Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: First Enoch

Daniel C. Olson, James D. G. Dunn, John W. Rogerson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467454742
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Olson's introduction to and concise commentary on First Enoch. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers. Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context. The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.

1 Enoch

Daniel C. Olson

Never before has 1 Enoch appeared in a Bible commentary. This is not surprising since the book is not found in any English Bibles and is missing from even the most generous editions of the Apocrypha (such as the one included in the NRSV). Enoch is therefore a unique member of the present volume and requires special treatment. Not only does its unfamiliarity demand a fuller introduction than is needed for the proto- and deuterocanonical writings, but even the bare fact of its inclusion at all in this commentary calls for an explanation.

The Book of Enoch is part of the canon of Scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; in fact, the book is often called “Ethiopic Enoch” since the complete work survives only in that language. (Another common title, “1 Enoch,” is intended to distinguish it from two later Enoch books.) Enoch is also reckoned canonical among Ethiopian Jews. As such, a biblical commentary seeking truly ecumenical and international scope might justify its inclusion on these grounds alone. However, other books unique to the Ethiopian canon are not treated in the present volume, so there are obviously other considerations at work. A historical survey may be the simplest way to explain Enoch’s long journey from the netherworld of exotic Judaica to general Bible commentary.

It has always been known that the Book of Enoch enjoyed a high reputation among the early Christians. The NT epistle of Jude even provides a citation of Enoch 1:9, respectfully prefaced: “Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying” (Jude 14–15). If we scan the Christian literature of the second and third centuries we find no lack of Enoch quotations and allusions, and these are uniformly favorable, occasionally indicating that the author accepted Enoch as authoritative Scripture. However, by the fourth century the book began falling out of favor in the church, mainly due to: (1) awareness of the exclusion of Enoch from the Jewish canon; (2) consternation over Enoch’s understanding of the “sons of God” in Gen 6:1–4 as angels; and (3) the usefulness of the book to heretics. Although Enoch was known and still read for several centuries more, eventually it ceased to be copied and was lost to most of the world, surviving only in a few scattered quotations.

The book fared worse in the synagogue. A high regard for Enoch is evident in late Second Temple writings such as Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and documents known only from the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), but the rabbinic Judaism which came to dominate public religious life among Jews after the disastrous first and second revolts (AD 66–70 and 132–135) took a dim view of apocalyptic literature such as Enoch. Although there is plenty of evidence that the angel legends found in Enoch were remembered as a kind of folklore, the book itself ceased to have any influence as a serious religious text except among some of the more esoteric schools of Jewish mysticism. Enoch was never a candidate for scriptural canonicity among the rabbis, and it appears that Jews lost track of the book long before Christians.

Reports began circulating in Europe as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century that the lost Book of Enoch had survived in the Ethiopian church, but it was not until 1773 that copies were obtained, and then another half-century elapsed before an English translation appeared in 1821. After this slow start, however, scholarship proceeded rapidly. No fewer than five German editions were published between 1833 and 1901. Newly discovered Greek manuscripts of portions of the book were published in 1844 (Enoch 89:42–49) and 1892 (Enoch 1–32), and a Latin version of Enoch 106:1–18 appeared the following year. A second English Enoch came out in 1882. Many more Ethiopic manuscripts began to surface; a 1906 critical edition collated almost two dozen, and that same year saw the publication of an important French Enoch. But it was chiefly the translation and commentary of R. H. Charles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1893; 2d ed. 1912) which ensured the book a permanent place in the scholarly spotlight. The inclusion of this landmark work in the highly successful Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (ed. R. H. Charles et al.; 2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1913) made Charles’s Enoch available to a wide readership.

From the 1920s until the early 1970s scholarly treatments of Enoch focussed primarily on the book’s messianology, or more particularly on the mysterious “Son of Man” figure described in one of its sections. Owing to its obvious potential for illuminating the “Son of Man” title in the Gospels, this feature of Enoch tended to crowd out interest in other parts of the book.

Meanwhile, more raw data continued to come to light. In 1930 a fourth-century-AD Greek manuscript covering most of the final booklet of Enoch was found (Enoch 97:6–107:2, minus ch. 105). Total Greek fragments now covered a third of the book. Small Coptic and Syriac fragments were published in 1960 and 1968. Fresh Ethiopic manuscripts of Enoch were discovered and became available on microfilm in the 1970s, some of which rank among our oldest known copies. The most sensational development, however, came in the 1950s when J. T. Milik announced that he had identified Aramaic portions of the Book of Enoch among the recently discovered DSS. After a tantalizing delay, the fragments were finally published in 1976. Tattered remains of eleven different copies had been recovered, representing four of the five constituent booklets that make up Enoch.

