The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

184 THE BOOKS OF ENOCH En*^ I i
describing the death of the Lawgiver and mentioning his inspired successor,
Joshua (Deut. 34: 9). In the same manner the compiler of the Enochic
Pentateuch, perhaps an erudite scribe of the Qumran scriptorium living
about the year 100 B.C., added chapters 106-7, which resume the beginning
of the Book of Noah, the pseudepigraphical sequel to Enoch's antediluvian
wisdom.
If we now collate these conclusions with the literary-critical research
carried out over the last one and a half centuries, we shall observe, without
surprise, that the exegetes of the Ethiopic Enoch, Charles included, were at
fault in their tendency to cut up, to vivisect, one might say, the book of
Enoch into independent pieces of writing composed at widely different
periods. Nevertheless, certain general observations are more or less confirmed
by the facts we have established from the study of the Qumran
texts. Thus as early as 1845 Krieger correctly demonstrated that the Book of
Parables (En. 37-71) forms a separate piece of work dating from a more recent
period than the rest of the Apocrypha. In 1852 Liicke dated En. 1-36 and
72-108 between the years 166-160 B.C., changing this immediately, under the
influence of Ewald, to the years 135-105. Dillmann, who also dated En. 1-36
and 72-105 to the period of John Hyrcanus, proved that chapter 108 is the
most recent of all the additions to the primitive work of Enoch, but saw it as
'imbued with Essene doctrines'.
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