Rediscovering Enoch? The Antediluvian past from the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
The books of Enoch were among the long-lost heritage of ancient Judaism recovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What they told of fallen angels, demons, the origins of evil, and the end of the world was popular among ancient Jews, including the first followers of Jesus, and Enochic books were even quoted by Jude and defended by early Christians like Tertullian. Yet the very apocalypticism that made them appealing in the Second Temple period (538 BCE-70 CE) caused their rejection by Rabbis in the second century and by Church Fathers like Athanasius and Augustine in the fourth and fifth. As a result, these writings virtually disappeared from historical view until James Bruce’s 1773 discovery of manuscripts of 1 Enoch in Ethiopia. Bruce’s discovery ushered in a new era of scholarship, marked by the recovery of forgotten forms of apocalyptic thought from Second Temple Judaism and the recognition of their influence on the origins of Christianity.
Or, at least, this is the tale that is conventionally told. But is it accurate? What was known before Bruce, and where? What precisely did Bruce find, and is it apt to describe his acts as “discovery”? What happened in its immediate aftermath? And what might we learn of the early modern reception of Enoch when we look beyond this narrative, broadening our scope beyond Bruce and the scholarly founders of the field of Second Temple Judaism? For instance, what was the image of Enoch among Jewish kabbalists and Christian Hebraists, whose sense of Enochic writings may have been more shaped by 3 Enoch and the Zohar than 1 Enoch? Or in the Slavonic Church, which long knew 2 Enoch? Or in the Ottoman Empire among Muslims for whom Enoch-Idrīs was associated with Hermes, such that his books might encompass Hermetica? And perhaps most importantly, how does this era of supposed “discovery” look when seen from the perspective of Ethiopia, where 1 Enoch was never actually “lost”?
These are the questions explored in the present volume. It collects and extends the results of our discussions of the 10th Enoch Seminar on “Enoch and Enochic Traditions in the Early Modern Period,” organized by Gabriele Boccaccini with Annette Yoshiko Reed and held on 9-14 June 2019 in Florence, Italy. Like that event, this volume seeks to bring research on Second Temple Judaism further into conversation with research on the multiple geographical and cultural contexts of its reception.
In recent years, much has been written about the impact of Enochic texts and traditions on Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity as well as on their transmission and transformation within Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. What has not yet been done, however, is to extend this line of research forward into the era of the so-called “discovery” of 1 Enoch. It is common to hail Bruce’s Ethiopic Enoch manuscripts, together with Richard Lawrence’s 1821 translation of one of them, as early milestones in the very development of academic scholarship on Second Temple Judaism as we know it today. Bruce and his impact, however, have yet to be sufficiently analyzed on their own terms or situated within their own historical and cultural contexts.
The aim of the present volume is to begin this task. Towards this aim, we have brought together specialists in antiquity and specialists in early modernity. In the process, this volume seeks to correct the habitual privileging of European Christian trajectories in past accounts of the history of research on the books of Enoch and their reception. Reassessments of Bruce and his manuscripts starkly expose the problems with the conventional narrative summarized above. Yet they also open the way for examining other perspectives on Enoch in early modernity—including in European art, philosophy, and esotericism but also among Masons, Mormons, Sufis, Lurianic kabbalists, and Ethiopian and Slavonic Christians.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodl. Or. 531, a manuscript of the book of Enoch brought from Ethiopia to Britain by James Bruce
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William Blake, ‘Enoch’ (1806–07)
Enoch is mentioned in passing in Genesis (5:21-24) as a man who lived before the Flood and “walked with God.” What makes his later reception so fascinating, however, is the degree to which it has been shaped by other sources. Genesis makes no mention of Enoch as scribe, let alone as the author of any books. But Enoch emerges as a scribal hero already in the most ancient surviving writings associated with him: the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers, commonly dated to the third century BCE, and the Book of Dreams and Epistle of Enoch, commonly dated to the second century BCE.
Fragment of Enoch preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls
The oldest textual witnesses to these works are the Aramaic fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from a period well prior to the rise of Christianity and thus confirm their Jewish provenance. Portions of these four works are also found in late antique and medieval Greek manuscripts, fragments, and excerpts transmitted by Christians—with the Book of the Watchers most heavily attested, consistent with its prominence in Patristic allusions and quotations. Even today, however, it remains that the fullest known forms of the Book of the Watchers, Book of Dreams, Astronomical Book, and Epistle of Enoch are the Ge‘ez versions collected in 1 Enoch, which Bruce’s famed manuscripts first brought to the attention of European scholarship and which reflect a long history of Ethiopian Christian transmission. This Ethiopian anthology also includes the Parables of Enoch (also called Similitudes of Enoch or Book of Parables; 1 En 37-71), which is not attested in either Aramaic or Greek.