Although scanty, covering less than 5 percent of the book by one estimate, these Qumran finds have nevertheless revolutionized Enoch scholarship. Certain copies of the first and third booklets (the Book of the Watchers and the Astronomy Book) are datable to roughly 200 BC, indicating a third-century-BC date of composition for these booklets at the very latest. They are thus the oldest extracanonical Jewish religious writings known (Stone 1978), forcing us to rewrite the history of Jewish apocalypticism, and this at the same time that the importance of precisely this thought stream of Judaism for the understanding of Christian origins has received fresh emphasis in NT scholarship, as summed up by Ernst Käsemann’s widely quoted dictum: “Apocalyptic … was the mother of all Christian theology.”

More generally, the DSS have challenged old stereotypes and fostered a new appreciation for the vitality and diversity of Judaism in the late Second Temple period. The Qumran literature reveals a thoroughgoing apocalyptic mentality happily coexistent with fervent Torah loyalty, all within a dissident Jewish sect that nevertheless evidences surprising connections of thought with both early Christianity and nascent rabbinic Judaism. Since Qumran, old tags like “Pharisaic legalism” and “early Christian charisma” no longer distinguish anything very well. The Scrolls also raise questions about the extent of the Jewish canon during the first century AD, since not only the familiar Hebrew scriptures but also books like Enoch and Jubilees appear to have enjoyed authoritative status at Qumran. These factors, along with the actual Enoch fragments themselves, have stimulated unprecedented interest in the book.

All of this has led to an avalanche of scholarly literature devoted to Enoch since the mid-1970s (García Martínez-Tigchelaar 1989), and the editors’ decision to include this work in the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible may simply reflect the fact that a critical mass has been reached: familiarity with Enoch is no longer optional for serious Bible study. We might even say that Charles’s bold assessment nearly a century ago has been vindicated: “To the biblical scholar and to the student of Jewish and Christian theology 1 Enoch is the most important Jewish work written between 200 B.C. and 100 A.D.” (Charles 1912: vi).

INTRODUCTION

The Enochic Tradition

The Book of Enoch is a collection of five booklets and two appendices written within a distinct tradition of Jewish apocalyptic thought over a period of at least three hundred years—probably longer. Although there is room for debate on some points, the majority of scholars today believe the corpus was originally written in Aramaic, the Aramaic translated into Greek, and the Greek into Ethiopic.

Most of the Enoch booklets are composite, and as many as a dozen authors might be represented altogether. The book is therefore best thought of as an anthology, the chief literary depository of the “Enochic tradition.” Like other apocalyptically minded Jews, the Enochians believed that God would openly break into history in the near future and usher in a new age after a day of wrath and reward, but more specifically they saw this Last Judgment as profoundly connected with the first (and heretofore only) universal judgment—the Genesis flood. Thus the days of Noah were expected to yield clues for understanding the current scene.

With this in mind, we go to Gen 5:24 and read that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.” A few verses later we come across an equally cryptic passage relating how the “sons of God” took wives from among the “daughters of humans” and begot children, “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (6:1–4). Immediately following, Noah is introduced and the flood narrative begins.

These seemingly unconnected texts are fleshed out in the first section of Enoch, the Book of the Watchers, where we learn that Enoch learned both the secrets of the cosmos and the future fates of humankind in his various “walks with God.” He is allowed to return in order to give instruction to the “chosen and righteous,” preparing them in this way to face the coming judgment. Alongside the story of Enoch is an elaboration of the Gen 6:1–4 pericope. We learn of a rebellion led by a group of angels known as “Watchers” (cf. Dan 4:13, 17, 23), who sire with human women a race of violent giants and who compound this crime by spreading knowledge of the occult arts and forbidden technology. Only Enoch’s great-grandson Noah will escape with his family when the corrupted world is drowned.

The theological ramifications of these strange tales occupied Jewish minds for centuries and found expression in a stream of writings, mostly apocalypses, and mostly attributed pseudonymously to Enoch himself. To the seminal first booklet were added these later works which expand on its themes in a wide variety of ways, so that the finished Enoch represents a full-scale attempt to account for the growth of evil in the world, how it manifests itself, and how God intends to deal with it in the future.

Though Enoch arrived at its present form in piecemeal fashion, the corpus exhibits a real unity in that virtually everything in it relates to one or the other of two interwoven and contrasting myths which are already well developed in the first book:

1.the righteous man who ascended to heaven, became like one of the angels, received true wisdom, and passed on his revelations to his godly offspring for their salvation;

2.the wicked angels who fell from heaven, became like mortals, produced demonic offspring, propagated worthless mysteries, and now stand condemned to perish.

