Category:Parables of Enoch (text)

The Parables of Enoch is a Jewish writing, a section of 1 Enoch, generally included in collections of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.

This page is edited by David W. Suter, St Martin’s University (Lacey, WA), United States of America

Overview

Also known as the Similitudes of Enoch, this work comprises chapters 37-71 of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. It is a Jewish apocalypse that is likely to be dated from the early to mid first century CE, or perhaps in the latter part of the first century BCE. It was initially composed either in Aramaic or Hebrew but at present is preserved only in Ge’ez (ancient Ethiopic) as a part of the Ethiopic version of 1 Enoch.

The Parables of Enoch is divided into three sections, each designated as a “parable,” in which the sage Enoch is lifted into heaven and shown visions of a messianic figure being named and seated in judgment in conjunction with the celestial praise of the angels and the revelation of cosmological secrets. The meaning of “parable” (Hebrew mashal or Aramaic metal) in this context seems to indicate some sort of comparison between celestial and cosmological order on one hand and the disorder of human society on the other, to be set right by an act of judgment by the messianic figure revealed in each of the parables. The comparison between nature and humanity has its origin in the Wisdom tradition of ancient Israel, from whence it passes over into the ideology and formal expression of apocalyptic literature. The designation of mashal does not reflect a genre per se (there are a number of genres or literary types associated with the mashal) but rather the use of a variety of topics that are typical of meshalim. The Parables of Enoch addresses the fate of the righteous and the wicked through a patterned set of likenesses linking cosmology and eschatology.

The work is noted for the distinctive character of its "Son of Man"/”Elect one” angelomorphic messianism based on Daniel 7 and the Servant Songs of Deutero-Isaiah, for its revelatory scenes set in the temple of heaven in which the praise of the angels presages the celestial worship in the later Jewish Hekhaloth literature, for its continued interest in the cosmological lore characteristic of the Enochic tradition in Early Judaism, and for its advancement of the pseudonymous career of the sage Enoch, the recipient of the revelations of “that Son of Man” seated upon “his glorious throne” to judge “the kings and mighty of the earth.” In an addendum at the conclusion of the Parables, Enoch is informed that he is “that Son of Man.” While this final revelation seems incongruous with the Parables as a whole, where Enoch is the recipient rather than the subject of the revelation, it may well anticipate Enoch’s metamorphosis into an angelic or celestial being in later examples of the Enochic literature.

Other features of note include an interest in the fall of the Watchers derived from the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), which the Parables links to the fate of the kings and the mighty, and several passages associated in one way or another with the figure of Noah rather than Enoch. In general, scholars tend to consider the Parables of Enoch to be a critique of the oppression of the Romans and their clients. It is quite possible, for example, that the crisis that precipitates the work is the oppressive policy of Herod the Great or the effort of Gaius Caligula to install his statue in the Holy of Holies of the Temple.

The Parables became prominent in the 1970’s when J.T. Milik announced that it was not included in the Aramaic fragments of Enoch discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, opening a heated controversy among scholars concerning its dating and its implications for messianism in early Judaism and the associated Jesus movement. Milik’s effort to treat the Parables as a third century Christian document composed in Greek on the basis of the gospels has been soundly rejected by other scholars, who tend to date the work as a Jewish document composed somewhere between the coming of Rome to the region and the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 C.E. Such a dating represents a fairly narrow window in time for the composition of the work; however, where one dates the document during this period can make a dramatic difference in how one reconstructs the religious history of the time.

Manuscript tradition

Synopsis

The Parables of Enoch in Scholarship (History of research)

As soon as the Book of Enoch was made available in modern translations (Laurence 1821 [English]; Hoffmann 1833-38 [German]; Dillmann 1853 [German]; Brunet 1856 [French]) as well as in its Ethiopic text (Laurence 1838; Dillmann 1851), the messianic theology of the Parables dramatically changed the terms of the then incipient scholarly debate on the meaning of the Son-of-Man sayings in the New Testament, which was still anchored to Patristic categories (Less 1776; Scholten 1809). Since the second century CE with Ignatius of Antioch (Ephesians 20:2), there was in fact a well established tradition in the Christian Church to interpret “son of man” as a reference to the humanity, humility and lowliness of the divine Messiah, “Son of God”—a tradition that the flourishing of Semitic studies after the Reformation had accepted and strengthened.

