The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE ROMAN AND BYZANTINE PERIODS 107
for those who will come after him and keep the Law in the last days' (En.
108: i). Two phrases, at least, of this text seem to point, in guarded and
obscure terms, to the doctrine of the ultimate salvation of all sinners (En.
108: II, 14-15): *And now I will summon the spirits of the good who belong
to the generation of light, and I will transform those who were born in
darkness, who in the flesh were not recompensed with such honour as their
faithfulness deserved . . . And they (sc. the faithful) shall see those who were
born in darkness led into darkness, while the righteous shall be resplendent.
And the sinners shall cry aloud and see them resplendent, and they (sc.
the sinners ?) shall go where days and seasons are prescribed for them.'
The doctrine that sinners will be saved at last by the prayers of the righteous
is, rather obscurely, enunciated in the Apocalypse of Peter (composed about
the beginning of the second century): 'My Father will give unto them all the
life, the glory, and the Kingdom that passes not away' (according to the
Ethiopic version contained in the Books of Clement): then, in the Second
Book of the Sibylline Oracles (a paraphrase, in this part, of the Apocalypse
of Peter): 'He shall grant them (sc. the godly) to save men out of the fierce
fire and the eternal gnashing of teeth'; and more especially in the Coptic
Apocalypse of Elias, which exhibits the closest formulation to En. 108:
'The righteous will behold the sinners in their punishment, and those who
have persecuted them and delivered them up. Then will the sinners on their
part behold the place of the righteous and be partakers of grace. In that day
will that for which they (sc. the righteous) shall often pray, be granted to
them', etc.I
THE SLAVONIC ENOCH AND
OTHER ENOCHIC
WRITINGS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
It is one of the chief merits of A. Vaillant's edition of the Slavonic Enoch
('2 Enoch') that it has established definitively the respective value of the
two recensions of this work, the long and the short.^ Taking as his startingpoint
manuscripts already published, ^ Vaillant proves beyond doubt that,
in spite of the deficiencies of existing copies, it is the short form that represents
the original text of the version, made in the tenth to eleventh centuries
^ See M. R. James, The Apocryphal New par Tlnstitut d'fitudes Slaves, iv, Paris 1952).
Testamenty pp. 520-1 and 524.
3 Especially those published by M. Sokolov
* A. Vaillant, Le Lime des Secrets d^Hinochy in Gtenija of the University of Moscow, 1899
texte slave et traduction frangaise (Textes publics and 191 o.