4. “I Was Shown Another Calculation” (חשבון אחרן אחזית): The Language of Knowledge in Aramaic Enoch and Priestly Hebrew1
Seth L. Sanders
The science of apocalypticism can be defined as the exact numerical calculation of the end of time. It is intended to provide absolute assurance to faith and hope. The science of apocalypticism, which numerically calculates the when of the End Time, rests on the belief that “everything must fulfill its course out of inner necessity.” It is the task of the seer to reveal this necessity. —Jacob Taubes2
[☞ p4.1] The earliest known Jewish scientific work is, probably not coincidentally, also the first known scientific work in Aramaic. This is the Astronomical Book of Enoch, found at Qumran, the oldest manuscripts of which date to the 3rd century BCE The text is written in the cosmopolitan, high-cultural register of the lingua franca of the Babylonian and Persian empires known as Standard Literary Aramaic.3 Its contents consist of a series of rules for the movement of the heavenly bodies and the increase and decrease of hours of light over the course of the year, presented as visions seen by the antediluvian patriarch Enoch during a tour of the universe conducted by the angel Uriel.
[☞ p4.2] But why is the oldest known Aramaic science presented to a Jewish patriarch during a heavenly journey? Babylonian mathematics and astronomy are generally considered by historians of science to be the most highly developed empirical knowledge in the ancient world. This paper attempts to shed some light on the peculiar way that this most exact of sciences was presented in the Levant: as a set of mystical visions in an incipient Jewish apocalyptic literature.4
[☞ p4.3] The paper will approach this broad problem narrowly: by placing the Astronomical Book in the cultural context of Hellenistic Judea and asking what one of the text’s key linguistic patterns—one heretofore little-recognized—tells us about this context. I take as an axiom that the role of social theory in philology is to frame interesting questions that the data are suited to answer. In this case, to understand what type of knowledge the Astronomical Book contains, it may not be as useful to ask “is it science for us?” as it would be to ask, “was it science for them?” and “if so, how?”
[☞ p4.4] These questions set my agenda: to avoid anachronism and place the Astronomical Book in the history of science, we need to ask what systematic knowledge of the physical world might have meant to Hellenistic Jewish writers. The inherited genres of exact knowledge that are both well preserved to us and likely to have been important to scholars in Hellenistic Judea are contained in the Priestly literature of the Pentateuch, so the first half of the paper will examine how these texts organize knowledge of the physical world. In the second half I will examine an Aramaic phrase that introduces formulae for calculating the hours of light in Astronomical Enoch, as well as cosmic geography in the Enochic Book of Watchers. Although it has not been remarked before, this phrase shows striking signs of being calqued on the Hebrew phrase that introduces plans for the tabernacle in Exodus. If so, the language of knowledge in Enochic literature is closely based on the language of knowledge in Priestly literature.
[☞ p4.5] This linguistic and literary pattern can cast some new light on how “science” was framed by early Jewish scholars. Like its Babylonian ancestor, Enochic astronomy claims to be based on the observation and calculation of originally divine phenomena. But for Enoch, these Babylonian calculations are presented through a story in which the data as well as their analysis are divinely revealed. The revelation of astronomy and cosmic geography to Enoch is based on the revelation of the tabernacle to Moses in Exodus. Just as Moses is “caused to see” the proportions of the temple, Enoch is “caused to see” the calculations that specify the movements of the spheres. By emphasizing Enoch’s passivity in the observation and calculation of heavenly phenomena, these texts frame what we would consider empirical knowledge of the physical world in a very different kind of epistemology: a “revealed science” that helps explain how astronomy could function as part of an apocalypse.
1. Did They Believe in Science? Ancient Jewish Knowledge about the Physical World
[☞ p4.6] Biblical texts show no interest in mathematics, astronomy, or what we would call science. Indeed, Deuteronomy 4:19 contains an explicit and pointed warning against the dangers of visual evidence of the physical universe. Observation of the heavenly bodies is a temptation towards, perhaps because it provides evidence of, other gods—and therefore forbidden to Israel.5
[☞ p4.7] But already before the completion of the Hebrew Bible, some Jewish writers were adopting very different attitudes toward knowledge of the physical world. Even as books like Daniel were being completed, narrating the uselessness of foreign knowledge in comparison to the revelations of Israel’s God (e.g. Dan 1:20, 2:19), Jewish writers had begun incorporating Babylonian mathematics and astronomy into major literary works.6 By the third century BCE, Biblical patriarchs like Levi and Enoch were represented as learning and teaching about numbers and the stars. And rather than crude improvisations, these teachings derived from the highly developed techniques of Babylonian scholarship, arguably the world’s first truly empirical scientific tradition.7 By the first century BCE, these new interests had been energetically and creatively integrated into the ritual framework of the Qumran community.8 And these texts are only the earliest evidence of a pattern of systematic cosmological speculation in Jewish tradition, often presented as exegesis of Genesis 1, that continued to assume new forms through the Byzantine and medieval periods.9
[☞ p4.8] Was there a Jewish “apocalyptic science,” as Jacob Taubes boldly proposed in 1947? These cases of serious interest in mathematics and astronomy raises the question of whether the Hellenistic period represented the dawn of a kind of scientific thought in Judaism. It is clear that something new was dawning, for which current historical frameworks are not quite adequate.
[☞ p4.9] For example, while Hellenization is a common way of how new ideas emerged in early Jewish literature, it is not possible to explain the new Jewish interest in mathematics and astronomy through Greek influence. This is because it mainly draws on elements that had existed in the ancient Near East for centuries before its emergence in texts of the third century BCE. The new material first appears in Aramaic, not Greek; it is in a dialect—Standard Literary Aramaic—formed already in the Persian period; and it derives directly from a Babylonian scientific tradition that was itself one of the main influences on early Greek mathematics and astronomy.10 Since this new phase of Jewish thought cannot be explained as a result of the Hellenization that has been so central to our explanations of other major changes in Judaism, from the rise of Rabbinic Judaism to Christianity, we need to seek other explanations.
[☞ p4.10] Taubes argued for the idea of an “apocalyptic science” in a German dissertation that was more or less neglected in the study of early Judaism and Hellenistic history. But in the past decade, the idea has reemerged as scholars begun to suggest that a new form of Jewish thought appeared in the Enochic literature. Philip Alexander was the first to argue in detail that “the approach to nature displayed in the Enochic Book of the Heavenly Luminaries is unprecedented in Jewish literature. It seems to mark a turning-point in Jewish intellectual history—the emergence, for the first time, of what might properly be called a scientific attitude.”11
[☞ p4.11] Alexander’s argument reopened the discussion after Taubes, challenging us to ask new questions appropriate to our data. He has been followed by Jonathan Ben-Dov and Annette Reed, who have each added significant arguments for integrating early Jewish discourse about numbers, the body, and the stars into the history of science.12 As the great Otto Neugebauer pointed out, ancient science is especially useful to the cultural historian because it often used highly distinctive, originally Babylonian methods, the trajectory of which can be traced across languages and cultures.13 For example, the Babylonian cuneiform writing system used a base-60 number system (in contrast to the Hebrew and Greek base-10 system) and a “linear zigzag function” for calculating the length of the day (in which the longest day of the year is assumed to have a 2:1 proportion of hours of light to hours of darkness, and the shortest day is conversely assumed to have a 1:2 proportion). Because these conventions are both distinctive and arbitrary, they are easily recognizable across languages and texts and give us reliable evidence for the origins and direction of intercultural contact. Ben-Dov used the linear zigzag function, among a number of features, to deduce the precise nature and time period of the Babylonian astronomy used in the Astronomical Book of Enoch, and Drawnel was similarly able to show that the base-60 calculations in the Aramaic Levi Document had to have a Babylonian origin. The patterns shared between Babylonian, Jewish and later Greek texts pay a further dividend because they force us to rethink old and perhaps inappropriate analytical categories. As we shall see, the astronomical material in Enoch cannot be categorized as “law,” “prophecy,” “wisdom” or “religion.”
