“The Origins of the Book of the Watchers as ‘Apocalypse’ and its Reception as ‘Apocrypha’” more

The Book of the Watchers – A conversation with Paolo Sacchi but so did Ezekiel also, who was the first person who wrote, and left behind him in writing, two books concerning these events. 55 In the first passage, Josephus probably echoes Deut 4:2 (“You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it; that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you”), whereas in the latter he provides us with a more realistic picture of the situation of the “biblical” literature of his time. These few remarks are intended merely as a prompt to further discussion. Sacchi’s importance is beyond dispute. All of his work unites the highest acumen with the most brilliant insight and erudition. It is impossible not to profit from him, and his studies will in all probability long remain among the basic resources for our understanding of this fascinating period of Jewish history. Corrado Martone The Origins of the Book of the Watchers as “Apocalypse” and Its Reception as “Apocryphon” How do we fit the Book of the Watchers within the history of Judaism as we know it? To answer this important question, Paolo Sacchi’s essay puts the familiar concepts of “apocalyptic” and “apocrypha” to fresh use. In the process, he demonstrates – with his usual elegance of argumentation, creativity of thought, and masterful skills of synthesis – the value of revisiting our understanding of Second Temple Jewish history in light of the evidence of the Book of the Watchers. Sacchi proposes that the authors of the Book of the Watchers played a pivotal role in creating the apocalyptic genre, and he investigates their motives. Many scholars – myself included – have stressed the importance of distinguishing the apocalyptic genre from apocalyptic eschatology, often to the degree that we have considered questions of genre in relative isolation from the content thereby conveyed. Likewise, we have often been so preoccupied with tracing the genre’s prehistory (prophetic and/or priestly and/or sapiential and/or mantic and/or visionary) that we have paid less attention to the question of why the genre emerged precisely when and where it did. For an answer, Sacchi looks to the Book of the Watchers’ points of contrast with texts now in the Tanakh. He proposes that its location of knowledge in heaven is inherently incompatible with the “Zadokite Judaism” of those Jewish texts that came to be canonical. Reading the Tanakh as the product of the Temple establishment, he suggests that the authors of the Book of the Watchers “struck violently against the tradition” 56 The Book of the Watchers – A conversation with Paolo Sacchi by appealing directly to heaven without Mt. Sinai as a mediating space and by selecting a pre-Mosaic sage as pseudepigraphic revealer. In his view, then, the Book of the Watchers was “apocryphal” from its very origins: its authors wrote in full awareness that their creation was “destined to remain both secret and ignored.” We should be grateful to Sacchi for raising these complex issues in such an incisive and thought-provoking fashion. In what follows, I would like to respond to his essay by experimenting with an alternate approach both [1] to the Book of the Watchers’ origins as “apocalypse” and [2] to its reception as “apocryphon.” [1] Sacchi is rightly famous for resisting a purely generic approach to the study of apocalypses. Accordingly, he here reminds us that we cannot extricate an author’s choice of genre from his/her values and assumptions. In the Book of the Watchers, the medium is much of the message: the genre apocalypse embodies a distinctive epistemology and cosmology, which locates true knowledge in heaven and which accounts for its trustworthy transmission to earth with appeal to the revelations granted to select scribevisionaries. The result, moreover, is a radical devaluation of earthly knowledge. To whom, however, does this radical move respond? For Sacchi, the answer is to be found in what he terms “Zadokite Judaism.” Yet, in my view, there is little in the Book of the Watchers to support the contention of a violent departure from Pentateuchal, prophetic, or priestly precedents.99 The epistemology, cosmology, and genre of the Book of the Watchers can be readily interpreted as an extension and development of ideas about knowledge, writing, and access to divine knowledge in Ezekiel and other works of late biblical prophecy.100 Even if the feet of biblical prophets may stay planted on earth, it is claimed that their words – like those of the Torah before them – come straight from God. Likewise, the absence of explicit appeal to Torah and Temple in the Book of the Watchers might not be as radical as it first might seem; for precedents and parallels, we need only look to the sapiential literature from which the Book of the Watchers draws so many of its main themes.101 To what, then, could the Book of the Watchers’ devaluation of earthly wisdom respond? Another possible answer could be found in developments in the Hellenistic age.102 As with contemporaneous Near Eastern sources, For a “softer” reading of the Book of the Watchers’ polemic against priests see Boccaccini, Beyond, p. 78. 