The discovery of Aramaic Enoch fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls revolutionized scholarly research on a number of key elements of Judaism in the Second Temple period—including the emergence of apocalyptic literature, the production of so-called “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,” the spread of Jewish sectarianism, and the articulation of new concerns with demonology and heavenly ascent. Perhaps no less revolutionary, however, has been the impetus to reconsider the reception of Enochic texts and traditions in later periods as well.
Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex pseudepigraphus veteris testamenti (Hamburg & Leipzig, 1713)
Even prior to Bruce, references to books of Enoch had been collected by European scholars like Johann Albert Fabricius, due in part to the curiosity about them sparked in the wake of Joseph Scaliger’s 1606 print publication of the Greek excerpts from the Book of the Watchers in George Syncellus’ ninth-century chronography. So too after Bruce: the editions and translations based on his Ethiopic Enoch manuscripts featured further catalogues of Enochic quotations, references, and allusions, especially in Greek and Latin. In his 1821 translation, for instance, Lawrence adduced such traditions to establish that “the Ethiopic version of the Book of Enoch contains precisely the same work as the Greek version, which was known to the Fathers.” Lawrence’s catalogue, based on Fabricius, was expanded in turn by R. H. Charles.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European scholars also sought out other Enochic writings of possibly pre-Christian Jewish provenance. These included what is now commonly called 2 Enoch, a text known in full from medieval Slavonic manuscripts (also called Book of the Secrets of Enoch), and what is commonly called 3 Enoch, part of the Hekhalot corpus of pre-kabbalistic Jewish mystical writings in Hebrew (also called Sefer Hekhalot). Charles himself, for instance, worked with W. R. Morfill to produce an English translation of 2 Enoch from the Slavonic, published in 1896 and later updated with N. Forbes for inclusion alongside 1 Enoch in his 1913 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. Inspired by Charles, Hugo Odeberg published an English translation of Sefer Hekhalot under the title “3 Enoch” in 1928, arguing for its isolation from the Hekhalot corpus and its inclusion instead among “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.”
Codex Panopolitanus, in Elena Dugan, ‘Enochic Biography and the Manuscript History of 1 Enoch: The Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 140 (2021), p. 119
Scholarly interest in Enochic reception, however, continued to center on 1 Enoch, not least because of its quotation in the Epistle of Jude. These efforts further intensified in the wake of the 1886 discovery of Codex Panopolitanus, which includes portions of the Book of the Watchers in Greek, as well as the 1892 publication of Latin fragments corresponding to 1 Enoch 106. Most influentially, H. J. Lawlor took up the task of assessing evidence for the reception of the books of Enoch in Greek and Latin literature, noting the importance of this evidence both for “use as witnesses to the text of the book current in early times” and for “its history in the Christian Church and the views which were held as to its authenticity and inspiration.”
Interest in Enochic reception intensified yet again in the wake of the Dead Sea Scrolls—albeit this time with a broader horizon. Milik’s 1976 editio princeps of the Aramaic Enoch fragments included chapters revisiting evidence related to 1 Enoch but also other Enochic books, and in the process, further attended to Jewish and other non-Christian trajectories. In the decades that followed, scholars such as William Adler and James VanderKam extended Lawlor’s efforts to map the Christian reception of Enochic texts and traditions, while scholars such as Martha Himmelfarb, Philip S. Alexander, and John C. Reeves took up the task of tracing their Jewish, Muslim, and Manichaean afterlives. This line of research was a major catalyst for the late twentieth-century renaissance of research on the reception of “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha” more broadly. The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen the emergence of new collaborative conversations among specialists in Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam, inspiring a wealth of new studies mapping the dynamically interreligious diffusion of Enochica in Late Antiquity and Middle Ages.
To our knowledge, the present volume is the first book-length publication to focus on Enochic texts and traditions in the period between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, surveys of the history of research on Second Temple Judaism have treated elements of the reception of 1 Enoch in the nineteenth century, and to a lesser extent, the effects of the printing of Syncellus’ Enoch excerpts in the eighteenth century. With a few exceptions, however, these developments have been framed in terms of what they contribute to scholarship today and thus largely decontextualized. In what follows, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars are considered in their own cultural contexts, alongside their predecessors and contemporaries—and in a manner not limited to those men whom specialists in Second Temple Judaism celebrate as the founders of the scholarly field. Furthermore, our purview goes well beyond Europe, situating developments critical for the emergence of this field in relation to the reception of Enoch and his books in Ethiopia and beyond.