1 - On Subsidiary Works, Absent and Present from our Documents

Summary

This chapter will test out the hypothesis that subsidiary works, and not 1 Enoch or the five books of Enoch, are the literary wholes to which our documents best attest, and in which ancient readers were most demonstrably invested. Said differently, rather than asking our manuscripts to reveal what parts of 1 Enoch they contain, we should be asking at a slightly lower level of literary organization, and cataloging our evidence accordingly. The purpose of this chapter is to try and find the correct balance between map and territory, and to create a catalog that is usefully (but not excessively!) detailed concerning what we actually do have in our documents, so that we might better realize what we do not.

As noted above, five books make up Ethiopic Henok. The secondary literature is generally cautious when it comes to restoring the text of two of these books to Second Temple Judaea. The first, the Book of Parables, is entirely absent from the remains recovered at Qumran, leading to wild speculation about where and when it might have been written before appearing for the very first time in the material record of fourteenth-century Ethiopia. Since it does not appear in the non-Ethiopic material record, we will leave it aside for now. The second, the Book of the Luminaries, appears in such different forms at Qumran versus its purported Ethiopic “equivalent” that many scholars talk about an Aramaic Astronomical Book as a very different work from that which appears as Book 3 of Ethiopic Henok, though with some textual overlap. This leaves the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Dreams, and the Epistle as the three books whose text is often confidently imagined to belong in the library of Second Temple literature.

Even if we narrow our inquiry to tracking the appearance of three of the five Enochic books in our pre-Ethiopic material record, we are not yet at the simplest level of our textual building blocks [Table 1.2]. These three books have long been recognized to be composite in and of themselves, made up of various textual sections. In keeping with our definitions above, these textual sections stemming back to independent sites of composition would mean they represent works in their own right.