100 Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven. 101 Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, pp. 38-39, 50-53, 58-61. 102 Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, pp. 170-71; pace Sacchi’s location of the core ideas of the Book of the Watchers in the Persian period. The Watchers of 1 En. 6-11 may not function as symbols for the Diadochi in the same direct sense that symbols function in later historical apocalypses, and the Book of the Watchers may not express active opposition to Hellenism of the type that we see in the Maccabean age, but it does seem shaped by the more subtle modes 99 The Book of the Watchers – A conversation with Paolo Sacchi 57 the Book of the Watchers’ epistemological and literary choices may reflect the encounter with Greek wisdom in the wake of Hellenistic conquests. The Greek concept of “authorship” stands in stark contrast to the anonymity of ancient Israelite literature. On one level, we can thus read the rise of pseudepigraphy in Second Temple Judaism as an expression of the broader impulse to match the famous authors and sages of the Greeks with famous scribe-sages of a more distant past.103 Pseudo-Eupolemus, for instance, expresses the same impulse within the framework of the genre of Hellenistic historiography – also with reference to Enoch (Eusebius, Praep. Ev. 9.17.8). Through the apocalyptic genre, however, it can be taken even further: after all, Enoch functions in the Book of the Watchers, not only as “author” and teacher, but also as a conduit for truths that come straight from heaven. Tacit, perhaps, is a rejection of Greek wisdom as both suspiciously new and inherently earth-bound. The encounter with Hellenistic culture may also help to explain why we find the same generic conventions utilized in the Astronomical Book, either before the Book of the Watchers or around the same time. Just as the Astronomical Book’s astronomy resists Hellenistic science,104 so it authorizes its own teachings with the claim that Enoch visited heaven and learned about celestial cycles from their angelic overseer: whereas the astronomers of other nations peer up at the sky, Enoch traveled there, and Jews possess his writings. Likewise, the Book of the Watchers’ preoccupation with the corrupting power of false knowledge proves particularly poignant when read as a defense of Israel’s intellectual heritage in the face of the growing prestige of Greek wisdom. In the wake of Hellenistic conquests, some Near Eastern scribes, like Berossus, were similarly redeploying ancient traditions and mounting claims to possess wisdom far more ancient than the Greeks; others were developing new literary forms in which to express their hopes for vindication.105 The broader cultural context may also point us towards a different perspective on the rhetoric of secrecy in the Book of the Watchers. Far from suggesting that the Book of the Watchers was meant to be esoteric – transmitted in secret among Enochians and ignored by other Jews – its appeal to heavenly secrets may be intended to establish the mechanisms ____________________ of response and resistance characteristic of Near Eastern reactions to Hellenistic culture in the third century BCE. 103 A.Y. Reed, “Pseudepigraphy, Authorship and the Reception of ‘the Bible’ in Late Antiquity,” in The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity, ed. L. DiTommaso – L. Turcescu (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 104 M.E. Stone, “Enoch, Aramaic Levi, and Sectarian Origins,” JSJ 19 (1988), p. 164; also A.Y. Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism?,” forthcoming in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses. 105 J.J. Collins, “Jewish Apocalyptic against its Hellenistic Near Eastern Environment,” BASOR 220 (1975), pp. 27-36; J.Z. Smith, “Wisdom and Apocalyptic,” in Visionaries and their Apocalypses, pp. 101-20. 58 The Book of the Watchers – A conversation with Paolo Sacchi through which true knowledge is transmitted. Because of biblical heroes like Enoch, we are told that some heavenly secrets are now openly available on earth – but only among the writings of the Jews. [2] Why, then, was the Book of the Watchers rejected by Rabbis? For Sacchi, its exclusion from the Tanakh is a marker of its opposition to the “Zadokite” Temple establishment of its own time and its resultant incompatibility with the Judaism of later Rabbis. We might question, however, the assumption of a continuity between the Second Temple priestly establishment and the early Rabbinic movement. For Sacchi, their purported shared appeal to the Tanakh suffices to align them against those who wrote and read “apocrypha.” Arguably, however, the Rabbinic