[☞ p4.12] But is “science” the best category for organizing this body of data? Along with a lucid analysis, Alexander provided his own definition of science. Reed and Ben-Dov also proposed brief characterizations, each differing from the other.14 And this points to a problem. As we show in the introduction to this volume, when one compares the divergent reasons scholars have given for why texts like the Astronomical Book should be called science, it is easier to agree that it is science than to specify why.
[☞ p4.13] The new types of knowledge that emerged in Hellenistic Jewish culture were heterogenous. They included astronomical calculations of the movements of the heavenly bodies and length of the days, sexagesimal (base-60) mathematics, and physiognomic interpretation of the body. On the one hand, all of these modes of knowledge have at some point in modern European history been understood as natural science: astronomy and mathematics are of course still understood this way. But as late as the mid-19th-century a form of physiognomy known as “phrenology” was still taken seriously by scholars across Europe.15 It seems intuitively correct to us to define mathematics and astronomy as exact science, but is it science to observe someone’s hair to predict their character and destiny, as the Qumran physiognomic text 4Q186 does?16 What is surprising is how clear the verdict of the history and philosophy of science is on this point: there is simply no rigorous way to tell whether a discipline is science or not.
[☞ p4.14] In an influential 1983 article, the philosopher of science Larry Laudan explained that the problem of distinguishing scientific knowledge from other types has loomed large in Western philosophy for a long time: “From Plato to Popper, philosophers have sought to identify those epistemic features which mark off science from other sorts of belief and activity.”17 In the philosophy of science, the task of defining the boundaries of science became known as the “demarcation problem,” and after well over a century of heated debate it is now generally agreed to be insoluble. “… it is probably fair to say that there is no demarcation line between science and non-science, or between science and pseudo-science, which would win assent from a majority of philosophers” (112).
[☞ p4.15] Historically, nobody seems to have ever produced a necessary and sufficient definition of science (or its ancestors such as Aristotle’s episteme). As Laudan explains, definitions have at some points focused on science as proceeding deductively from a priori principles and at other points as proceeding inductively from observed phenomena. Science has also been defined as being “falsifiable” (a definition that includes the flat earth theory) or as proceeding from a “scientific method” (the rules of which were never successfully explained). And as Francesca Rochberg has shown, ancient science was also defined in contradictory ways. It has been described as explanation without accurate observation (Greek), or accurate observation without explanation (Mesopotamia and Egypt).18
[☞ p4.16] The problem is not that no useful criteria for science are possible, but that historically, there have been so many of them. These criteria concern something immensely important to the people who proposed them—the nature of reliable knowledge of the world. So while it may be ironic that the question, “is it science?” does not admit of a “scientific” (or at least universally valid) answer, it is precisely the persistence of the question that can provide a useful starting point. Rather than trying to place our texts into an anachronistic modern category, we must first find out how biblical and early Jewish writers themselves depicted systematic knowledge of the physical world.
[☞ p4.17] The following investigation will adopt a provisional, heuristic definition: “science” will be understood as a system of exact knowledge of the physical world. This will let us compare a usefully large, but delimited, group of corpora. It will let us investigate what counted as reliable knowledge of the physical world for the ancient Jewish writers of Enoch: did they presuppose the Classical opposition between physis “nature” and nomos “culture,” i.e. what is physically given in the cosmos and body, versus humanly given norms? If they did not presuppose such oppositions, then what, if anything, separated their astronomy from other forms of systematic technical knowledge such as law? Similarly, we will ask how their knowledge of the physical world was opposed or related to categories usually associated with religion, such as ritual, for example in the forms of knowledge laid out in Priestly texts and later Qumran works of halakha. Did our writers differentiate between cosmic and ritual knowledge, rather than claiming, for example, that God created a seamless network of nature and culture? As we shall see, Enoch’s authors inherited a set of texts that did not assume an essential difference between nature and culture, but rather work on a set of homologies between what is created and what is commanded.
[☞ p4.18] Finally, this intellectual shift will only acquire its full meaning in a historical and cultural context, but we must move forward incrementally in reconstructing one, attentive to what the sources are best suited to tell us. We still lack first-hand information about the people who produced the early Enochic literature. In response, scholars have so far reconstruct a cultural and historical setting based on attitudes and allusions reflected in the texts.19
[☞ p4.19] What we can be sure of is that these early Jewish writers inherited a set of biblical categories, but transformed them to accommodate Babylonian science.20 Their scientific sources emerged from an old cosmopolitan Mesopotamian world of exact descriptive knowledge, one that had existed for centuries in cuneiform, and then Aramaic, independent of Priestly and Deuteronomistic categories.21 Since there are no biblical genres of mathematics or astronomy, and divination is taboo, the extensive use of Babylonian astral science in Aramaic texts at Qumran could potentially appear as a radical break within Judaism.22
[☞ p4.20] Yet when Babylonian material appears in Enoch it seems to occasion no break at all; it is presented in terms of the inherited biblical categories of knowledge. This itself is a valuable clue to the cultural world in which our writers lived. We do not know the full range of texts that Second Temple Jewish scribes had available to them.23 But biblical texts are the most solid ground on which we can begin a description of their intellectual framework. We can be certain that they were aware of biblical texts containing exact descriptions of the cosmos, temple, and human phenomena. It is to these texts that we now turn to provide some of the background for Enoch’s new knowledge.
2. Created and Commanded, Nature and Culture: Priestly Categories and their Legacy
[☞ p4.21] Because they provide the most exact chronological framework of the Pentateuch and contain the most extended discussions of the physical world, Priestly texts are a reliable starting point for considering the scientific background of Astronomical Enoch. As knowledge of the physical world, the material in Enoch would have been understood in light of three major corpora, concerning 1) time and the universe, 2) the temple, and 3) the human body. These are contained in the creation account of Genesis 1-2:4a, the temple revelation of Exodus 25-31 (cf. Ex 35-40 and Ezekiel 40-48), and Leviticus 12-15, with its command to observe physical signs to diagnose them, as it were, as symptoms of a ritual state, primarily the form of impurity manifested in the disease צרעת.24
[☞ p4.22] The Hebrew Bible begins with the Priestly account of the origins of the physical world, a pointedly taxonomic narrative in which each major sort of thing in the world is created, category by category.25 This creation account ends by narrating how a seven-day ritual week is built into the structure of the cosmos (Gen 2:2-3). It is God’s speech that performatively completes the cosmos with a verbally sanctified cycle of seven days, which fact is transmitted by an anonymous Priestly author as the definitive account of creation. Similarly, in a ritual text which appears to have been shared by both the Deuteronomistic and Priestly schools (Lev 11, Dtr 14), the prohibition on eating creatures derives directly from their observable physical characteristics: the category of “unclean” (טמא) completely overlaps with the category of “abominable” (תועבה in D)26 and therefore prohibited in Dtr 14:3-20. In both cases, Priestly texts present the pattern of divine commands as homologous with the pattern of divine creation.
