The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

126 INTRODUCTION
the Spirits of the unborn children and the deceased, and also the spirits
and the souls of the punished angels (chapters 43,44, 47); apocalyptic
matters (chapters 44. 7-10, 45. 5, 48A).
8. Section on divine Names (chapter 48B).
9. A shorter Enoch-Metatron piece (chapter 48c).
10. The names of Metatron, the transmission of the secrets to Moses,
the protest of the angels, the chain of tradition.
After a long discussion Odeberg reaches the conclusion that the compilation
of the main part of the work, namely chapters 3-48A, goes back to the
second half of the third century A.D. If he concedes that this writing scarcely
constitutes a 'homogeneous unity or a work by a definite author in the modern
sense of the word', this simply provides an opportunity for him to suggest
that certain 'layers' of this work, in particular chapters 3-15 concerning
Enoch-Metatron, might have been composed in the second century or even,
in part, towards the end of the first century (pp. 23-43 and 188). While one
must admire Odeberg's scholarly erudition in the immense field of Jewish
mystical literature, we shall find it easy to prove that he is mistaken in his
dating of the 'Hebrew Book of Enoch' by at the very least a thousand years.
Hardly less inexact is the dating to the sixth century put forward by some
Jewish scholars.
The main argument results from our dating of the Slavonic Enoch, the
Book of the Secrets. Odeberg, who realizes that the date of the short recension
of the Slavonic Enoch is earlier than that of the long recension, proves beyond
doubt, through a detailed comparison of themes and formulas, that the text
of the Slavonic Enoch was known to the authors of the Hebrew Enoch
(pp. 52-63). However, he accepts the dating of the original of the Slavonic
Enoch to the first century A.D., the dating of Charles and other scholars,
qualifying this by the addition 'that there was originally a Jewish writing,
belonging to the Enoch Literature and embodied in the present 2 Enochs
and that this Jewish Book of Enoch was well known to the circle from which
J Enoch has emanated' (p. 63). Our dating of the Greek original of the
Slavonic Enoch ('2 Enoch') to the ninth if not the tenth century (see above,
pp. 110-12) constitutes the terminus post quem of the writings incorporated
in the Hebrew Enoch. Besides, it is well known that Jewish scholars of the
Middle Ages easily read and translated works of Greek and Latin Christian
literature (e.g. chronicles and biblical apocrypha) and of Arabic Muslim literature.
Accordingly, Odeberg's assertion of 'the impossibility of conceiving any