The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

ARAMAIC BOOKS OF ENOCH 5
The destruction wrought by Roman soldiers, by rodents, by insects, and
above all by the ravages of the centuries on the treasures of the central
library of the Essene settlement at Hirbet Qumran, hidden in Cave 4 in the
summer of the year 68, has had a merciless effect on our Enochic manuscripts.
Scarcely any fragments offer continuous, or almost continuous, passages of
the text. The majority are reduced to tiny pieces, in truth minute crumbs,
whose identification, direct and indirect association, and combination into
a restored text, demanded great reserves of patience and ingenuity. To quote
a novelist: *I1 se mit a etudier le rouleau avec la patience fr^n^tique qui
caract^rise ce genre de savants, capables de perdre la vue en ^tudiant pendant
vingt ans un fragment des Manuscrits de la Mer Morte.'^
Fig. I tabulates the fragments of 4QEn in relation to the sections of the
Ethiopic Enoch.
If we compare the sections represented by our fragments of 4QEn (including
the restored text) with the Ethiopic text, the balance appears fairly
satisfactory. For the first book of Enoch, the Book of Watchers, we can
calculate that exactly 50 per cent of the text is covered by the Aramaic
fragments; for the third, the Astronomical Book, 30 per cent; for the fourth,
the Book of Dreams, 26 per cent; for the fifth, the Epistle of Enoch,
18 per cent.
Fig. I also makes clear the 'codicological status' of the scrolls of 4QEnoch.
It can be seen that En"" brought together in the same volume three of the
documents attributed to the antediluvian patriarch, the first, the fourth, and
the fifth; to these should be added, in all probability, the Book of Giants,
which came after the Book of Watchers. En ^ and En® each contained the first
and the fourth book; both were perhaps originally tetralogies. The scribes
of En* and En^ probably transcribed only the Book of Watchers, whilst the
scribe of En^ copied only the Epistle. The special case of the Astronomical
Book will be discussed presently.
The dates of the 4QEn manuscripts are spread over the second and first
centuries B.C.: En* was written in the first half, En^ in the middle, and En^
(represented by only one fragment, written by the same copyist as that of
4QTestLevi^) in the third quarter of the second century; En* was written
in the first half, En^ in the middle, and En^ (of which En*^ seems to be
a more or less contemporary copy) in the last third of the first century.
However approximate these dates may be (and I would be the first to
" G. Kersch, *Le secret de la bouteille' in Histoires h faire peur prdsentdes par A, Hitchcock,
Paris 1967, p. 115.