The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

io8
INTRODUCTION
from Greek into the old western Slavonic of Macedonia, if not Pannonia.^
The Greek text from which this translation was made still existed in the
thirteenth century; it is quoted in the Greek treatise entitled the Debate of the
Panagiote and the Azymite (i.e. of the Orthodox and the Latin) known
through two Slavonic versions.^ The translation itself is attested for the
first time in the fourteenth century by some extracts incorporated into a
juridical collection called Merilo Pravednoey 'Just Balance', which is preserved
in a manuscript of the monastery of the Trinity and St. Serge of the mid
fourteenth century, and in three others of the fifteenth to seventeenth
centuries.
For the edition the choice of the basic manuscript was simple. There are
only two complete manuscripts of the original text, U (Uvarov collection no.
3 (i8), fifteenth century, written in the Novgorod-Pskov region of Russia)
and B (Barsov collection, seventeenth century, of Russian origin); and U
is by far the better, or rather the less bad.3 The original text underwent a
double revision: the first, with very long elaborations, is represented by R
(Belgrade, Nat. Library, no. 321, sixteenth century, of middle-Bulgarian
redaction in a poor Slavonic of Moldavia); and the second, which was
made from i?, with modifications and some additions, is represented by
two manuscripts, *S (sixteenth century, in middle-Bulgarian of Moldavia)
and P (A.D. 1679, of Ruthenian redaction). The first reviser, 'un amplificateur
enrag^ qui croit n^cessaire de d^verser dans un texte toute son Erudition',
did his work between the second half of the thirteenth century and the
sixteenth century in the Bulgaro-Serbian area; he was perhaps a writer of the
group of Vladislav the Grammarian, which fiourished in the second half of
the fifteenth century.
Western scholars became familiar with the Slavonic Enoch through the
German translations of N. Bonwetsch (1896 and 1922) and the English
translation of R. MorfiU (1896). Essentially they represented the long form
or else a short version, made by abridgement, of the long recension.^ At
that time the work in this long form was dated to the first century A.D. and
attributed to an Egyptian Jew or else to a Judaeo-Christian. But N. Schmidt
dated the short recension, which he considered to be Jewish and Palestinian,
to the first century A.D., and the long recension, which he considered to be
^ For an earlier statement of this view see their affiliation see Vaillant, loc. cit., pp. v-vii
N. Schmidt, J AOS xii (1921), 307-12. and xxiv-xxv.
2 Vaillant, pp. xvi-xvii. * For the last mentioned, see F. Repp,
3 For other manuscripts and the table of Wiener slawistisches Jahrhuch, si (1^62)y S^-^^'