The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THIRD COPY 183
Remember, however, that En^ belongs to the same manuscript as 4QEn-
Giants*. The Book of Giants, quite certainly in my opinion, came immediately
after the Book of Watchers, our fragments En*" i i-xiii; see below, introduction
to 4QEnGiants\
Moreover, it is not certain that the Greek version, even less the Ethiopic
one, has preserved a faithful translation of the Aramaic text. The second
dream of Enoch, namely the zoomorphic history of the world, told in chapters
85-90, was slightly expanded in E; see the commentary to En^ 4.
Next, certain pointers in 4QEns and in the Chester Beatty-Michigan
papyrus (CM) allow us to conclude that the commencement of the Epistle of
Enoch was longer in the original than in the versions; see the introduction
to En«. Finally, either the Apocalypse of Weeks (see En«) or the last chapters
of the work (see our fragments 5 i and ii) appear relatively well preserved in
the early versions, except for the addition of chapter 108, which is missing
from CM and was certainly missing from our En*^.
Various pieces of information given above, particularly in the paragraph
on the orthography, and below, in the notes to the text of the fragments,
justify a fairly definite conclusion that the copy of 4QEn'' was made from
an old manuscript, doubtless belonging to the last quarter of the second
century B.C. (date of iQIs* and iQS). Thus in that period an Enochic
corpus was already in existence, consisting of four works: the Book of
Watchers, the Book of Giants, the Book of Dreams, and the Epistle of Enoch
(see above. Introduction, ch. I). In the process of compilation the Book of
Watchers was slightly altered and rewritten. This is why the versions of this
part are closer to the text of En*" than to that of En* and En^.
Furthermore, it is certain that the third part of the Ethiopic Enoch,
the Astronomical Book, circulated in Aramaic quite separately from the
tetralogy and in a much more developed form. The incorporation of a r^sumd
of this work in the Enochic Pentateuch must already have taken place in the
Christian era, probably at the same time as the inclusion of the Christian
Book of Parables. This latter certainly did not exist in the Semitic languages,
Aramaic or Hebrew, nor even in a Judaeo-Greek form.
I conclude that about the year 100 B.C. there existed an Enochic Pentateuch
in two volumes, the first containing the Astronomical Book, and the second
consisting of four other pseudepigraphical works. The compiler of this
Pentateuch was quite conscious of its analogy with the Mosaic Pentateuch.
The book of Deuteronomy, a sort of Testament of Moses (imitated in some
degree by the author of the Epistle of Enoch), ends with a historical section