[☞ p4.23] The idea that animals have different inherent types of physical nature is broadly-based in the Hebrew Bible, appearing in narrative as well as ritual sources. In addition to D it appears not just in P (Lev 11:2-28, analyzed below, as well as Lev 27:11, 27) but also in J (Gen 7:2, 8), and P’s continuator H (Num 18:15). As Naphtali Meshel writes, the appearance of this opposition in the J version of the flood story implies a strong claim about the nature of the created world. The idea implicit in the sources is that the clean-unclean differentiation that modern scholars would see as cultural is in fact based in physical nature:
the distinction between pure and impure animal species is no innovation of Israelite religion, but was recognized in antediluvian times. Furthermore, since Noah is intuitively familiar with it, YHWH has no need to enumerate the pure and impure species. Thus it appears that the distinction does not stem from a divine decree, but rather from naturally inherent traits, easily discernible by any human being, Israelite and non-Israelite alike.27
[☞ p4.24] Yet a contrast between nature and culture does arise within a later strand of biblical literature about the physical world. Meshel demonstrates how a nature/ culture opposition was editorially added into the structure of a Priestly text—in the redaction of Leviticus 11 and in opposition to the parallel set of regulations from a shared Vorlage in Deuteronomy 14:4-20.28 In the Priestly portions of the text, Lev 11:1-42, 46-4729 the editor introduced two distinct negative categories of creatures: שקץ “prohibited for consumption” and טמא “impure, ritually defiling.” The distinction between the two means that not every animal that is prohibited for consumption is considered ritually impure. For example, among the שרץ “swarming creatures” on land, which are all prohibited, only eight types are designated impure in Lev 11:29-30. Similarly, and remarkably, not every animal that is impure is prohibited for consumption! Lev 11:39-40 explain that if a permitted quadruped dies of itself, it is ritually defiling—but may be eaten, with only the routine, day-long impurity (וטמא עד הערב) which is assumed as a matter of course in daily life according to P.
[☞ p4.25] Thus the old dichotomy of pure and permitted versus impure and prohibited is replaced with a four-part grid: pure and permitted, pure and prohibited, impure and permitted, impure and prohibited.30 This new division was not practical. Because Lev 11’s configuration of laws focuses on improbable situations and foodstuffs, it appears to have been conceptual, rather than normative.
[☞ p4.26] This editorial rethinking of Leviticus 11 is a sign of an emergent speculative strand within Priestly thought that has begun to treat created and commanded categories separately. It stands in contrast with an older conceptual framework, shared across multiple biblical sources, that sees created and commanded as homologous, at least with respect to the categorization of animals.31 The two different biblical treatments of created and commanded orders suggests that Second Temple Judaism inherited more than one theory dealing with the issues of physis and nomos, nature and culture. It is within the Priestly tradition that signs of a rethinking emerge, against the default biblical taxonomy of animals in which commanded is homologous with created.
[☞ p4.27] How did these biblical taxonomies of the cosmos, temple and body which early Judaism inherited cohere? It has been convincingly argued that the Priestly writers saw cosmos and temple as homologous in essential ways; H emphasizes the parallel thus:
[☞ p4.28] את-שבתתי תשמרו ומקדשי תיראו אני יהוה “My Sabbaths you shall observe/And my sanctuary you shall revere: I am the Lord.”32 The human body represents the third term in this homology: humans exist within and serve as well as endanger both cosmos (Gen 6:12-13) and temple (Lev 16).33
[☞ p4.29] If the Priestly strand of the Pentateuch contains exact descriptive knowledge of the cosmos, temple, and body, they are not presented symmetrically. The first corpus is brief and unlike the latter two it is presented by an anonymous narrator, not God. This Priestly discourse begins with the narrator’s treatise on the creation and structure of the cosmos—ordered through God’s speech into binary divisions of things and a temporal cycle of seven (Gen 1-2:4a; again, contrast Dtr’s warning against attention to and divinization of celestial phenomena in Dtr 4:19). This narrative is not spoken by God but consists chiefly of instances of God’s speech narrated by an anonymous voice.
[☞ p4.30] The second corpus, about the temple, has a drastically different epistemology than the first. It is framed as a divine speech that goes into extensive detail on the precise measurements and materials of the tabernacle, the ritual prototype of the temple, and its implements (Ex 25-31). Remarkably, it presents its information not as words but as a visual model (תבנית):34
ככל אשר אני מראה אותך את תבנית המשכן ואת תבנית כל-כליו וכן תעשו
“Exactly as I am showing you—the pattern of the Tabernacle and the pattern of all its furnishings—so shall you make it.
[☞ p4.31] Note that here Moses does not “see” the תבנית on his own, but rather God causatively shows him, in the hiphil of the standard Biblical Hebrew verb of seeing, ראה. Moses’ visions of the Tabernacle imply a different epistemology within the Priestly source. All descriptions of these visions are marked by being narrated with syntactically passive forms. Ex 25:40 reads:
וראה ועשה בתבניתם אשר-אתה מראה בהר
[☞ p4.32] “See, and make, according to their pattern which you are being shown on the mountain,” using a hophal, the grammatical passive of the causative.
[☞ p4.33] Moses is then shown a rule: Ex 26:30 reads:
והקמת את-המשכן כמשפטו אשר הראית בהר
[☞ p4.34] “Then set up the Tabernacle according to its rule, that you were shown on the mountain,” also with hophal.
[☞ p4.35] Finally, Ex 27:8 narrates Moses’ vision with a morphologically active but pragmatically passive hiphil:
נבוב לחת תעשה אתו כאשר הראה אתך בהר כן יעשו
[☞ blockquote4.8] “Make it hollow, of boards. As you were shown35 on the mountain, so shall they make it.”
[☞ p4.36] The vast majority of the Priestly work and Deuteronomy consists of scenes where Moses hears God’s instructions; but for Moses to see God’s instructions requires a special sort of language. The power relationship is made evident in the text’s morphology and syntax. The special grammar of seeing in the tabernacle vision has the result of denying Moses’ epistemological agency: he does not even see the tabernacle under his own power, but rather is passively shown by God.36
[☞ p4.37] Finally, the Priestly corpus’ first set of instructions for ritual in the tablernacle ends with a manual for the observation and ritual response to discharges and affections of the human body (Lev 12-15). Unlike the tabernacle vision, the rules for discharges have a known, earthly object: the human body. They are therefore made known as verbal commands, not as a report about a passive vision of a heavenly model. Since the reader is not privileged to see the תבנית (visual model) Moses saw, both the tabernacle vision and the rules for discharges end up presented in words. The literary corpus of P transmits both of the latter to the reader entirely in divine direct discourse.
[☞ p4.38] The point to take away from different framing of exact knowledge within the Priestly corpus is that there is a gap in how the three orders of knowledge are presented as being learned—the second two, about the tabernacle and the body, are framed as revealed, spoken or shown by God to be passed on by a human speaker. By contrast, the first corpus, about the cosmos, is not explicitly claimed to be revealed. This corresponds to the practical ritual function of the second two, which are represented as divinely spoken commands to be enacted word for word by humans: the temple and the body are sites on which humans act ritually, while the cosmos cannot be acted upon by humans; rather, it sets the scene for all ritual. The construction of the temple and the treatment of pure and impure human bodies are chartered differently from creation.
[☞ p4.39] If the opposition of “science” and “religion” is anachronistic for early Jewish texts, how can we move beyond discard the misleading old binarism? As we have seen in the case of Lev 11, we cannot assume that native categories of knowledge were uniform or stable even within a coherent corpus such as the Priestly work: there are different ways knowledge is said to be mediated, and different relationships between created and commanded orders.37 What new analytical categories better organize the data? If we cannot find a uniform opposition in ancient Priestly (or, perhaps, Qumran) works between nature and culture, what separated their exact technical knowledge from law or ritual?
[☞ p4.40] A solution to the question of what the new genres of Jewish knowledge had in common and how they patterned together may lie in attending to their status as knowledge, to precisely how they claimed to be known. In other words, to understand how ancient Jewish arts of knowledge may have been understood as sciences, it may be most helpful to focus not on an anachronistic modern concept of how scientific knowledge should be created, but on ancient concepts of how it was created. In the examples we have seen, these ancient discourses do claim that “the truth is out there” in the world, and that it becomes humanly known by observation or calculation. But as we will see, what may be most distinctively ancient and Jewish about Enochic science is its sense of non-human agency, one interestingly different from modern notions of scientific knowledge production.
