Enoch and Qumran Origins: New Light on a Forgotten Connection by Gabriele Boccaccini

Author:Gabriele Boccaccini [Boccaccini, Gabriele]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-05-21T08:43:00+00:00

Without trying to collapse these texts into one, I suggest a common thread, which claims for certain people a special identity tied to revealed wisdom. I do not wish to claim that all these texts refer to the same group, and here I share the caution of both Tiller and Knibb, and I do not wish to apply the term "sectarian" to all of them. However, I suggest a common mentality that focuses on the claim of special knowledge and sometimes chosenness, which implies that certain other people are notthe chosen and do not have this special knowledge (Nickelsburg 1985; cf. 1999; 2003b). In the Apocalypse of Weeks and, as I argue in my commentary, in one extended section in the body of the Epistle (98:9-9910), these involve an exclusivist polarity between wisdom and deceit, the wise and those who lead many astray with their lies. The same worldview appears in iQS; CD 1; the pesherim on Nahum, Psalms, and Habakkuk; as well as iQH 12(4):5-13(5):4. In other texts the polarity is more muted or not at all evident. This is the case with 4Qlnstruction.

Where I do treat the relationship between this text and 1 Enoch - thanks to John Strugnell calling it to my attention - I state that "the text's epistemology, cosmology, and eschatology suggest that it represents a strand of Israelite sapiential tradition that also lies behind 1 Enoch" (Nickelsburg 2001, 59). Revealed wisdom comprises ethical and eschatological knowledge. What I think needs to be sorted out among these texts, and others in the sapiential tradition, are the content and nature, and the claimed or unclaimed source of revealed wisdom and knowledge, and the continuum along which the positing of such knowledge brings with it its foil: deceit and deceivers, lies and liars. The problem is perhaps not altogether different from the distinction one makes between gnosis and gnosticism.

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Peter Flint discusses the identification of certain Qumran Cave 7 fragments with text from the Epistle of Enoch as attested in the Chester Beatty-Michigan papyrus (CBM) (Bonner 1937, 65; Kenyon 1941, f. n r.). This identification attests the ingenuity and the papyrological and linguistic skills of the scholars who have proposed it, but I am skeptical of the identification for two reasons.

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