I have attended several previous Enoch Seminars. You can find posts on the seventh (2013) here, here, and here. That last post also has links to posts on the second (2003), fifth (2009) and sixth (2011) Enoch Seminars.
The Nageroni meeting on Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity? just finished up on Friday at the same venue and with some of the same participants.
Andrei Orlov's Enoch Seminar paper, "A Farewell to the Merkavah Tradition," is available here at Academia.edu.
I expect to be very busy in the coming week, so blogging may be light. But I have made sure that there will still be some new things for you every day, so please keep coming back as usual.
I am not going to post the full text of my paper, but I do want to leave you with something, so here is its Conclusion, minus a few footnotes. Have a good week.
This paper has undertaken a close look at small slice of the evidence from an important ancient Jewish apocalyptic corpus and a somewhat later Jewish mystical corpus. Any generalizations about Jewish or any other kind of apocalypticism and mysticism that appear to arise from it must be tested by a fuller consideration of the evidence from these two collections of texts, not to speak of the evidence of a wider range of apocalyptic and mystical traditions. Nevertheless, some preliminary conclusions suggest themselves.
It seems likely that some of the differences between the two collections can be explained by chronological developments of Jewish tradition, notably the evolution of angelology between the Second Temple period and late antiquity. Most obviously, named angels are rare in the biblical and Enochic literature, but have become far more common in late antique Jewish texts. The understanding of the cherubim and the living creatures as separate classes of angel may also be a later development. It is not found, for example, in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. The multiplication of appellations is more pronounced in the Hekhalot texts than in earlier literature, but this may in part be due to the mystical perspective of the texts, since a similar tendency has already begun to appear in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, which refers to “angels of glory, “angels of ornamentation” and the like. But most of the interesting differences are better viewed in phenomenological and ideological terms rather than chronological ones.
In 1 Enoch the angelic revelations are mediated by a patriarch from legendary antiquity—almost always Enoch—and these angels are sent by God. These revelations were relevant to the writers of the Enochic books and their original audience in a number of ways. They provided coveted information about the physical universe, the heavenly realm, and what should be expected at the eschaton, and also important practical information on how properly to follow the divinely ordained solar calendar. They also provided background on heavenly responses to current earthly events at the time of the Maccabean revolt. But all these revelations are mediated by Enoch or, occasionally, Noah. The only possible exception is the descent of the scribal angel to aid Judah the Maccabee in battle, perhaps passing intelligence on to him as well. But similar revelations to Enoch’s followers, the readers of the Enochic books, are never envisaged. Moreover, the one time when angels shared revelations to human beings at their own initiative, the coming of the watchers, the result was disaster.
In the Hekhalot literature the angelic revelations are mediated by certain Tannaitic rabbis and give information on the divine throne room, explain the heavenly background of certain events in legendary antiquity, and give detailed instructions for theurgic rites for the control of angels consisting of adjurations, merkavah hymns, divine and angelic names, and ritual praxes. And their message is that angelic revelations are in principle available to their readers by carrying out these theurgic rites. The various texts do not give a clear or consistent account of just who is qualified to undertake them: the Hekhalot Rabbati seems to require the practitioner to be an expert in Torah or a paragon of virtue or perhaps both (HR §234), whereas at least one component of the Sar Torah seems to say that anyone who follows the rites correctly is qualified, no matter how dull (ST §§304-305). These praxes give unmediated access to the divine realm and therefore to a form of realized eschatology, but they also offer practical theurgical powers, notably supernaturally rapid learning of Torah.
What are we to make of these two perspectives? It is possible that they come down to a different assessment of the risks associated with the crossing of the boundary between the human and angelic realms. For the writers of 1 Enoch, unmediated access to angelic revelations is an unacceptable risk except for great figures like Enoch and except when the initiative rests entirely with God. Enoch himself is so exalted that he was transformed into an angel. It is true that Judah the Maccabee may also be viewed a recipient of an angelic revelation, but his status, while less than angelic, would have been closer to that of Enoch than any of the readers of the Enochic books, and the angel acted in concert with God. From this perspective those who cross the boundary bring about chaos and ruin, exemplified by the story of the watchers, except for these great figures who act under God’s direction. Their followers, the writers and readers of the Enochic books, cannot experience such unmediated access to angels until their own apocalyptic transformation at the eschaton, when they will take on natures suitable for dwelling in the angelic realm.
