Saturday, November 26, 2005

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: The Old Testament pseudepigrapha and the book of 1 Enoch made it into the news earlier this month in the North Adams Transcript in "Looking at the Bible as a great work of literature." The article interviews Edem Dekel, professor of classics and Jewish studies at Williams College. I suspect that some of the quotations are inaccurate.
The function of the Bible as literature is found not only in its own pages, but in the form of off-shoot texts that were crafted as a compliment to the official sacred ones. A second set of Hebrew books called the Pseudepigrapha — which is Greek for "written under a false names" — contains such things as "The Testament of Adam" and "The Testament of Isaac," which claim either to be written by the Biblical characters they are named after, or sometimes, just be concerned with the story behind the story of these same characters. It's a bit like Biblical fan fiction.

The pseudepigrapha survive almost entirely in languages other than Hebrew. Neither of the two works mentioned is in Hebrew.
One of the most interesting tales to pop up in the Pseudoepigrapha is the Book of Enoch, one of the so-called "begats" between Adam and Noah in the Book of Genesis. The rabbis took an interest because of the wording used to describe Enoch's life — whereas everyone else was listed as dying, Enoch's fate is described as "then he was no more."

"This was always seen as a kind of weird problem," said Dekel. "The Book of Enoch explains to us that Enoch didn't die, he was taken up while he was still alive, taken up to heaven and given a kind of world tour of heaven, of the future of the world, and he was sent to write a vision of everything that he saw that was then transmitted back to earth."

In this way, The Book of Enoch is an early form of the apocalyptic traditions that lead to later works like Revelations. In true literary form, later sections of the Bible often borrow from earlier sections in their stories as a method of not only solidifying the validity of the newer stories, but as an early form of a time-honored storytelling technique. One of the more noticeable places that this happens is in the resemblance between the births of Moses and Jesus.

"Pseudepigrapha" and "Revelation" please. Sigh.

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