Enoch: a brief history of the text.
The full text as we now have it has been preserved for us through the Ethiopic Christian Church in a language known as Ge'ez. Nevertheless a number of fragments of the work have been preserved in both Greek and Aramaic allowing us to construct history of the development of the text. There are at least thirty three manuscripts of the text in Ge'ez that can be divided into two basic families, indicated by the Greek letters alpha and beta. The alpha family seems to have best preserved the ancient traditions of the text.

As we have the text, it breaks reasonably clearly into five books with an epilogue. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revealed that the texts were in fact in circulation separately at an early stage, although at a later stage collected into two manuscripts. Another important fact that arrises from the Qumran corpus is that there was no Book of Parables, ie the present second part of the Book of Enoch. This strongly suggests that the Parables is a late addition to the collection. It has further been suggested that another book, the Book of Giants (represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls), was in fact a part of the Enoch tradition.

The third Enochian book, the Book of Astronomy, is considered the oldest of those preserved, thought to have been written well before the second century. It contains a description of the structure of the universe as well as the details of a 364 day solar calendar, a calendar that seems to have been popular especially in the Dead Sea Scrolls although it is well supported by another pseudepigraphic book, Jubilees.

The first book, the Book of the Watchers, was probably written before the hellenistic crisis that led to the pollution of the temple in Jerusalem in 167 bce at the hands of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The Watchers is ostensibly about the rebellion of a group of angels (watchers) who came to earth, had relations with women, and taught people all types of secrets of the universe. This is thought to be -- amongst other things -- a covert criticism of a section of the priesthood that was engaging in marriages outside their selected caste, perhaps with foreigners.

The Dream Book or Dream-Visions contains two dreams, one of which is known as the Animal Apocalypse, a text that helps to date the Dream Book rather precisely to the end of the 160s bce. In the Animal Apocalypse there is a passage that seems to refer specifically to the actions of Judas Maccabeus, yet neither refers to the rededication of the temple nor to Judas's death.

The fifth book, the Epistle of Enoch (a name that comes from a Greek fragment of the text), was the latest of the Qumran preserved Enoch texts, perhaps written around 100 bce. The book has been badly managed in antiquity and suffered numerous reeditings. The Apocalypse of the Weeks comes from this section, though one needs to reorder the text to reconstruct it. Thus Charles broke chapter 91 up and put the first part after ch 92 and the other part after ch 93.

There are also fragments of a Book of Noah to be found in the text as well.

Ian Hutchesson