But for the Hekhalot literature unmediated access to angelic revelations is appropriate for more or less anyone who follows the correct procedures as taught by the great figures of the Tannaitic rabbis, and those who do so are pleasing to God. The crossing of the human-angelic boundary is perilous and can lead the practitioner to death or madness, or bring about even worse disasters, but it can be undertaken safely by the worthy practitioner who follows the rites with full care. Such practitioners can experience proleptic interactions with angels and share with them in the worship of God in the divine throne room before the eschaton. They can even enjoy an attenuated and temporary metamorphosis of their human nature into an angelic one. The texts assume an ultimately apocalyptic eschatology, but show little interest in it because their attention is focused on the realized eschatology offered in them.
By this interpretation the followers of Enoch believed they could benefit from his divinely sanctioned interactions with angels, but they dared not seek such interactions themselves because the perils were too great before their own transformation at the eschaton. The Hekhalot practitioners, however, believed that the teachings of their masters gave them both the wherewithal and the divine sanction to experience such interactions themselves here and now. To paraphrase the old eleemosynary saying, Enoch gave his followers fish, but the Hekhalot rabbis taught their followers how to fish.
There is much to commend this understanding of the texts, but I have two reservations about it. First, although the ideology of the Hekhalot literature is presented reasonably directly, the one reconstructed here for the Enochic literature is inferential and depends on our generalizing a lesson from the story of the watchers, namely, that revelations from angels are too dangerous for lesser mortals to seek without direct divine sanction. The texts may imply this lesson, but they do not teach it explicitly, and it is risky to assume that there is a transparent moral to a story as profound and entertaining as that of the watchers.
Second, even if this is an intended message of the Enochic books, it is difficult to say how much their ideology regarding the human angelic boundary represents (Jewish) apocalypticism in general, while the contrasting ideology of the Hekhalot literature represents (Jewish) mysticism in general. There are reasons to be cautious. The sharp delineation of the human-angelic boundary in 1 Enoch arises to a large degree from the story of the watchers and this story does not figure in every Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic work. Some, including the Book of Daniel, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch, present their human protagonist as initiating angelic interactions by means of the sorts of rituals known cross-culturally to generate such experiences. These works do not obviously imply that only such figures from legendary antiquity could use such rites and the ideology operative in the Enochic literature should not be assumed for them too. Moreover, the Book of Revelation presents us, unusually, with an apocalypse that seems to be written in the name of its actual author. It is unclear what John means when he says that he was “in the spirit on the Lord’s day,” in an isolated setting (1:10), but it could certainly be taken to mean that he was undertaking ritual praxes at a sacred time in order to initiate the vision that followed. And although John was still mediating the revelations for his followers, he was not an exalted figure of legendary antiquity and the book does not in any direct way rule out the possibility that its readers could also have similar visions.
As a form of mysticism, the Hekhalot literature allows for human initiation of contact with the divine for the purpose of experiencing the divine in a much more direct way than is possible in normal day-to-day life. But the specific combination of ritual praxis and recitation of adjurations, hymns, and names; the specific ideology of a perilous spiritual world that can be safely navigated by these means; and the specific goals of liturgical union with the angels, domination of angels for theurgic purposes, and even attenuated, temporary, angelification of the practitioner himself, call out for comparison with other forms of mysticism. But such comparisons are outside the scope of this paper.
I close, then, not by offering any definitive conclusions, but rather some synthetic observations about a small slice of our evidence for ancient and medieval apocalypticism and mysticism and some reflections on where those observations may lead us in a wider consideration of the evidence.