The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

436 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
its provenance, Jewish or Christian, Palestinian or not, he is equally
puzzled. And it is an honest puzzlement. Slavonic Enoch is attested
only in Old Church Slavonic and does not seem to have been known to
any of the ancient apocalyptic literature, although it shows certain
connections with The Greek Apocalypse ofBaruch. This relationship,
however, can only serve as an instance of illumination of an obscurum
per obscurius, for the context, origin and character of the Greek
Apocalypse of Baruch itself are no better known than those of
Slavonic Enoch. 12
Attention has been drawn to various points in Slavonic Enoch which
are supposedly known in the West. Chapter 30 of the book, dealing
with the creation and naming of Adam, has most frequently been cited
in this connection. Certainly the tradition of the creation of Adam
from seven or eight elements was widely diffused: one form of it is
the text known as Adam Octipartite which circulated in a variety of
languages.
Adam Octipartite survives in Latin, Old Irish and in Old Church
Slavonic, as well as such vernaculars as Old French, Middle Dutch, 13
Old Frisian, 14 and others. Versions of the text in Anglo-Saxon are
related to the oldest Latin manuscript, 15 while M. Forster published
the Latin text from a tenth-century manuscript, and investigated its
The Books of Adam and Eve', Journal of Theological Studies NS 44 (1993),
pp. 143-56.
12. See the comments on Greek Apocalypse of Baruch by H.E. Gaylord in
James H. Charlesworth, (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 653-60. Compare in detail also his doctoral dissertation:
H.E. Gaylord, 'The Slavonic Version of III Baruch' (PhD dissertation Hebrew
University, 1983). Two dissertations are currently being written on this work in the
United States, one by E. Wright at Brandeis University and the other by D. Harlow
at Notre Dame University.
13. M. Forster, 'Adam's Erschaffung und Namengebung: Bin lateinisches
Fragment des s.g. slawischen Henoch', in ARW 11 (1907-1908), pp. 483-86.
Secondary forms occur in still further European vernaculars; see Forster, 'Adam's
Erschaffung'; E. Turdeanu, Apocryphes slaves et roumains de I'Ancien Testament
(SVTP, 5; Leiden: Brill, 1981), p. 413.
14. Fo'rster, 'Adam's Erschaffung', pp. 491-92. He gives a number of texts in
the Appendix to his article, pp. 522-529.
15. See also discussion by Turdeanu, Apocryphes slaves, p. 416. A thorough
recent study of the Old Irish and Old English texts is H.L.C. Tristram, 'Der "homo
octipartitus" in der irischen und altenglischen Literatur', Zeitschrift fiir Celtische
Philologie 34 (1975), pp. 119-53.