3. Revealed Science and Evidential Grammar in Early Enochic Literature
[☞ p4.41] The rise of new genres in early Judaism containing exact knowledge of the stars and body demands explanation.38 And any historical account of the rise of these forms will need to account for their connections to old ones. Otherwise we risk turning the Hellenistic period into a black box, the distinctiveness of which is predicated on an inexplicable paradigm shift in the status of foreign knowledge and text genres.39 We want a description fine-grained enough to account for the specificity of the forms this new knowledge takes, but broad enough to account for both their connections with and breaks from older ones.
[☞ p4.42] Jonathan Ben-Dov has suggested one promising way of seeing new “scientific” genres of exact descriptive knowledge as continuous with earlier biblical ones: through the reshaping of genres. A striking feature of the oldest known Hellenistic Jewish scientific text, the Astronomical Book of Enoch, is its narrativization. An older, factual description of the layout and cycles of the cosmos appears to have been edited into a story involving Enoch.40 As Ben-Dov notes, the Astronomical Book is not alone here, but shares the fact of narrative presentation with the other two oldest known Qumran texts presenting exact knowledge, the Book of Watchers and the Aramaic Levi Document: “Whereas the three early scientific writings are embedded within literary frameworks and presented as part of a comprehensive patriarchal teaching, the three later items [4Q561, 4Q318, and 4Q560] lack a clear extra-scientific framework.”41 The narrative framing of exact knowledge thus did not merely legitimate a form of previously alien wisdom: it provided a new context and set of connections for its meaning and use.
[☞ p4.43] The narrative framing of new knowledge in Astronomical Enoch is illuminating for two reasons: for the continuities it creates with earlier literature, and for the epistemological claims it makes about the knowledge it presents. The continuity it creates is clear: the angel Uriel shows Enoch the cycles of the universe, making astronomy into the content of revelation. This reframing creates a symmetry with the narrative framing of two of our three earlier corpora of exact Priestly knowledge: in the revelation of the Tabernacle’s heavenly model (תבנית) and the Levitical rules for the observation and categorization of disease. But these Priestly revelations were, not accidentally, about the temple and body—not the cosmos. Here is where Astronomical Enoch creates something new: for the first time in a known Jewish text, astronomy is presented by a divine being, the angel Uriel. Thus the editors of Astronomical Enoch did not so much rupture as fill out the Priestly paradigm they inherited; P had framed exact cosmic knowledge in Genesis as spoken by a narrator, not God. Astronomical Enoch’s presentation of exact cosmic knowledge as revealed makes it symmetrical with the earlier P presentations of revealed exact knowledge about the temple and body.
[☞ p4.44] But precisely how was Enoch said to gain this revealed cosmic knowledge? A paradoxical phrase, preserved in the Aramaic of the Astronomical Book, allows us to be more precise about the epistemological status claimed for the astronomy revealed to Enoch.
[☞ p4.45] It seems that many of the new pieces of Babylonian astronomical knowledge that Enoch learns in the Astronomical Book parallel the passive syntax of Moses’ tabernacle vision. They are framed as חשבון אחרן אחזית “I was shown another calculation.”42 Grammatically a verbal phrase based on the 1cs internal passive aphel suffix form of חזי (most likely to be vocalized ʾoḥzayit or ʾaḥzayit),43 it has the remarkable feature of taking the Hebrew loanword חשבון “calculation, reckoning” as an object.44 Here we see the prime experiential categories of observation and calculation brought together in a distinctive new way. The mathematical formulae are not calculated, but the calculation (like the tabernacle’s משפט) is shown to Enoch—an account that stands in sharp contrast with Pseudo-Eupolemus’ claim that Enoch “discovered” (with eurisko) astrology.45
[☞ p4.46] What is more, this phrase is not merely a part of the editorial framework of the Astronomical Book; it is grammatically parallel with the way new pieces of mythical cosmic geography are introduced in Enoch’s otherworldly journey in the Book of Watchers, אחזית טור אחרן “I was shown another mountain,” a phrase that appears in the singular or plural at least three times in the preserved Aramaic portions corresponding to Enoch’s second otherworldly journey:
[☞ p4.47] 4Q204 1 xii 26-28 = 1 En 31:1-246
ואחזיא]ת֯ [טורי]ן אׄח֯רנין ואף בהון חזית אילנין די נ֯פ֯ק 27 [מנהון דמעא די מתקרא צרו וחלבנ]ה֯. [ול]ה֯לא מן טוריא אלן אחזיאת טורׄ 28 [אוחרן
26 [… and] I [was shown] other [mountain]s, and also in them I saw trees, from which there came out 27 [sap which is called galbanu]m. [And be]yond these mountains, I was shown 28 [another] mountain …
[☞ p4.48] 4Q204 1 xii 30 // 4Q206 1 xxvi 17 = 1 En 32:1
אלן כלצפון מדנחהון אחזית טורין אחרנין
… toward the northeast of these [mountains] I was shown other mountains
[☞ p4.49] Most remarkably—and in contrast to the Ethiopic, which does not consistently preserve the phrase “I was shown (an)other mountain(s)”, what we see here is an editorial framing device shared between the Book of Watchers and the Astronomical Book.47 What is more, 4Q204 is the earliest clear evidence for a collection of books of Enoch since its fragments represent not only the Book of Watchers but also the Dream Visions and Epistle.48 We find that the editors of this earliest collection of Enochic works drew on the image, and grammar, of Moses’ passively gained vision (with the passive of the causative of the standard Biblical Hebrew verb of seeing) to frame Enoch’s own passively gained visions (with the passive of the causative of the standard Aramaic verb of seeing).
[☞ p4.50] If the use of aphel passives of חזי to frame revealed knowledge is both a calque from the Priestly Tabernacle vision and a distinctive editorial device shared between the Astronomical Book and the Book of Watchers, then the Aramaic evidence bears on two old questions about the composition and editing of early Enochic literature. First, it means that the creators of this early literature drew more heavily on the language and imagery of the Pentateuch than has previously been acknowledged.
[☞ p4.51] Categorical statements such as that of George Nickelsburg in his Enoch commentary that apart from Genesis “the rest of the Pentateuch is of little interest to the Enochic authors” will need to be revised.49 Second, Randall Chesnutt recently reported the important discovery that Oxyrhynchus 2069, the earliest Greek manuscript of Enoch, dating from the early 4th century CE and thus at least a century older than the earliest Ethiopic version, represents a tradition in which the Book of Watchers was copied together with the Astronomical Book.50 But the editorial pattern discussed here in the 3rd-century BCE Qumran fragments suggests that the connection between these books may well be no less than 6 centuries earlier!
[☞ p4.52] Despite the significance of the discovery of the original Aramaic version of 1 Enoch at Qumran, no modern edition of the books of Enoch makes this data about the editorial framing of its visions available to the reader. Because they prefer to base their readings on the fully preserved Ethiopic manuscripts, Isaac’s English translation of the Ethiopic Ms. Kebran 9, Nickelsburg and Vanderkam’s English translation, and Uhlig’s German translation all typically render “I saw.” Disturbingly, the only edition that consistently presents the actual readings of the original sources is Milik’s editio princeps of the Aramaic fragments.51 This renders the fragmentary but consistent evidence of the Aramaic—and thus a clue to the texts’ editing, biblical referents, and epistemology—invisible.52
[☞ p4.53] The Aramaic (as well as its antecedent Biblical Hebrew) grammar has epistemological consequences for the analysis of early Jewish views of exact knowledge. Obviously, Enoch’s visions are a mode of revelation (they are involuntary, with a divine cause, using the same aphel first person passive of the חזי root as appears for the visionary revelation of heaven in the Aramaic Levi Document53). But there is a more specific epistemic value that vision has.