Now facing the idea of a seemingly heavenly, superhuman Messiah Son of Man in ancient Judaism, a passionate controversy divided philologists and theologians on opposite sides. For the editors and translators of 1 Enoch, the text (including the Parables) was clearly a pre-Christian Jewish text; New Testament scholars and theologians instead looked at it with suspicion and diffidence. The problem was made even more complex by the fact that, contrary to other sections of 1 Enoch, the Book of Parables did not seem to contain any explicit historical allusions, nor could it claim a clear record of quotations in ancient Jewish or Christian literature. It was relatively easy to dismiss the opinion of those early interpreters who had questioned the antiquity and Jewishness of the entire book of Enoch (Hofmann 1852; Philippi 1868). But concerning the Parables the debate would never reach a consensus.

Theological and apologetical concerns certainly played a major role. On one hand, the book highlights the diversity of ancient Judaism and challenges the centrality of the Mosaic Torah as the foundational and permanent element of Jewish identity. On the other hand, the idea that Jesus or his disciples could have “learned” from a non-canonical, pseudepigraphical Jewish text seemed to diminish the uniqueness and originality of the Christian message. There were exceptions, notably, Heinrich Ewald and Wilhelm Baldensperger, who quite enthusiastically took the Parables as the main source for their understanding of Jesus’ messianic preaching (Ewald 1857; Baldensperger 1888). But many maintained a later Christian date for the composition of the Parables (Hilgenfield 1857), or at least for its Son-of-Man passages (Drummont 1877). Most New Testament scholars just ignored the document, claiming that the evidence for its pre-Christian origin was too dubious to be used.

At the turn of the century, new editions of the Ethiopic text (the real first critical editions by Flemming 1901, and Charles 1906) as well as new translations (Charles 1893, 1912, and 1913 [English]; Beer 1900 [German]; Flemming 1901 [German]; Martin 1906 [French]; Riessler 1928 [German]) marked the affirmation of 1 Enoch in the field of Judaic Studies. The pre-Christian date of the entire document (including the Parables) seemed to be solidly established and accepted (Gry 1909; Frey 1928), as well as the notion of the “Son of Man” as a pre-existent heavenly Messiah. The idea penetrated even more conservative Christian settings, under the suggestion that the fact that Jesus used the term of himself could be taken as evidence of a clear consciousness of his own divinity or pre-existence in heaven (Roslaniec 1920). Yet, ironically, the more the Book of Parables was understood as evidence of pre-Christian Judaism, the more the skepticism about the value of the text for Christian studies grew as a consequence of the rising anti-Semitism and the predominant theological tendency to dismiss the Jewish features of the preaching of the historical Jesus and of the early Church as the remains of a continuity to be demythologized, in order rather to stress the elements of discontinuity. There continued to be some remarkable exceptions, notably, Wilhelm Bousset and Martin Werner, who more than anybody else emphasized that the preaching and self-understanding of Jesus as well as the faith of the first Christian communities grew and developed around the concept of the Son of Man as an angel-like Messiah and explored the revolutionary implications of such a view for a reconstruction of the developments of early Christology (Bousset 1913; Werner 1941).

A new situation arose after the Second World War with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Just when the conditions after the shock and tragedy of the Holocaust had eventually become more favorable for a reappraisal of the importance of Jewish traditions for Christian origins, and the analysis of Sjöberg on the reference to the Parthians in chap. 56 seemed finally to link firmly the text to an actual historical event in the first century BCE (Sjöberg, 1946), the study of the Book of Parables suffered a major setback. The presence at Qumran of Aramaic fragments from all Enoch booklets except the Parables prompted the editor, Josef Milik, to claim in 1951 that this fact provided conclusive evidence in support of the skeptics, who had never ceased to suspect that the Book of Parables did not exist at all in pre-Christian times and had to be a later composition inspired by the Gospels (Milik, 1951, 1959).

