“I was shown another calculation.”

SETH SANDERS: Apocalyptic Science.

Strangely, the earliest known Jewish apocalypse is also the earliest known Jewish scientific work. The Aramaic fragments of the Astronomical Book of Enoch, composed in the 3rd century BCE or earlier and found at Qumran, represent the first appearance of astronomy and mathematics in Jewish literature. But this science comes in a vision. The angel Uriel takes the patriarch Enoch on a heavenly journey where he sees the clockwork of the universe: the gates through which the sun, winds and heavenly bodies regularly move.

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The editors of this earliest collection of Enochic works drew on the image, and grammar, of Moses’ passively gained vision–with the passive of the causative of the standard Biblical Hebrew verb of seeing–to frame Enoch’s own passively gained visions with the passive of the causative of the standard Aramaic verb of seeing. If the language of knowledge in Aramaic Enoch is both a reference to the Priestly Tabernacle vision and a distinctive editorial device shared between the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers, then the Aramaic evidence bears on an old question about the creation of early Enochic literature. It means that the creators of this early literature drew more subtly and deeply on the language and imagery of the Pentateuch than has previously been acknowledged.

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I would not in the first instance assume that the phrasing in Aramaic 1 Enoch was based on the description of the revelation of the Priestly Tabernacle to Moses in the Pentateuch. Rather, I would guess that both arise from the tradition of ancient Near Eastern revelatory visions such as the Sumerian account of the dream revelation of the temple of Ningursu to King Gudea of Lagash. But I haven't seen Seth's full argument and he may well have good grounds for finding a specific connection with the Pentateuch.