion or another. Right?
Yes I considered it so self-evident that I wasn’t explicit about it. Actually I was about to discuss the issue of the apocalyptic genre as 1 Enoch is generally considered by scholars to be the first surviving example of a true apocalypse. Paul is clearly influenced by greek philosophy and Jesus is being filtered through writers clearly influenced by greek philosphy. 1 Enoch is influenced by ideas that it shared with ancient greek literature but its sources go back to pre-Hellenistic Mesopotamia. I think that’s the difference between 1 Enoch and Paul/Jesus.
…how to better understand the views of sexuality in these ancient texts?
Well fortunately scholars have been at work.
See ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Genesis 2 reveals a different, older world view than Genesis 1 which is rather late. For ancient patriarchal societies like the Hebrews masculinity was not simply a sexual characteristic. It was woven into the fabric of the universe. Yahweh was definitely male. Females were a different category. Wives and daughters were possessions. The authors of much of the Hebrew Bible meticulously extruded the feminine divine principle. This is why these folks could imagine a cosmos without females as apparently the Watchers were intended to be. Humans need offspring. So they need women.
Of course not all ancient cultures were patriarchal. The problem is that our religious tradition finds it source in one that was. Frankly, with this in mind, a lot of the Hebrew Bible is hard to take. I mentioned before that Robert Alter openly speculates that the prophet Ezekiel was mentally ill. Anachronistic perhaps but by modern standards probably true enough. Ezekiel’s seething misogyny is repulsive. And of course this aspect of ancient thought found a natural partner in some forms of greek philosophy that disparaged the physical in favor of the immaterial. This communion produced the Christian pathology. (Too late now of course but I much prefer the simply human lusts of paganism. It’s refreshing to read about the BeastMan Enkidu being civilized by a week long bought of lovemaking with a temple prostitute. Even the horndog Zeus is preferable to the celibate psychopath Yahweh.)
…don’t you think that there was an earlier time in which the ancient Hebrews also worshiped the goddess Asherah, sometimes described as Yahweh’s partner or consort?
Yes, the clear evidence is that the ancient Hebrews were indigenous Canaanites who separated themselves out culturally. Not invaders from outside although there was obviously influence from all over. Egypt dominated the Levant politically for centuries. Here as everywhere the winners wrote the histories. The “winners” who wrote the Hebrew Bible were members of the patriarchal Yahweh cult. In their writings they pretend that faithful Hebrews were always Yahweh devotees. Hebrews invented their own origin story and a conquest by them reflective of their own conquest by others. The final redaction of their literary sources was almost certainly post-exilic if not even later. There is no real evidence of widespread Torah observance before the Hasmonean Dynasty!
There are still boatloads of questions – many of them simply unanswerable – but I think the most compelling account of the origin of the oldest portion of 1 Enoch is from a group of very conservative Jews, tending to the mystical and apocalyptic, alienated from and dissatisfied with the Temple establishment, organized around certain ancient cultic sites in the Northern Galilee. Still it’s probably a mistake to think of “Enochic” Judaism vs “Mosaic” Judaism. Post-exile it’s probably a mistake to think of something called “Judaism” at all. There was a Temple Establishment struggling for and consolidating its power vs many indigenous religious practices. Much of the Hebrew Bible has more to do with that struggle than the imagined “history” it purports to relate. Even much older sources are filtered through that lens.
Ok having reached more or less the middle of the book, highlighted by a Divine Throne Vision, the nature of the writing changes. We enter what Nickelsburg et al describe as the first true surviving Jewish literary apocalypse. This raises several interesting questions…
…Jesus, from Galilee, may also have still seen the ideal denizens of the Kingdom of God as like unto those angels…
Yes, as iffy as some of it is, I think you can derive from our sources a hint of an idea that the Jesus community was a drop-out cult, living by the strictures of the imminent Kingdom. It would not surprise me if celibacy (or indeed, rejection of all domestic obligations) was part of that. It seems to go back deeply into the tradition.
—
We’ve reached a center point in the text of the ‘Book of the Watchers’ portion of 1 Enoch. I said originally that I would not get bogged down in linguistic or textual issues unless it was important to discuss it. It’s not my main focus – this is not a paper or even a review – but it does now become relevant. Some questions arise.
1. Chpts 1-16 are largely narrative. We read about the Rebellion of the Watchers and the consequences, their Doom and the punishment of their offspring. It culminates in Enoch’s dream/vision of the Divine Throne. On the other hand chpts 17-36 consist of cosmic journeys and divine revelations. Sooo…what is the relationship between chpts 1-16 & 17-36?
2. There is a rough and immediate shift of emphasis between chpts 16 & 17. We go from judgment in the Divine Throne Room to a cosmic journey without any intervening narrative. The nature of the journeying seems to change. The text clearly indicates that Enoch’s perception of the Divine Throne is in the nature of a dream/vision. Yet from chpt 17 on it reads as if Enoch is being physically transported in the company of an angel guide to various places in the Hebrew cosmic geography. (This the distinction I think Paul is making when he describes his vision of the “Third Heaven” in 2 Corinthians 12 when he says whether in the body or out of the body I do not know. Paul doesn’t know if he had a vision or if he was physically transported.) Sooo…what is the relationship between chpts 16 & 17?
