The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

8 INTRODUCTION
a much more developed form. Enastr^ provides remains of the final part of
the work, a part which is also lost in the Ethiopic tradition. The complete
text of this book in Aramaic was, accordingly, very long, so that copies of it
filled voluminous scrolls, and this explains why it was never included with
the other Enochic writings on the same strip of parchment.
This work, in which the essentially astronomical and calendrical content
was enriched by cosmographic information and moral considerations, seems
to me to be the oldest Jewish document attributed to Enoch. An indirect
allusion is already to be found in Gen. 5: 23, where the writer, having fixed
the age of the patriarch at 365 years, impKes, in guarded terms, the existence
of astronomical works circulating under the name of Enoch. It is highly likely,
indeed, that the whole chronology of the Bible, in particular that of the Mosaic
Pentateuch, was elaborated by priestly redactors of the Persian era, taking
as their point of departure the calendar with fixed days and festivals composed
of 364 days.^
The origination of this calendar may have been attributed by its anonymous
inventor to Enoch, as the antediluvian sage/)ar excellence. In the Persian
period this reckoning was of a strictly theoretical nature, suitable as a framework
for the distant events of sacred history and nothing more. It was only
the Essenes who introduced it effectively into their liturgical life, during the
second half of the second century, without, it would seem, taking account of
its inevitable discrepancy with the solar year of 365 J days. It was precisely
through anxiety to find a more concrete reference to the year of 365 days,
employed widely in Persian and Hellenistic times, that the age of the patriarch
was corrected from 364 to 365 years in Gen. 5: 23.
An obvious allusion, as it seems to me, to the Astronomical Book of
Enoch occurs in the Hellenistic Jewish historian Eupolemos,^ whose History
of the Jews was completed in the year 158 B.C. In the first extract from this
work quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea {Praeparatio Evangelical ix. 17. 2-9)^
Eupolemos gives a detailed account of Abraham as the inventor of astrology
' See A. Jaubert, *Le calendrier des Jubil6s son of John, a member of the priestly family
et de la secte de Qumr^. Ses origines bibliques': of ha-Q6s, ambassador of Judas Maccabaeus
Vetm Testamentumym{igs2)y 250-64; the same, to Rome in 161 B.C. (i Mace. 8: 17; 2 Mace.
La date de la Ckne. Calendrier bihlique et liturgie 4: 11).
chr^tienne, 1957, pp. 13-75 CUn calendrier juif ^ K. Mras, GCS 43. i (1954), 502-3. The
ancien'); cf. Milik, Ten Years, pp. 110-13; immediate source of this quotation in Eusebius
J. van Goudoever, Biblical Calendars, 2nd edn., was Alexander Polyhistor, a Greek compiler
Leyden 1961.
of the first century B.C.
2 Probably to be identified with Eupolemos,