The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE ASTRONOMICAL BOOK 13
The origin of the science of Enoch is certainly heavenly, for it is the angel
'Cri'el ('Light of God') who instructs him on the luminaries of heaven,
in accordance with the express order of the Lord (72: i; 74: 4; 78: 10;
79: 2 and 6; 80: i; 82: 7). However, it is during his earthly life, certainly as a
creature of flesh and blood, and not as a redivivus on leave from his sojourn
in Paradise, that the patriarch Enoch explains orally, as father to son or
master to disciple, and draws up in writing his scientific and religious teachings,
his moral exhortations, and his revelations concerning the future, in
short, antediluvian 'wisdom' in all its forms. Methuselah has to transmit
to his descendants and to the generations of the world to come 'this wisdom
which is beyond their thoughts' (76: 14; 79: i; 82: i).
These mythological details remind us of a Sumerian and Babylonian literary
genre, namely the epistles with sapiential and other contents, which the
antediluvian sages (there were reckoned to be seven of them, as Enoch was
the seventh starting from Adam: Jub. 7: 39) addressed to the kings, their
contemporaries (from eight to ten in number, the last having been the hero of
the flood, Ziusudra, Atra-hasis, Utnapi§tim, just as Noah was the tenth
starting from Adam). The most striking parallel is the 'Teachings of Suruppak
to his son Ziusudra', a fairly popular collection of counsels of wisdom
known to us through Sumerian and Akkadian copies dating from between
2500 B.C. and the middle Assyrian epoch. ^ A second striking coincidence
is that Suruppak is the name of an antediluvian hero and at the same time
that of a town (modern Fara), the home of the hero of the flood story. Now,
Enoch son of Cain saw his father erect 'a town which he named with the
name of his son Enoch' (Gen. 4: 17). Enoch, the first citizen, is thus the
inventor of urban civilization, sciences and techniques included. An apocryphal
letter in Middle Assyrian is addressed to the first antediluvian king:
'To Alulu speak: "Thus said Adapia the sage . . ." '.^
The text of En. 81 contrasts strongly with the relative simplicity of the
Enochic legend in the Astronomical Book. The moral considerations of
81: 7-9 do not contain any calendrical references like those of chapters
80 and 82. Enoch receives his instruction from the angels at the time of his
sojourn in Paradise (this is implied). Then the three angels (v. 5) lead him
back to earth and arrange for him an interval of one year for the instruction
' W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Litera- ^ O. R. Gumey, The Sultantepe Tablets, no.
ture, p. 95; cf. M. Civil and R. D. Biggs, 'Notes 176, 14. See also W. W. Halls, 'Antediluvian
sur les textes sum^riens archaiques', in Revue Cities*, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, xxiii
d'assyriologie, be (1966), 1-5, no. i. (i97i), S7-^7> esp. 61-4; below, p. 313.