3. There’s the thorny question of genre. Scholars almost universally consider the Book of the Watchers the first true surviving Jewish apocalypse. Well, assuming the genre didn’t simply fall out of the sky one afternoon, where did it come from? What are its precursors? Now I’m not going to write a paper or an essay; the shelves already groan. But this subject does raise some interesting questions which I will be content to raise at least. (Further than that I will take the easy way out and point you towards the work of John J Collins who’s done the heavy lifting anyway. Prof Collins is one of those few authors that if you ask me what books to get I will say, anything!)
Then, we’ll take the tour. A tour to mysterious regions and peculiar places “beyond the fields we know”… We’ll meet curious persons and receive messages from improbable spokesmen…
Prof John J Collins, in his early monograph, ** you do not have permission to see this link **, defines Apocalyptic as
a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.
(While Collins’ later book, ** you do not have permission to see this link **, is rightly considered a classic and essential, I still think you should also seek out the former book.)
1 Enoch clearly draws on previous forms of literature. The text contains rewritten and reinterpreted Hebrew biblical narrative, episodes of prophetic call, dream visions, and cosmic journeys that reveal the nature of the universe.
Nickelsburg suggests the influence of ancient Greek Nekyia, stories associated with necromancy depicting a hero’s descent into the underworld. The obvious example is in Homer’s Odyssey, Book 11 where Odysseus journeys to the underworld. But such travels are hardly exclusive to the Greeks. Consider the considerably more ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld. She undergoes trials and tests, faces death and escapes only though the intervention of the god of wisdom and magic, Enki.
Narratives of dream visions and cosmic journeys sit comfortably side by side in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh’s companion, the BeastMan Enkidu, has a dream/vision of the underworld. (This is surely the most despairing view of an afterlife possible. The Epic imagines the souls of the dead as birds, sitting in darkness, their wings encrusted with dust and filth. And this is not the fate of just the damned folks. This is everybody! These folks had a hard way of looking at things.) The Epic culminates with Gilgamesh’s quest to attain immortality by journeying under the sacred mountain Mashu to receive wisdom from Utnapishtim, the survivor of the flood, who lives in Dilmun, the Babylonian Eden. After a physical journey, like Odysseus.
There is at least one important difference between the later Jewish apocalypses and the oldest parts of 1 Enoch. In the Book of the Watchers (chpts 1-36) we have no vision of the eschatological end of the age. Instead what is foretold is the purgative cleansing of the earth through the Flood. A purification of creation. It was only later that the Flood became an image, a precursor of the eschatological end of the age so characteristic of what we assume to be the apocalyptic view. (See Matthew 24:37-39) For me this raises a question which I would love to put to these scholars. I guess this reflects my own litcrit background. Is it really best to interpret the first example of a genre in terms of characteristics of the later more developed examples?
I guess the best way to explain my point is to look at the development of the modern genre of science fiction. H G Wells wrote a series of famous books in the 1890s, still popular today, that set the tone and established ideas (time travel, invasion from space, invisibility not through magic but through chemistry, space travel, etc) that were taken up by later writers. I have heard H G Well’s work described as science fiction but that’s to interpret it through a later lens. Wells’ work wasn’t science fiction simply because the genre hadn’t been invented yet. The genre of science fiction developed as a result of Well’s work. First comes the creative foundational work and then other writers take qualities they admire and expand on it. Genre is always a secondary aspect of literature. Any original creative work is difficult to pin down and classify just for this reason. Make sense?
Wells’ described his work as “social fantasy”. He used these imaginative narrative techniques to examine social issues. They work fine as rip snortin’ adventures for sure but they also have a cultural subtext. The Time Machine satirizes the British class system. The War of the Worlds critiques British imperialism. Works like The Island of Dr Moreau demonstrate that Wells had thoroughly internalized the implication of Darwin’s ideas, a feat apparently beyond most Victorian authors. Later, lesser authors took the ideas and made them into a identifiable genre with its own cliches.
Genre studies seem very important in a lot of biblically related fields. I’m suggesting that maybe fixing a work into a genre might not be the astute analysis it’s cracked up to be. As I move through the portions of the Book of Enoch composed much later I’m going to keep an eye out for this kind of thing.
I, Enoch, alone saw the visions, the extremities of all things. And no one among humans has seen as I saw.
-1 Enoch 19:3 Nickelsburg
So, based on Prof Collin’s definition of apocalyptic, the second half of the Book of the Watchers (chpts 17-36) is a true apocalypse. But since it is the oldest example we have, we will be on the lookout for ways in which it differs from later examples just as we note where it is similar.
In chpt 16 we were left at the Throne of the Almighty who pronounced the judgement of the fallen Watchers and their twisted offspring.
Say to them,
‘You will have no peace.’
