The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE GREEK VERSION 77
fought (above, pp. 45-6); thus it certainly comes from a Byzantine chronicle.
The Latin extract of En. 106: 1-18 comes likewise from a chronicle, translated
from Greek into Latin (below, p. 80). Above (p. 20) I suggested that
a passage from Syncellus (who always copies Panodorus through the intermediary
of Annianus) refers to the final part of the astronomical Enoch,
unknown to the Ethiopic version. If this is correct, it must be concluded
from this that the Astronomical Book known in Alexandria around the year
400 still had its long text which faithfully reproduced the Aramaic original.
That is confirmed by my identification of P. Oxy. 2069, fr. 3, with the
Astronomical Book in its long recension; this papyrus is approximately
contemporaneous with the Enochic codices used by Panodorus.
All these indications show clearly in my opinion that at the beginning of
the fifth century there did not yet exist an Enochic Pentateuch such as we
know it through the Ethiopic translation, with the book of Parables in the
second place. The Greek archetype of this collection goes back at the earliest
to the sixth or the seventh centuries, if it is at about this date that we should
place the composition of a stichometry of the canonical and apocryphal
books of the two Testaments, an improved edition of which bears the name
of Nicephorus, patriarch of Constantinople from 806 to 815. The number of
stichoi which he gives to 'Enoch', 4,800, corresponds well to the present
length of the Ethiopic Enoch, if one compares it, for example, with his
figure of 5,100 for the 'Patriarchs', that is, the Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs in Greek. ^
It remains for us finally to answer the question why Syncellus, following
Pandorus and Annianus, says explicitly that his extracts come from the 'first
book of Enoch'. In theory three solutions can be considered:
1. The successive Enochic documents were counted, one after the other,
so that 'the first book of Enoch' would have been the Book of Watchers;
*the second book' the Book of Giants; ^the third' the Book of Dreams; and
so on.
2. The first and the second books of Enoch denoted the two volumes of the
Enochic Pentateuch, the second of which comprised only the Astronomical
Book.
3. The early Enochic Pentateuch (Aramaic and Greek), in its entirety,
was looked upon as 'the first book of Enoch' to distinguish it from the
' I have verified this passage in the Paris, line 15, and in Oxford, Christ Church Greek
Bibl. Nat. grec MS. 1711, preliminary f. 6^ MS. 5, f. ii^ 19.