[☞ p4.54] In contrast to Biblical Hebrew, where the חזי verbal form represents a marked term for “seeing,” often of dubious truth, in Standard Literary Aramaic חזי is the unmarked, default verb for “to see.” Aramaic verbal phrases with חזי encode strong claims about their statements they contain: the truth of any object that this verb of seeing takes is implied to be self-evident. In linguistics this category is known as an evidential, a morphological or lexical category that connotes the speaker’s assessment of the evidence for his or her statement.54 Verbs of seeing are sensory evidentials signaling that the speaker’s evidence for the truth of his or her statement is derived from the speaker’s own sight.55
[☞ p4.55] Sensory evidentials play a crucial role in the arguments that the Book of Watchers makes about human observation of the physical world. The preserved fragments of the book’s introduction in 1 En 2-3 (4Q201 1 ii 1-3) evidence repeated play on the same verb of seeing, חזי, that structures the presentation of astronomical calculations in the Astronomical Book and mountains in Enoch’s second otherworldly journey:
[ובמעדיהן מתחזי]ן֯ ולא̇ מע֯ב֯[רין ]ב֯ס֯רכן ח֯[זו] ל֯א֯ר֯ע֯ה֯ ו֯א֯[תבו]ננו בעבד
ה[
מן קדמיה לא]ח֯רנה ד֯מ̇[נ]ד֯[עם לא ל]א֯שני̇ה֯ ו֯כ̇ל̇ מ̇ת֯ח֯[ז]א֯ [לכן] חזו לדגל …
[And] they (f) [become seen in their seasons], and they do not alt[er] their order. S[ee] the earth and consider its working! [From first to l]ast nothing changes and everything of it becomes seen. See the signs of…
[☞ p4.57] The cosmos displays a set of unchanging cycles, conclusive visual proof of a god whose sovereignty and relationship with creation is also mediated through cycles.
[☞ p4.58] What does the language of knowledge in Aramaic Enoch tell us about revelation and science in early Judaism? It is difficult if not impossible to meaningfully oppose a category of revelation to a category of science in the conceptual world of early Enochic literature. This is true not least because the very grammatical form of the texts, as well as their rhetorical style, entails that the subject of exact knowledge is both signs of divine order and something that God causes the knower to see. This editorial framing device and its evidential syntax subverts any opposition between revelation, as a mode of knowledge based on the claim “God revealed X,” as opposed to science as based on the claim “I observed or calculated X.”
[☞ p4.59] The Aramaic phrase that introduces central units of astral knowledge in the Astronomical Book חשבון אחרן אחזית “I was shown another calculation” implies a category that one could call revealed science, which bridges the gap: the calculations are Aramaic-Babylonian astronomy, but the agency belongs to the angel Uriel who caused Enoch to see the calculation. אחזית טור אחרן, this phrase’s editorial parallel in the Book of Watchers, lets us see one specific technique that the compilers of the earliest Enochic collection used to claim that mythic geography and astronomical mathematics had the same evidential status. If we understand science as knowledge gained from observation and calculation, as opposed to revelation, we see an explicit incorporation (and subversion?) of all of these modes of knowledge in the framework that unified the earliest books of Enoch.
[☞ p4.60] What was lost in translation from Aramaic to Greek and Ethiopic was a significant piece of the grammar of Enoch’s revealed, or apocalyptic, science. Echoing the syntax of the Priestly account of Moses’ tabernacle vision, this evidential phrase makes distinctive claims about human intellectual agency in what we would call scientific knowledge. Notably, these claims seem quite different from the claims made by Jewish writers in Greek such as Pseudo-Eupolemus, who attributes agency to the human mind when he says Enoch “discovered” astrology. By contrast, the earliest Enochic books claim that Enoch only learns about the stars passively, in precisely the same way Moses learns about the Tabernacle. They argue that knowledge comes from a unity of three factors: not just observation and calculation, but observation, calculation and (divine) manipulation.56
Conclusion
[☞ p4.61] Attention to the precise Aramaic grammar of knowledge in Enochic literature, in contrast with its Hebrew Priestly forbears, gives us new evidence about the sources, composition, and epistemology of early Enochic literature. First, it corrects an earlier misunderstanding that Genesis was the main Pentateuchal source of Enoch’s language and ideas: in fact, the authors of the Astronomical Book and the Book of Watchers reproduced the Priestly language of Exodus in the Tabernacle revelation, framing Enoch’s cosmic revelation with a phrase that represents the precise Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew. This may have further bearing on the currently inconclusive debates about the Mosaic, non-Mosaic, or anti-Mosaic nature of Enochic literature. Second, this shared editorial move provides evidence that the Watchers and the Astronomical Book were created with at least one of the same editorial techniques, already in the 3rd century BCE—at least 600 years before the earliest known manuscript evidence of this connection, in Oxyrhynchus 2069.
[☞ p4.62] Finally, from an epistemological viewpoint: if we wish to use science as an analytical category in early Jewish thought—and I think we should—it will help to be specific about it. In what way did it count for ancient Jewish writers as authoritative knowledge of the physical world? What emerged at Qumran and later might best be understood as a “revealed science”—exact knowledge of the created world framed as divine discourse, with the role of human agency suppressed. This distinctive framing may help explain both how it emerged in a way that could claim to be continuous with earlier authoritative Jewish genres, and why this conjuncture did not produce new observations and calculations—its framing as revelation foreclosed these knowledge production mechanisms. But it would be the worst kind of anachronism to say it failed as science. Rather, it laid the foundation for a different, and quite productive, intellectual agenda.
[☞ p4.63] I will conclude by returning to the provocative concept introduced by Jacob Taubes in his 1947 dissertation, Abendländische Eschatologie. It ties together some of the threads presented here, even as it opens up a further question. Taubes’ term—“apocalyptic science”—suggests why the Astronomical Book could have been both the earliest known Jewish scientific work and the earliest Jewish apocalypse. Taubes was not the only one to recognize that apocalyptic calendars provided an intimate and regular connection between exact descriptive knowledge and political events—a form of knowledge that no modern definition seems to consider science. But he pointedly suggested that the real legacy of apocalyptic science may not have been in what we call science at all, but rather in a new vision of history:
The events of the world are written on the face of the divine clock, so the point is to follow the course of world history to determine the hour of the aeon. Apocalypticism is the foundation which makes universal history possible.57
[☞ p4.64] What if the integration of exact knowledge with historiography was as essential as mathematics or observation to the distinctiveness of early Jewish scientific thought? We would then need to consider whether Rochberg’s cutting remark, that “It may only be incidental that elements with affinities to modern science are to found within the boundaries of Babylonian mathematical astronomy,” may apply equally to early Jewish thought.58
[☞ p4.65] If so, the revealed science of Enoch and Qumran may have even greater continuities with Mesopotamian scholarship, one crucial task of which was to study the stars in order to know the trajectory of politics. The Assyriologist Mario Fales has recently argued that already in the Neo-Assyrian period, the practical effect of the “astronomical diaries,” which correlated astronomy with a chronicle of events on earth, was to link heavenly observation “with the concept of diachrony, and more widely with the flow of political and social history.”59 In this case the later trajectory of apocalyptic and universal history may represent a return to, more than a falling away from, the ancient Near Eastern intellectual roots of early Jewish science. And the task of understanding the terms on which ancient Jewish thinkers understood the physical universe and their place in it would then beckon to us with yet more promise.
