The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE EPISTLE OF ENOCH S3
world of men is thus in no way the first cause of evil on the earth, as the two
authors of the Book of Watchers taught. The same idea of the subsidiary
role of the wicked spirits in the diffusion of sin recurs in 97: 4, '. . . those
against whom this word witnesses "You have been the companions (sc. the
accomplices) of sinners'", an explicit quotation recapitulating En. 13: 2
and 16: 3. In the passage of 100: 1-3 which describes how 'in these days,
in a single place' the sinners will kill one another, fathers their sons, brothers
their brothers, the author borrows phrases from the account of the mutual
massacre of the giants (10: 9-12; 12: 6; 14: 6; 16: i; cf. Jub. 5: 9).
The author of the Epistle of Enoch returns to the problem of the origin
of evil in a remarkable passage which it is desirable to quote in extenso (98:
4-5). The beginning is preserved only in the Ethiopic; (apart from some
words in CM from the end of this passage): T swear to you, sinners, that
as a mountain has never become and never will become a slave, nor a hill a
servant of woman, so sin has not been sent down to the earth; but men have
created it themselves, and those who commit it will be under a great curse.'
This is a polemic, tinged with irony, against the principal argument of the
Book of Watchers. Restrained, however, by the rules of pseudepigraphy
(Enoch cannot contradict himself from one of his works to the next), our
writer resorts to a bold metaphor. Just as the mountain cannot change its
nature and become a slave, so a spiritual being cannot become carnal. He
thus categorically denies the myth of the descent of the angels and their
union with the women, which, according to the Book of Watchers, explains
the presence of evil in the world. Man alone, insists our author, is the fons
et origo of moral evil.
He takes up this idea again immediately afterwards in the passage (lost
almost entirely in E) where he also rejects the 'heavenly', natural origin of
social injustice and physical imperfections (CM, pi. 2, lines 4-12):
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