Twenty-five years passed from that dramatic announcement to the actual publication of the Aramaic Enoch fragments. Although there were some who tried immediately to dismiss the absence of the Parables from Qumran as purely accidental and consequently devoid of significance, it was little more than a voice crying in the wilderness (Thompson 1960-61). Due to the lack of conclusive data, waiting for the actual publication of the fragments was necessary—it was simply a matter of good sense. Unless one’s argument could not be contradicted by Milik’s assertion, nobody wished to plough the sands (Hindley 1968; Theisohn 1975). For all those years, the Parables were in limbo.

Even after it became apparent that the publication of the Aramaic fragments by Milik had not fulfilled his promises to provide a conclusive answer (Milik 1976), it took many years for the research in the Book of Parables to recover and regain momentum. Nobody accepted the third-century date proposed by Milik, but the absence of the book from Qumran continued to puzzle the specialists and push them toward a post-70 date (Knibb 1979; Jas 1979), although more and more scholars dared to challenge this trend. (Greenfield and Stone 1977; Suter 1979; Mearns 1979; Bampfylde 1984; Black 1985). The notion of an apocalyptic Son of Man was dismissed and then re-entered, back and forth in the scholarly discussion so many times that, with a few conspicuous exceptions (Charlesworth 1985, 1988; Caragounis 1986), scholars in Christian Origins seemed to have lost any confidence in the possibility of using the document as a reliable source for any historical reconstruction of the earliest developments of the Jesus movement (see Burkett 1999). However, the publication of a new edition of the Ethiopic text (Knibb 1978) and numerous translations in the 1980s (Fusella 1981 [Italian]; Corrente/Piñero 1982 [Spanish]; Isaac 1983 [English]; Knibb (1984) [English]; Uhlig 1984 [German]; Black (1985) [English]; Caquot (1987) [French]) laid the foundation for a reevaluation of the importance of the document within Second Temple Jewish literature. Credit goes to the leadership of scholars such as George Nickelsburg in the United States and Paolo Sacchi (and his school) in Europe, who even in the darkest times kept the flame alive and did not waver but insisted on the centrality of the Parables for Second Temple Jewish and early Christian studies (Nickelsburg 1978, 1981, 1992; Sacchi 1981, 1990; cf. Boccaccini 1991).

The contemporary renaissance of Enochic studies has now vindicated their position. This new phase of research is characterized by a fresh look at the Parables within the complexity of Jewish thought and the development of Enochic Judaism (Boccaccini 1998; Nickelsburg 2001; Jackson 2004). Contemporary scholars have underlined the diversity of competing expectations and speculations about mediatorial figures and messiahs in Second Temple Judaism (Neusner 1987; Charlesworth 1992; Boccaccini 2005). By the mid-1990s scholars appeared once again comfortable in locating the Parables in pre-70 Judaism (Collins 1992; Slater 1995; 1998). The emphasis has shifted from the absence of the Parables from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the question of why the Qumran sectarians – representatives of just one of the many Judaisms of the time – might not have agreed with the theology of this Enochic booklet and thus rejected it (Boccaccini 1997, 1998; Chialà 1997; Nickelsburg 2001; Sacchi 2003). The relationship between the Enochic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls and between the Enoch group and the Qumran community is indeed fascinating; contemporary research has just begun to explore the subject.

The Enoch Seminar at Camaldoli (2005) and the publication of the second volume of Nickelsburg’s commentary on 1 Enoch (2011) mark the climax of the contemporary rediscovery of the Book of Parables. They are the corner-stones for future research. Nickelsburg already made clear his position in the introduction to his English translation of 1 Enoch (co-authored with James VanderKam): “the Parables can be dated sometime around the turn of era… At the very least, the description of the Chosen One/son of man… is presumed in the gospel tradition about Jesus, the Son of Man.” (Nickelsburg and VanderKam 2004, 6; cf. Olson 2004).