APPENDIX: Two Old Translations on Early Jewish “Science”
[☞ p4.66] It is important to be aware that the importation of the category “science” into ancient Jewish texts has a long history. If the scholarly characterizations of ancient science by Alexander, Reed, and Ben-Dov are examples of bringing the category into self-conscious reflection, it was often done so unselfconsciously in earlier scholarship. This is apparent in the tendency to insert the term “science” into Hellenistic Greek accounts of what Abraham taught the Egyptians, making it easy to see him as the “first scientist” without any analogous terms appearing in the texts. The first passage where this tendency can be obseved is in Wacholder’s translation of Pseudo-Eupolemus. The relevant fragment reads, in Greek and his translation,
συζήσαντα δὲ τὸν Ἁβραὰμ ἐν Ἡλιουπόλει τοῖς Αἰγυπτίων ἱερεῦσι πολλὰ μεταδιδάξαι αὐτοὺς καὶ τὴν ἀστρολογίαν καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ τοῦτον αὐτοῖς εἰσηγήσασθαι, φάμενον Βαβυλωνίους ταῦτα καὶ αὑτὸν εὑρηκέναι, τὴν δὲ εὕρεσιν αὐτῶν εἰς Ἐνὼχ ἀναπέμπειν, καὶ τοῦτον εὑρηκέναι πρῶτον τὴν ἀστρολογίαν, οὐκ Αἰγυπτίους. (Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 9:8)
And Abraham lived with the Egyptian priests in Heliopolis, teaching them many things. And he introduced astrology and other sciences to them, saying that the Babylonians and he himself discovered them, but he traced the discovery to Enoch. And he (Enoch) was the first to discover astrology, not the Egyptians….60
[☞ p4.67] Wacholder’s rendering of the Greek καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ τοῦτον αὐτοῖς, a phrase with the general sense of “et cetera,” as “and other sciences” very much begs the question of what category the things included fall into! The use of eurisko “find (out), discover, invent” to specify how Enoch learned astrology and other forms of knowledge is worth noting, since it attributes the agency to Enoch himself and not divine revelation—in stark contrast to what we will see in the Astronomical Book.61 A similar move appears in Whiston’s 1895 rendering of the parallel passage from Josephus.
τήν τε ἀριθμητικὴν αὐτοῖς χαρίζεται καὶ τὰ περὶ ἀστρονομίαν παραδίδωσι. [168] πρὸ γὰρ τῆς Ἁβράμου παρουσίας Αἰγύπτιοι τούτων εἶχον ἀμαθῶς: ἐκ Χαλδαίων γὰρ ταῦτ᾽ ἐφοίτησεν εἰς Αἴγυπτον, ὅθεν ἦλθε καὶ εἰς τοὺς Ἕλληνας. (Josephus, Ant. 1.167-168)
He communicated to them arithmetic, and delivered to them the science of astronomy; for before Abram came into Egypt they were unacquainted with those parts of learning; for that science came from the Chaldeans into Egypt, and from thence to the Greeks also …
[☞ p4.68] Here again the word is inserted (twice!), and Feldman’s more precise rendering avoids importing the category: “For these matters reached Egypt from the Chaldeans, from whence they came also to the Greeks.”62
[☞ p4.69] These examples are hardly exhaustive, but they do show how translators repeatedly—if not uniformly—caused ancient Jewish sources on astronomy and astrology to explicitly call them “science” when no parallel appears in the Greek. It may be possible to demonstrate that such a category does indeed stand behind Pseudo-Eupolemus and Josephus’ accounts, but such a demonstration would need to carefully tease this category out from existing Greek terms such as tekhne, a type of practical skill often associated with crafts like metalworking, and existing in tension with episteme, pure knowledge. Indeed, the fact that astronomy and astrology are taught along with metalworking, medicine and magic by the fallen angels in 1 Enoch 7-9 would suggest that a category such as tekhne may have been more natural.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-1] 1 This paper was originally presented at the “Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge” conference at the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on April 4, 2011, where Loren Stuckenbruck delivered a valuable response, which follows the paper. The ideas emerged from a discussion in the hallway of ISAW with my colleague and co-organizer Jonathan Ben-Dov; I thank him for introducing me to this remarkable set of issues. This draft was improved by detailed comments from the viewpoints of biblical and Second Temple literature by Ben-Dov, of Hebrew and Aramaic linguistics by Edward Cook and Matthew Morgenstern, and the history and philosophy of science by Michael Barany. It has also benefitted from an inspiring discussion with Simeon Chavel and valuable remarks by Kelley Coblentz-Bautch, Daniel Stökl Ben-Ezra, and Tzemah Yoreh. All errors remain my own.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-2] 2 Occidental Eschatology (trans. David Ratmoko; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 [1947]), 32. Note that the original German term Taubes used was Wissenschaft, which has a broader range than English “science,” denoting any form of rigorous scholarship.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-3] 3 For an incisive discussion of linguistic variation in the Aramaic found at Qumran and what it may say about its associated textual genres and producers, see Aaron Koller, “Four Dimensions of Linguistic Variation: Aramaic in and around Qumran” in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context: Integrating the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Study of Ancient Texts, Languages, and Cultures (ed. Armin Lange et al.; SVT 140; Leiden: Brill, 2011) I:199-213, with references. The foundational study was by Jonas Greenfield, “Standard Literary Aramaic” in Actes du premier congrès international de linguistique sémitique et chamito-sémitique, Paris 16-19 juillet 1969 (ed. A. Caquot and D. Cohen; The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 281-289; repr. in ‘Al Kanfei Yonah: Collected Studies of Jonas C. Greenfield on Semitic Philology (ed. S.M. Paul, M.E. Stone, and A. Pinnick; 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001), 1:211-220.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-4] 4 For detailed discussion of the nature of the scientific material in Enochic literature see the essays of Alexander and VanderKam in this volume. The Enochic Book of Watchers is taken to be paradigmatic of early Jewish mystical literature even by the most skeptical student of the topic, Peter Schäfer, for which see his Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-5] 5 The evidential language of the passage is remarkable: it reads ופן-תשא עיניך השמימה וראית את-השמש ואת-הירח ואת-הכוכבים כל צבא השמים ונדחת והשתחוית להם ועבדתם אשר חלק יהוה אלהיך אתם לכל העמים תחת כל-השמים “Lest you look up at the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars—the whole entourage of heaven—and become scattered by bowing down to them and worshiping them, who the Lord your god assigned to all the (other) peoples under heaven.” (Note that all translations of Hebrew and Aramaic texts are mine.) In a move strikingly relevant to the present discussion, but which cannot be pursued here, Steven Weitzman argues that this is part of a distinctive Deuteronomistic agenda for disciplining the senses. In this agenda, memory—but not visual evidence—is to be relied on for religious knowledge and practice. See his “Sensory Reform in Deuteronomy” in Religion and the Self in Antiquity (ed. David Brakke et al.; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 123-139, esp. 128-9. Weitzman’s arguments complicate the more standard understanding of the passage as “express[ing] clearly the fact that from biblical times on, Jewish faith has been based primarily on experience rather than speculative thought” (Jeffrey Tigay, Deuteronomy [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996] ad 4:9, with citation of A. J. Heschel). Weitzman’s arguments can be strengthened by a close reading of the passage in which the line appears, Deut 4:12-19. What is distinctive about the passage is its repeated stress on the nature of experience, and what claims follow from that sort of experience. The experience was, first of all, auditory: 4:12 and 4:15 state: “The Lord spoke to you out of the fire, and it was the sound of words you heard—you saw no image, only a sound. … So keep … watch over yourselves, since you saw no image when the Lord spoke to you out of the fire at Horeb …” Then the text warns of two dangerous misapprehensions, each involving acting on the evidence of one’s vision. Formally, both are expressed by “lest” plus a pair of subjunctive verbs joined hendiadically: “Lest you cause ruin by making (פן-תשחתון ועשיתם) for yourselves a sculpted image …” (4:16) and “Lest you look up to the heavens and see” the heavenly bodies “and become scattered by bowing down (ונדחת והשתחוית) to them and worshiping them …” (4:19). The first pathway to disaster is making a visible image and taking it as a divine being; the second pathway is seeing the visible images of the stars and taking them for divine beings. Now, Mesopotamian astronomy and astrology were based on the idea that the stars were in fact the visual evidence of gods, “heavenly writing,” in the Babylonian phrase (discussed by Rochberg in her book of the same name), in which a divine pattern could be read. In response to this, the Deuteronomic passage argues not that there is no writing in the heavens, but that it is dangerious to read. It is dangerous to read one’s visual experience of the sky, precisely because signs of the divine may be found there: evidence of more than one god. Contrast the account I give below of Priestly exact knowledge, in which visual evidence of both the cosmos and human body are crucial.