The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

I20
INTRODUCTION
women point out to them the route to be followed. They arrive at a region
with a mountain of gold; in a church containing a statue of the Virgin Mary
with Child, situated in a city of gold, they find only two old men who lodge
in two narrow rooms of the cloister:
Surgentes pariter verba dedere senes.
Rex noster Deus est, coeli terraeque creator.
Cherubin et Seraphin custodibus urbs habitatur,
Angelici cives moenia nostra tenent.
Cantibus angelicis solennia nostra reguntur.
Corpora nostra cibo coelesti, semper aluntur.
The old men, who are present at the Mass celebrated by two priests,
Elias et Enoch, fuerant illi seniores,
Sicut et ambo simul, proprio testantur arbore,
Ad quos et nautae verba beata movent.
Vidimus scriptis, quoniam pro nomine Christi,
Vos hostes antichristi fieri statuistis,
Ipseque vos perimet, sed corpora non tumulabit,
Christus eum post haec, propria virtute necabit,
Dicite quando fit hoc?
Enoch confesses his ignorance of the date fixed by God for the Last Judgement,
and Elijah advises them to return home, which they do; the journey
which seemed to them to last three years had lasted three hundred.
The theme of the return of Enoch and Elijah at the end of time, of their
struggle with the Antichrist, of their death and their resurrection after three
(and a half) days was extremely popular in all the Christian churches from the
second century (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, TertuUian) until the beginning of the
modern era. This belief explains, for instance, the commemoration of Enoch
on the Tuesday after Easter by the Jacobite Syrians.^
It would be easy to collect evidence on the eschatological role of Enoch and
Elijah. This is the belief of the universal Church, affirms the author of the
Chronicon Paschale:^ odros (sc. Enoch) ianv 6 a/xa rep ^HXia ev iaxdrais
' Numerous texts were collected by W. with the reference to two witnesses in chapter 11
Bousset, Der Antichrist in der Oberlieferung of the Revelation of John, our theme goes bedes
Judentums, des Neuen Testaments und der yond it and differs from it; *eine Losung des
alten Kirche, 1895, pp. 134-9 ('Henoch und Ratsels* is still awaited.
Elias') and p. 180. We agree with him that, 2 Ed. G. Dindorf, i (1832), 36, 5-7.
although connected by ecclesiastical writers