These neatly complementary myths find their resolution in the Last Judgment—a ubiquitous presence in Enoch—when God will consign to all players their final reward or punishment. The Enochic authors also exploit to great effect the typology of Genesis flood/Last Judgment (and Noah/latter-day righteous), allowing the readers to see themselves and their world within the antediluvian scene and therefore to use the twin myths as a lens for interpreting reality in their own time.

Because it is possible to read everything in Enoch as in some way elucidating either the Enoch myth or the Watcher myth (or both), it is profitable in an Enoch commentary to make frequent recourse to these paradigms, allowing us to see “Enochic theology” at work.

Dates and Provenance

R. H. Charles’s division of Enoch into five major sections has stood the test of time, and the DSS have furnished some solid paleographical data for dating the individual booklets. The components of Enoch are now conventionally organized as follows:

1.The Book of the Watchers
(BW) chs. 1–363d cent. BC or earlier

2.The Parables (or “Similitudes”) of Enoch
(PE) chs. 37–711st cent. BC to late 1st cent. AD

3.The Astronomy Book
(AB) chs. 72–823d cent. BC or earlier

4.The Dream Visions
(DV) chs. 83–90165–160 BC

5.The Admonitions (or “Epistle”) of Enoch
(AE) chs. 91–1052d cent. BC

The two appendices (chs. 106–7 and ch. 108) are usually lumped in with the AE, although their secondary status is universally recognized and their dates of composition are unknown (cf. The Appendices below).

New controversy flared up regarding the dating of the PE once it became known that this section alone was not represented among the DSS fragments (Suter 1981). By the early eighties this debate had spent itself, however, and all Enoch specialists have rejected Milik’s arguments for a late, Christian origin for the book, while a consensus has emerged which sees the PE as wholly Jewish and probably written between the late first century BC and the destruction of the temple in AD 70 (Black 1992: 161–62). Some scholars hold out for a late-first-century-AD date, largely because the booklet is missing from the Scrolls, but most critics rightly reject that argument, finding a number of different reasons for this nonappearance. In particular, the clear evidence that the Qumran community had begun to lose interest in the Enoch literature in its latter days (Milik 1976: 7, 139) adequately explains the absence there of a relatively late Enochic writing like the PE.

The question of provenance is more difficult, since the Enochic tradition originally sprang from unknown quarters. The Essenes (or “pre-Essenes”), a disgruntled band of levitical priests, the elusive “Hasidim” mentioned in the books of Maccabees, and even the Samaritans have all been assigned paternity for this apocalyptic child by various modern scholars, but solid evidence is lacking. The dates of the booklets allow us at least to organize the growth of the tradition into three phases: (1) the BW and the AB are certainly pre-Maccabean, with many scholars looking for their genesis early in the postexilic period; (2) the DV and the AE belong to the second century BC and reflect the first years of the Maccabean crisis and events just prior to it; and (3) the PE gives us a glimpse of the Enochic tradition a century or two later, but probably still pre-70 AD.

The two oldest booklets suggest a priestly and scribal origin, and nothing in either work indicates sectarianism, as is sometimes claimed. The priestly element is most obvious in the extensive attention given to the calendar in the AB. It is true that this distinctive, 364-day solar calendar has sometimes been called sectarian since it was used by the Qumran community and contrasts with the luni-solar calendar employed by the temple establishment in the Hellenistic period, but in fact no one knows when this latter system first came into official use. Some scholars have argued that the solar calendar is actually the older one, used in Jerusalem before the exile and possibly for some time afterward, because it seems likely that the same 364-day calendar was used by the priestly editors of the OT (cf. AB Introduction below, 926–28). If so, the Enochic system can hardly be labeled sectarian.

The scribal element, on the other hand, is more obvious in the BW. Clearly the authors of this book were educated and well versed in the Scriptures, and their hero is described as “Enoch, scribe of righteousness” (12:4; 15:1). As with the AB, nothing here suggests sectarian origins. Parts of the BW read like a veiled criticism of the Jerusalem priesthood, but this hardly proves that the Enochic authors categorically rejected the national cult: OT prophets, early and late, castigate unfit priests at least as harshly. There is a stratum of the BW which still respects the old northern shrine of Dan as sacred territory (13:7–9), but the finished booklet makes Jerusalem the center of the world (26:1). In both the AB and the BW the transgressions of the “wicked” may all be understood as those of the Gentiles or of real apostates from Torah Judaism, a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface (James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson)
• Abbreviations
• 1 Enoch
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