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-6] 6 Contra Hans-Peter Müller, the text of Daniel is emphatic in contrasting the reliable knowledge revealed by God with the Mesopotamian court sages’ unreliable arts of knowledge (to use a term brought into biblical studies by Esther J. Hamori; see her Women’s Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge f/c in the Yale Anchor Bible Reference Library). While it has been argued that Daniel’s techniques have a Mesopotamian provenance, the narrative of Daniel typically states the opposite, energetically opposing his knowledge to that of the court sages—with one exception. In an important treatment, Alan Lenzi has emphasized the contrast between Daniel, who receives revelation directly from God, and the Babylonian scholars who relies on written sources and sensory evidence, thus implicitly constrasting his successful “charismatic” performance with the scholars’ failed “institutionalized” practice. While generally convincing, Lenzi’s argument stumbles in forcing Daniel into a binary relationship with the Babylonian scholars; Daniel is actually presented as occupying multiple positions with respect to Mesopotamian scholarship that vary from insider to outsider. In fact, while Daniel is compared favorably to the Babylonian court scholars in Dan 1:19-20; 2:48; 4:8; 5:29; 6:28, he is only appointed over them at the end of Dan 2. By contrast, in Dan 4 he is introduced with both a Babylonian name and professional title: “Belteshazar, chief dream-interpreter” בלטשאצר רב חרטמיא (Dan 4:6), a designation that corresponds to a more elaborate title in the parallel version underlying the Old Greek. Here he is given his Jewish name but termed “chief of the sages and leader of the dream-interpreters” τὸν ἄρχοντα τῶν σοφιστῶν καὶ τὸν ἡγούμενον τῶν κρινόντων (4:15 in the Göttingen edition; for a useful treatment of the Old Greek and its relationship to the MT of Dan 4, see John Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993]). Dan 4 is the only part of the book to designate Daniel as a Babylonian expert from the outset, an anomaly most simply explained by its source, a Babylonian Aramaic legend of which an earlier version is preserved in 4Q242, the Prayer of Nabonidus. Here the figure who rescues the Babylonian king is simply termed “a diviner, a Jew” גזר והוא יהודי (1-3 4). See Lenzi, “Secrecy, Textual Legitimation, and Intercultural Polemics in the Book of Daniel” CBQ 71 (2009): 330-348. For the category of “Mantic (or Magic-mantic) wisdom” see Müller, “Magisch-mantische Weisheit und die Gestalt Daniels,” Ugarit-Forschungen 1 (1969): 79-94, “Mantische Weisheit und Apokalyptik,” in Congress volume: Uppsala, 1971 (SVT 22; Leiden: Brill, 1971): 268-293. James VanderKam insightfully presents and analyzes the Qumran evidence in his “Mantic Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” DSD 4 (1997): 336-353. But the gap between Daniel’s revealed wisdom and the Mesopotamian arts of knowledge raises questions for the category of “mantic wisdom”: what makes divination a category of wisdom? The two genres are distinct in Mesopotamian and biblical literature, and the features VanderKam analyzes in the scrolls do not fit neatly with the generic features of wisdom recently identified by Matthew Goff, “Qumran Wisdom Literature and the Problem of Genre,” DSD 17 (2010): 286-306. cf. the brief critique of Andreas Bedenbender, “Jewish Apocalypticism: A Child of Mantic Wisdom?,” Henoch 24 (2002): 89–96.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-7] 7 For the empirical basis of Babylonian astronomy and its importance in the history of science, see Noel Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). For its historical context and its role in debates about the nature of science see Francesca Rochberg The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Recent decades of research on the texts from Qumran have revealed that the earliest known Jewish apocalypse, the Astronomical Book of Enoch, is also the earliest known piece of Jewish astronomy and detailed mathematical calculation. Paleographic dating of the manuscripts place this text’s Vorlage in the third century BCE or earlier, before the final form of biblical books like Daniel. On the development of the books and figure of Enoch see James VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (Washington, D.C: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984). The thorough and persuasive treatment of the Babylonian mathematics and astronomy in the Astronomical Book and at Qumran by Jonathan Ben-Dov, Head of All Years: Astronomy and Calendars at Qumran in their Ancient Context (STDJ 78; Leiden: Brill, 2008), builds on but supersedes previous work on the subject. For the dating of the Aramaic Levi Document and the provenance of its measurement system see Henryk Drawnel, An Aramaic Wisdom Text from Qumran. A New Interpretation of the Levi Document (JSJSup 86; Leiden: Bril, 2004).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-8] 8 Ben-Dov has recently argued that the mid-second-century BCE Hebrew text 4Q317 “is in fact a translation and adaptation of the oldest section from the Aramaic Astronomical Book, attested in 4Q208 and 4Q209,” and the same concepts were later adapted and integrated into the sectarian Mishmarot texts see Ben-Dov, “Scientific Writings in Aramaic and Hebrew at Qumran: Translation and Concealment” In Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June-2 July 2008 (ed. K. Berthelot and D. Stökl Ben Ezra; STDJ 94; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 393, and on the adaption of EnAstr 394; and Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 147–151 on the adaption of concepts underlying 4Q317.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-9] 9 Tensions—some parallel to the ones treated here—exist in the major medieval Jewish esoteric sources on the role of the stars. These are treated incisively by Ronald Kiener, “Astrology in Jewish Mysticism from the Sefer Yezira to the Zohar,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought VI (3-4) (1987): 1*-42*. For the categories of cosmic knowledge from Hellenistic through Byzantine Judaism see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism? Historical and Cross-Cultural Reflections on ‘Religion’ and ‘Science,’” SR 36 (2007): 461-495 and her contribution to this volume. For the corresponding Christian transformation of ancient Hellenistic scientia see Hervé Inglebert Interpretatio Christiana: Les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie, géographie, ethnographie, histoire) dans l’Antiquité chrétienne (30-630 après J.C.) (Collection des Études Augustiennes; Paris: Institute d’Études Augustiniennes, 2001). Inglebert analyzes a series of four savoirs—cosmography, geography, ethnography, and historiography—that are only partly comparable to the “sciences” under discussion here. But given the strong interrelationship that Enoch’s editors and later apocalyptic thinkers saw between cosmography, geography, and historiography, might it be fruitful to pursue Inglebert’s series further?
[☞ endnote-chapter4-10] 10 I owe this point to Simeon Chavel (pers. comm. 2011), who emphasizes the fact that in Jewish sources the adapted Babylonian materials are never presented as having a foreign cultural provenance. Thus not only “science” but also “Hellenistic” and “Babylonian” are in important ways reified and anachronistic terms that only somewhat awkwardly fit our data.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-11] 11 “Enoch and the Beginnings of Jewish Interest in Natural Science” in this volume.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-12] 12 See Ben-Dov, “Scientific Writings”; Reed, “Was there Science?”.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-13] 13 Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Providence: Brown University Press, 1957, 2nd ed.).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-14] 14 For detailed citation and analysis, see the introduction, where we argue that Alexander’s definition is not compatible with some important and widely recognized features of ancient science, such as appear in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-15] 15 On the lives and deaths of phrenology and related physical and quantitative approaches to human character, see the lively study of Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996, Rev. and expanded ed.).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-16] 16 An illustrative passage comes from fragment 1 column ii lines 3-8: “[And] anyone [whose] eyes are [… and lo]ng, but th[e]y are fix[e]d, whose thighs are long and slender, whose toes are slender and long, and who was born during the second phase of the moon: he possesses a spirit with six parts light, but three parts in the House of Darkness. This is the birth sign under which such a person shall be born: the haunch of Taurus. He will be poor. This is his animal: the bull.”