One of the articles of faith among believers is that God does not change, that He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. So it is no wonder many find it so off-putting when they encounter the mercilessness of God in the Bible. The Watchers seemed genuinely repentant. yet they are doomed. Would Jesus have forgiven the Watchers?
But then suddenly, abruptly, in chpt 17 Enoch records
And they took me and led me away to a certain place…
Later we will find out who “they” are but here Enoch immediately begins his journey without explanation. From now on he is always accompanied by an angelic messenger who interprets the sights he sees. The description is reflective of a physical journey to the beyond rather than a solitary dream/vision.
Clearly there are textual issues in the transition between chpts 16 & 17. Nickelsburg goes so far as to rearrange some of the verses in chpts 18 & 19, and the other scholars I’ve read seem willing enough to follow him. It seems clear that chpts 17-19 are a unit and it’s likely some editor took a text, lopped off the beginning (which might have consisted of an introductory narrative) and joined it to chpt 16. Yikes! Our heads spin at the idea of such a free use of these texts. This might be a good time to discuss how our modern attitudes are different than the ancients.
Secular scholars view these texts as historical artifacts to be interpreted within a cultural context. Believers view these texts as inviolate sacred scripture to be interpreted as a guide to understanding the divine will. What both these perspectives have in common is that they distance the audience from the texts. The texts are done, finished, complete in themselves. We respond to them but we don’t really interact with them.
The ancients looked at it quite differently. First of all these were oral cultures. Literature was important but secondary in the tradition. Just the opposite of our approach. (Get it in writing! Hearsay is inadmissible in court!) For the ancients these were Living Documents being put to use. Rather then being distanced from them the audience had an ongoing relationship with them. This is why we have so many textual variations. Not because these folks were clumsy or stupid but because they felt absolutely no compunction at changing stuff, adding, deleting, to suit their current needs. We might regret this, desirous as we are of of having complete texts, but that was just the way it worked.
There’s an excellent example in the gospels themselves. When we look at the way Matthew and Luke used the gospel of Mark it’s clear that while they viewed it as authoritative they certainly didn’t view it as infallible, inerrant scripture! M & L changed and rearranged and left stuff out.
That’s why the doctrines of scriptural inerrancy and infallibility, and the doctrine known as Sola Scriptura, rather than being the traditional approach to the texts, are largely a modern understanding. Any point of view that privileges the written text is at best only a few hundred years old. A product of widespread literacy and the reproducibility of texts.
So while we wish we had all the original sources that made up the book of Enoch, considering the fragmentary nature of much of what survives, we are real dang lucky to have what we have. Still…I do hope there’s a sealed jar out there buried in the sand somewhere just waiting for a clumsy Bedouin to come along and stumble upon it.
Very few believers view the books of Enoch as inviolate sacred scripture.
Well in context I refer to any believers and their relationship to their own scriptures whatever they are.
Isn’t it the text-critical scholars who at least attempt to account for the development various textual variations and traditions?
Yes of course but I’m not sure how that speaks to my point.
They may have viewed Mark as an important and valuable novelty, but they surely did not consider it authoritative, or they would not have changed it so readily.
But that’s the point. Your pov is precisely how moderns think. Matthew uses 97% of Mark’s text and Luke uses 88%. That certainly sounds like they considered it authoritative. My claim is that this authority stimulates interaction with the text in a way contrary to a modern response. Mark’s authority sanctioned Matthew & Luke’s response. They felt free to change stuff precisely because they considered it authoritative. Counter-intuitive? Yes, because we don’t think the way the ancients thought.
Focusing on 1 Enoch, the text was considered authoritative by Jews and Christians until the fourth century. Yet it has been edited and redacted all through this process. The text was part of an ongoing conversation. It was living document all through its active life. Clearly the ancients had a different sensibility towards their scriptures.
Ok I’ve been thinking about the best way to proceed. Scholars agree that chpts 17-19 are of a piece, consisting of a general narrative of Enoch’s travels through the “beyond”. The subsequent chpts expand on these travels. We’ve seen this technique previously. One chpt provides a synopsis. Subsequent chpts expand on the synopsis. I’ve likened it to a rock dropped into a pond and the ripples that spread outward. Unlike before here I will trace a single image or idea through the rest of the text of the Book of the Watchers rather than go through constant repetition of the entire journey.
For example, when I discuss God’s Holy Mountain I will discuss all references from 17-36. So we will complete the entire journey but at each discrete episode I will discuss all subsequent references together. Of course there are still going to be loose ends and one-offs!
Note: In Nicklesburg’s inexpensive translation, the Book of the watchers (chpts 1-36 of 1 Enoch), chpts 1-16 take up 30 pages while chpts 17-36 are only ten pages. I’ve already mentioned the whimsical chapter/verse divisions. The point is that the apocalypse portion of the text is the shortest part. This actually turns out to be a good thing because it allows the reader to focus on a few powerful images and ideas rather than be blinded by an overwhelming vista. (Like the Book of Revelation. Quick! Tell me what happens at the opening of the Fifth Seal. Without having to look first.)
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