The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE BOOK OF WATCHERS 31
that 'la tradition juive avait bloqu6 sur le personnage d'Henoch deux sortes
de renseignements puises dans la legende m^sopotamienne: le role d'Enmeduranki
[seventh or eighth antediluvian king] comme initiateur de la civilisation
et celui de Xisouthros comme transmetteur de la sagesse ant^diluvienne
par ses livres, les seuls qui aient survecu a la catastrophe' (p. 25). He assumes
that 'le cadre de la captivity babylonienne constitue le Sitz im Leben ou la
legende en cause trouve sa place idoine et ou son origine s'explique au mieux'
(p. 195). However, in his opinion, it was at first just haggadic, anonymous
tradition, transmitted orally, and the earliest written version was not made
until the fifth century, by the redactors of the Pentateuch in their sacred
priestly history (source P) represented by the current text of Genesis.
The very close interdependence of En. 6-19 and Gen. 6: 1-4 is perfectly
obvious; the same phrases and analogous expressions are repeated in the
two texts. The table which follows on p. 32 shows this clearly.
The ineluctable solution, it seems to me, is that it is the text of Gen.
6: 1-4, which, by its abridged and allusive formulation, deliberately refers
back to our Enochic document, two or three phrases of which it quotes verbatim.
We should recall that this kind of stylistic usage was quite widespread
in early times. In the same brief and recapitulatory way the author of the
Book of Watchers refers, in his last chapters, to the Astronomical Book of
Enoch; similarly, the author of the Epistle of Enoch summarizes in En. 106-7
a more detailed account of the birth of Noah. If my hypothesis is correct,
the work incorporated in En. 6-19 is earlier than the definitive version of the
first chapters of Genesis. It is thus contemporary with, if not older than,
the calendrical document attributed to Enoch, which was also exploited
thoroughly by the final redactors of the Pentateuch. ^ Both are perhaps of
Samaritan origin.
We should note in addition that the ideas of the author of En. 6-19 on
the antediluvian patriarchs scarcely correspond to those in list P in Gen. 5.
The downfall of the angels certainly takes place.^ But it takes place after the
removal of Enoch to paradise (12: 1-4), which agrees better with the Enoch-
'Irad sequence of Gen. 4: 18 than with the sequence Jared-Enoch of Gen.
5: 18. Noah, besides, is certainly 'son of Lamech' or even, since his name is
not mentioned, quite simply ^Bar-Lamk (En. 10: i).
* Above, p. 8. Below, pp. 248-52, we shall to it in En. 10: 12.
prove the existence of a sacred history divided * 1*T (En* i iii 4; En. 6: 6), but not
into seventy weeks, which in turn precedes En. yet T^IJ^ TT (En^ 5 ii 17; En. 106: 13).
6-19, since there is an unquestionable allusion