abandonment of the Book of the Watchers formed part of an overarching rejection of priestly and scribal models of authority – including those of Temple scribes and priests.106 The richness of the Book of the Watchers’ reception-history may also shed doubt on Sacchi’s suggestion that this apocalypse was fated, from its very origins, for “apocryphal” status. In the centuries after its composition, the Book of the Watchers seems to have been widely accepted as an “apocalypse,” namely, as a record of the revelation of heavenly knowledge to a human being. Moreover, it contents were interpreted – in texts as diverse as the Book of Jubilees and Justin Martyr’s 2 Apology – as complementary and supplementary with the revealed knowledge contained in the Mosaic Torah and other biblical texts. The Book of the Watchers does not seem to have been perceived as a source of non-Mosaic wisdom. Rather, the early reception-history of the Book of the Watchers is inextricably linked to the history of interpretation of Genesis.107 Moreover, a surprising number of early Christians seem to have viewed the Book of the Watchers as a work of prophecy. Irenaeus presents information from the Book of the Watchers as part of what the Holy Spirit “proclaimed through the prophets” (Adv. Haer. 1.10.1), and Athenagoras discusses the Enochic myth of angelic descent in the context of recounting what “the prophets have declared” (Leg. 24-26). Much like Jude before him (14-15), Tertullian refers to Enoch’s words as “prophecies” (Idol. 4). These second and third century authors drew from Enochic books as from other Jewish scriptures, without distinguishing the Book of the Watchers as a source of secret knowledge.108 Interestingly, when Augustine rejects Enochic books as “apocryphal,” his stated concern is not with their esoteric and/or anti-Mosaic content but Reed, Fallen Angels, pp. 136-47. Reed, Fallen Angels, pp. 84-121. 108 Reed, Fallen Angles, pp. 151-55. In Origen’s early writings, we find Enochic books treated in much the same way (e.g., Princ. 1.3.3; 4.4.8); J.C. VanderKam, “1 Enoch, Enochic Motifs, and Enoch in Early Christian Literature,” in The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity, ed. J.C. VanderKam – W.A. Adler (Van Gorcum: Assen, 1996), pp. 5455. 107 106 The Book of the Watchers – A conversation with Paolo Sacchi 59 rather with the trustworthiness of their transmission. He acknowledges that Enoch wrote books. In light of the rejection of Enochic books by Jews of his own time, however, he questions whether these writings were corrupted in the long course of their transmission; for him, they are simply too ancient to be trusted (Civ. 15.23; 18.38). For earlier Jews and Christians, the Book of the Watchers’ claim of extreme antiquity seems to have been an advantage, helping to assert Israel’s possession of revealed wisdom far more ancient than the knowledge of the Greeks. By the fifth century CE, however, many Christians shared the Greco-Roman view of the distant past as a hazy realm of myth; for them, the Book of the Watchers’ claims to antiquity were a detriment to its acceptance. In my view, the evidence of the Book of the Watchers’ reception-history may thus point to the potential pitfalls in Sacchi’s suggestion of its “apocryphal” nature. It is always tempting to read non-canonical texts through the lens of modern assumptions about “apocrypha” – whether by assuming that diverse “apocrypha” reflect a unified esoteric movement, by dismissing their authors and readers as socially marginal, and/or by romanticizing their role in history as solely one of resistance. When we do so, however, we may risk wrongly relegating books like the Book of the Watchers to the status of the lost and suppressed. Sacchi rightly seeks to recover the Book of the Watchers’ significance for our understanding of Second Temple Judaism. What he might miss, in the process, is its continued place in Jewish and Christian history. Far from being the forgotten voice of “a vanishing variety of Judaism,” the Book of the Watchers influenced Christianity during its first formative centuries, and it continues to shape one of our most ancient churches, namely, the Ethiopian Orthodox. In Judaism, moreover, it may have reemerged in the Middle Ages to inform reflection on biblical interpretation, angelology, and the earliest stages of human history.109 Annette Yoshiko Reed Enochic and Babylonian Traditions: Some Proposals Since Smith’s rediscovery of the Babylonian Flood story, many are the motifs attested in the Bible and other pre-Christian Jewish texts for which scholars accept a Mesopotamian origin. But only recently have scholars assumed a correct historical approach in dealing with these aspects, as shown, for instance, in the fundamental studies on the subject involved here conducted by VanderKam, Kvanvig and Sacchi. A correctly rooted historical approach may help us to better understand the relationship with 109 Reed, Fallen Angels, pp. 233-272.