Category:Enochic Studies

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Overview

Enochic Studies / Research in the Enochic Literature is a field of research in Second Temple Judaism, that specializes in the study of Enoch and the literature attributed to him (1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, and 3 Enoch).

For a list of international specialists in the field, see Enochic Scholars.

History of research

The "Lost" Book of Enoch and Its Memory in Judaism, Islam and Christianity

For many centuries the Book of Enoch was considered to be "lost" in the West. But the memory of its supposed author remained vivid in Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

(a) Rabbinic Judaism maintained a sort of ambivalent view of Enoch, preserving both traditions which praise Enoch and traditions which rebuke him.

(b) In Islam Enoch was often identified with the prophet Idris, who is mentioned twice in the Qur'an and in the Muslim tradition is associated with the origin of writing and astronomy.

(c) Christianity (with the exception of the Ethiopic Church) eventually rejected the "canonicity" of the book of Enoch, but venerated the memory of the ancient patriarch.

Some important portions of the ancient Greek version of the Book of the Watchers resurfaced in the World Chronicle written by George Syncellus at the turn of the 9th century.

The ancient Rituale Romanum refers to Enoch together with Elijah in a prayer for the dying: Libera, Domine, animam servi tui (ancillae tuae), sicut liberasti Henoch et Eliam de communi morte mundi. Amen. (Breviarius romanus, titulus V, caput 7: Ordo commendationis animae).

The "Christian Cabbalists" were the first ones who actively tried to recover the lost Book of Enoch. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola claimed he possessed the "seventy secret books of Ezra." Among them John Reichlin (De arte cabbalistica, 1517) believed Pico had also the book of Enoch. In 1553 Guillaume Postel wrote in his De originibus that in Rome around 1536 he had met an Abyssinian priest who showed him a copy of 1 Enoch and explained its contents.

In the 16th century, the figure of Enoch also inspired leaders of millenaristic movements (the anabaptist Jan Matthys) as well as visionaries like John Dee and Edward Kelley. In 1533-34, after Melchior Hofmann predicted that Christ would return to earth, Matthys ruled the city of Munster, Germany as the "New Jerusalem," declaring that he was the prophet Enoch, whom Hofmann had said would appear just before the return of Christ. In 1583 John Dee and Edward Kelley claimed to have received from the archangel Michael portions of the Book of Enoch written in the angelic (or "Enochian) alphabet that Enoch himself used to communicate with the angels.

The Enoch Fragments of Syncellus and their publication

The Enoch Fragments of Syncellus were first published by Joseph Justus Scaliger in 1606 and discussed by Johannes Drusius in 1612. Jacques Goar translated them into Latin in 1652, when he published the editio princeps of Syncellus' Chronography.

For two centuries, until the end of 18th century, the interest of scholars remained focused on these Greek fragments, which provided the only textual evidence for 1 Enoch. They were included in works by Athanasius Kircher (Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652-54), Gottfried Vockerodt (De societatibus et re literaria ante diluvium, 1687), Scipione Sgambati (Archivorum veteris testamenti, 1703), and Johann Albert Fabricius (Codes pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti, 1713-23). The Fragments were translated into French (Pierre Jurieu, Histoire critique des dogmes et des cultes, 1704), German (Johann Christian Nehring, Neun Bücher Sibyllinischer Prophezeyungen, 1719), and partly, in English (A Universal History, vol.1, 1747; translated into Italian in 1765).

For his antiquity the character of Enoch was ofter associated (or even identified) with other mythical figures of ancient wisdom. Kircher viewed him as the founder of Egyptian Wisdom and identified him with Hermes Trimegistus. The Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (1656–1732), a leader of the Figurist movement of Jesuit missionaries in China, claimed that Enoch and Fu Xi, the supposed author of the I Ching (or Classic of Changes), as well as Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, were really the same person.

In 1710 Pompeo Sarnelli authored the first commentary on the surviving portions of the Book the Watchers. Nicolas Antoine Boulanger and Paul-Henri Thiry d'Holbach used the Syncellus fragments in their work on Enoch (1762). The 1820 Italian commentary by Daniele Manin was the last commentary of the Book of the Watchers based on the Greek of Syncellus. The "rediscovery" of the Ethiopic text and new Greek fragments during the 19th century deprived the Enoch Fragments of Syncellus of the centrality they had for two centuries in the early Enoch scholarship.

The Rediscovery of the whole Ethiopic Text of 1 Enoch (1773-1892)

As we have already seen, reports about the existence of a complete Ethiopic version of 1 Enoch first circulated in the West during the 16th century, as Guillaume Postel claimed that a copy of it was shown to him in Rome around 1536 by an Abyssinian priest. The French intellectual and collector Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) made strong efforts to recover the book but without success. The ms he purchased in 1633 thanks to the mediation of Gilles de Loches (Aegidius Lochiensis), did mention Enoch but was not a copy of the lost book of Enoch. At Rome there was indeed a copy of 1 Enoch, in the library of Card. Leonardo Antonelli; its provenance remains unknown. In 1775 the manuscript was examined by orientalist Agostino Antonio Giorgi, but remained unpublished. Shortly after Antonelli's death, it was purchased by Angelo Mai and became part of the collections of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

In 1773 the explorer James Bruce finally reached Ethiopia and brought back three copies of the Ethiopic version of the whole 1 Enoch. One copy was presented to King Louis XV of France and ended in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; a second was given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford; and the third was retained by Bruce for himself, being added to the Bodleian collections after his death in 1794. These were the first mss to be studied and published.

