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Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Name that biblical character!

WHO COULD IT BE? The Most Important Biblical Character You’ve Probably Never Heard of. One of the most influential people in the Bible is only mentioned in four verses—and his story is more a missing person case than a biography (Candida Moss, The Daily Beast).

When Professor Moss says "you," she is not talking about you, my regular readers. From the headline hint, you have already figured out that she is talking about Enoch.

This is a very good article on the current state of research on the Enochic literature. But I have one point of disagreement.

The assumption in the article is that the stories about Enoch, the sons of God and the human women, and the Nephilim in Genesis 5-6 are primary and the stories in the book of 1 Enoch, especially the Book of the Watchers and The Parables (Similitudes) are secondary expansions of Genesis. That is possible. But I read the situation differently.

To me it looks as though Genesis knew the stories about Enoch, the mating of the fallen angels (Watchers) with mortal women, and the rise of the giants.

I assume the stories were in oral form at this point. Any early written versions are probably lost. That is, unless the Book of the Watchers and perhaps the Book of Giants are as early as Genesis or earlier. The Book of the Watchers is widely dated to the third century BCE, but that is really just a guess.

In any case, Genesis didn't like these stories. But the writer couldn't ignore them. They were too well known. So Genesis, holding its nose, told them briefly, obliquely, and allusively, then quickly moved onto other things.

Sometime after the writing of Genesis, other writers who liked the stories decided they merited longer treatment. That would be how we got the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Giants, and the Parables of Enoch.

I cannot prove any of this. But others who think that the Enochic literature is derivative of Genesis can't prove their position either. And I think my reading makes better sense of the oddly brief and oblique stories in Genesis.

There are many, many PaleoJudaica posts on the Enochic literature. Too many to try to link to. If you are interested, run the search term "Enoch" throught the blog search engine.

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