The First Printed editions and Translations of 1 (Ethiopic) Enoch

Silvestre de Salcy was the first scholar to publish a translation (in Latin) of portions of the Paris manuscript, with notes in French (1800). His notes were translated into German in 1801.

Eventually, Richard Laurence published in 1821 the first English translation of the whole 1 Enoch, followed by the editio princeps of the Ethiopic text in 1838. Both works were based on the manuscript at the Bodleian Library. In 1831-33 Eduard Rüppell’s expedition to Ethiopia produced Germany’s first exemplar of the book at the Stadtbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main. Two German translations (Hoffmann, 1833-38; and Clemens, 1850) and a Latin translation (Gfrörer, 1840), contributed to make the book available to the scholarly community.

In the 1830s and early 1840s, the character of Enoch held a prominent place in the revelations of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saint movement. In the Life of Moses (6-7) Enoch is introduced as a prophet of repentance, a seer, and the builder of a city "that was called the City of Holiness, even Zion" (7:19).

If at the turn of the 18th century there were only a few Ethiopic manuscripts available in Europe, during the 19th century the number of manuscripts available increased dramatically as the result of new expeditions in Ethiopia and acquisitions from antiquity dealers. By the end of the 19th century, copies of 1 Enoch were present in libraries in England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States.

In 1851 August Dilmann published the first eclectic edition based on 5 manuscripts, and in 1853 a German translation with commentary. New translations appeared: in French (Brunet, 1856), English (George H. Schodde, 1882), and Hebrew (Lazarus Goldschmidt).

The Critical Study of 1 Enoch (1893-1950)

The knowledge of 1 Enoch was advanced by the availability of a greater number of Ethiopic manuscripts and by the publication in 1892-93 of a new Greek text (containing chs. 1-32). The ms (found in 1886-87 in Egypt) gave scholars not only a text larger than the one provided by the fragments of George Syncellus, but also a better understanding of the history of transmission of the text from the Semitic original to the Ethiopic. The English translation of Robert Henry Charles in 1893 was the first to use critically all this new material, thus opening a new stage in the history of research.

It was now possible to produce the first critical editions of the Ethiopic text--by Flemming in 1901, and Charles in 1906. New translations appeared--Beer 1900 [German]; Flemming 1901 [German]; Martin 1906 [French]; Charles 1912, and 1913 [English].

The pre-Christian date of the entire document (including the Parables) seemed to be solidly established and accepted (Gry 1909).

In comparison to the numerous publications at the turn of the century, only a limited number of studies appeared between the two World Wars. Notably, the material from Enoch was included by Paul Billerbeck in his Kommentar sum Neuen Testament (1924) and in Riessler's collection of OT Pseudepigrapha in German (1928). The major new resource was the discovery (in 1929) and publication (in 1937 by Campbell Bonner) of the Chester Beatty Papyrus, which preserved the Greek text of chaps. 97-107. The scholarly discussion remained focused on issues of primary interest for Christian theologians, in particular about the figure of the Son of Man in the Book of Parables, for its implication on the origin and development of early Christology.

1 Enoch in Limbo (1951-1975)

In 1951 a dramatic announcement shook the world of Enochic Studies. Józef T. Milik confirmed the presence at Qumran of Aramaic fragments from all Enoch booklets except the Parables. The rediscovery of significant portions of the original text was the beginning of a new chapter in the history of research even though in the immediate it resulted into a major setback. Twenty-five years passed from that dramatic announcement to the actual publication of the Aramaic Enoch fragments. For all those years, 1 Enoch was in limbo. A few new translations appeared, one in Danish (1956), two in Hebrew (1956, 1958), and one in Modern Greek (1973). Not surprisingly, the only major study of the period was Matthew Black's edition of the Greek fragments in 1970. Waiting for the actual publication of the Aramaic texts was necessary—it was simply a matter of good sense.

The Publication of the Aramaic Fragments by Milik (1976-2000)

The edition of the Qumran fragments by Józef T. Milik in 1976 reopened the research on 1 Enoch. In 1978 Michael Knibb published of a new edition of the Ethiopic text, which for the first time compared it with the newly founded fragments (Knibb 1978). Three scholars led the renaissance of Enochic Studies--George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam in the United States and Paolo Sacchi (and his students and collaborators Sabino Chiala and Gabriele Boccaccini) in Europe. In the 1980s numerous new translations (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 1 Enoch within Second Temple Jewish literature.

The Enoch Seminar and the Hermeneia commentaries (2001-present)

The year 2001 marks a turning point in Enochic Studies. In the Summer 2001 the main American and European specialists in 1 Enoch gathered in Florence, Italy at the invitation of Gabriele Boccaccini for the first meeting of the Enoch Seminar, and in the Fall of the same year the first volume of the Hermeneia commentary was published by George W.E. Nickelsburg.

References

Ted M. Ehro, and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, A Manuscript History of Ethiopic Enoch," in Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.2 (2013) 87-133
Martin Fiddell, "The Book of Enoch, the Angelic Alphabet and the Real Cabbala in the Angelic Conferences of John Dee (1527-1608/9)," in The henry Sweet Society Bulletin 48 (May 2007) 7ff.
Nathaniel Schmidt, “Traces of Early Acquaintance in Europe with the Book of Enoch.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 42 (1922) 44-52.