[☞ endnote-chapter4-17] 17 “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” in Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum (ed. R.S. Cohan and L. Laudan; Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 76; Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 111.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-18] 18 Rochberg, Heavenly Writing; cf. the statement of Feyerabend she cites on 31 and contrast the dichotomy of Babylonian as quantitative but not theoretical, vs. (later) Greek as both quantitative and theoretical cited on 34.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-19] 19 Second Temple scholars often resort to reading groups of literary texts as if they stood for social groups. Representative of the problem is the question of whether the Enochic literature, in contrast to Pentateuchal literature, was the product of an “Enochic movement” separate from a mainstream “Mosaic” Judaism. The most prominent contemporary proponent of an Enochic break with earlier Priestly traditions in Judaism is Gabriele Boccaccini, who lays out his thesis in Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1998). Veronika Bachmann provides a useful summary of the state of the question in “The Book of Watchers (I Enoch 1-36): An Anti-Mosaic, Non-Mosaic, or even Pro-Mosaic Writing?,” JHS 11/4 (2011), online at http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_151.pdf. The title of her article accurately represents the ambiguity of the current evidence.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-20] 20 If so, did it create a rupture with long-term Judean/Jewish/Hebrew traditions? Note well that these three adjectives do not form a smoothly overlapping series—surely part of the point, and perhaps part of the solution? As Michael Stone points out in his response to Ben-Dov’s article, “Émile Puech [argues that] the linguistic milieu of Qumran was no different from that of the rest of contemporary Judea. I propose considering that the same is true of the “scientific” milieu. In fact, we have very little information about the greater culture in which the Jews in the land of Israel lived, either in the First or Second Temple periods. If we were dependent on the Hebrew Bible, virtually nothing, for the Hebrew Bible does not deal with scientific issues … All considered, however, it is probable that the ‘larger culture’ in which the Jews lived was basically Mesopotamian.” Stone apud Ben-Dov, “Scientific Writings in Aramaic and Hebrew at Qumran,” 400.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-21] 21 For the intertwining of the Babylonian and Aramaic script-languages and intellectual worlds see the rich presentation of Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First-Millennium B.C. Mesopotamia” in Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures (ed. Seth L. Sanders; OIS 2; Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2006), 187–216.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-22] 22 While biblical texts condemn divination, early Enochic literature presents multiple positions. Significant Deuteronomistic prohibitions of divination appear in Dt 18:10, 14; 1 Sam 15:23; 2 Kings 17:17. A remarkable scene in Ezekiel depicts the king of Babylon as employing a grab-bag of divination techniques that help him decide to attack Jerusalem (21:26-28, where the root qsm appears four times). By contrast, Enoch presents contradictory positions on the study of the heavenly bodies, as an impetus to both obdedience and disobedience (1 En 2) and blasphemy (1 En 7-9) in the editorially complex Book of Watchers. Annette Reed explores this tension: Enoch promotes astronomy in 1 En 2 and the Astronomical Book, but it is condemned in the three accounts of the angels’ fall in 1 En 7-9, where transmitting knowledge of the workings of the stars and the course of the moon, as well as the use of plants for healing, constituted a major part of the fallen angels’ transgression. See Annette Y. Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37-44.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-23] 23 As Michael Stone remarked about the Qumran Enoch fragments, “In principle, there is no reason to think that the body of literature that is transmitted as the Hebrew Bible is a representative collection of all types of Jewish literary creativity down to the fourth century.” See “The Book of Enoch and Judaism in the Third Century B.C.E.,” CBQ 40 (1978): 490.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-24] 24 Any thorough exploration of this topic will also need to examine continuities with the geographical and cosmographical lists discussed most perceptively by Michael Stone, “Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature” in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and archaeology in memory of G. Ernest Wright (ed. Frank Moore Cross, Werner Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller; Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 414-452. In applying the lists of revealed things in wisdom literature to the category of science, the important critique of Michael Fox, “Egyptian Onomastica and Biblical Wisdom,” VT 36 (1986): 302-310 should be borne in mind. While it hardly invalidates Stone’s observations, it demands that more detailed arguments be provided for the social contexts in which the shift from ancient Near Eastern scribal “wisdom” to Hellenistic Jewish “science” took place—a demand that this essay and especially the contribution of Popović in this volume attempt to begin to answer.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-25] 25 The Priestly theory of creation via language implicit here has never been clearly elucidated. I am preparing a study of the grammar of creation in the Priestly source, but in the meantime see the detailed discussion with bibliography in Mark S. Smith, The Priestly Vision of Creation (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2009).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-26] 26 Though see the article of Meshel cited below for a demonstration that the underlying concept appears in P as well.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-27] 27 Naphtali Meshel, “Food for Thought: Systems of Categorization in Leviticus 11,” HTR 101 (2008): 203-229 at p. 209.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-28] 28 Meshel, “Food for Thought.” On the shared Vorlage of Lev 11 and Deut 14, William Moran remarks that “there has long been general agreement that the concordia discors which careful comparison of the two passages reveals, is best explained by dependence on a common source.” For earlier bibliography see his “The Literary Connection Between Lev 11:13-19 and Deut 14:12-18,” CBQ 28 (1966): 271-277 (note that in the quoted passage Moran is referring to Lev 11:2b-23 and Deut 14:4-20, rather than the narrower portion addressed in the rest of his essay) and more recently Meir Paran, Darkhe ha-signon ha-Kohani ba-Torah: Degamim, Shimushe Lashon, Mivnim (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1989), 340.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-29] 29 Lines 43-45 have long been recognized as an H insertion (see e.g. Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995], 69). This is clearest from the distinctively H exhortation to be holy, with an allusion to the Exodus, in line 45. Yet this division shows a striking coherence with Meshel’s analysis: while terms derived from the שקץ and טמא stems are used consistently everywhere else in the chapter, here they are used indiscriminately. For literature see Meshel, “Food for Thought,” 213-214 and n38.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-30] 30 For the argument for a further four-part distinction in Lev 11:2-8, 24-28 between species that are pure and permitted to be touched, pure and prohibited from being touched, impure and permitted to be touched, and impure and prohibited from being touched see Meshel, “Food for Thought,” 216-220.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-31] 31 For an alternative view of the Priestly relationship between creation and command, see Simeon Chavel, “‘Oracular Novellae’ and Biblical Historiography: Through the Lens of Law and Narrative” Clio 39 (2009): 12, and in greater detail “Hasifrut Hamishpaṭit Shebamiqra’” in Sifrut Hamiqra': Mavo'ot ve-Mehqarim (ed. Tzipporah Talshir; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi, 2011), 249-255.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-32] 32 The phrase appears twice in the Holiness code, at Lev. 19:30 and 26:2. Note the striking parallels in the Priestly announcements of the completion of the cosmos and the tabernacle between Gen 1:31-2:3 and Exod. 39:32, 39:43, 40:9, and 40:33-34 analyzed by Jon D. Levenson, “The Temple and the World” Journal of Religion 64 (1984): 287. The crucial arguments were made by Moshe Weinfeld (“Shabbat, Miqdash, Wehamlakat H,” Beit Mikra 21 [1977] esp. 188) and Levenson, “The Temple and the World,” 286-288 and filled out with respect to Mesopotamian comparanda by Victor Hurowitz, I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in the Light of Mesopotamian and Northwest Semitic Writings (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992). See now Richard S. Ellis, Mark J. Boda, and Jamie R Novotny, eds. From the Foundations to the Crenellations: Essays on Temple Building in the Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2010).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-33] 33 cf. Milgrom, “Israel’s Sanctuary: The Priestly ‘Picture of Dorian Gray,’” RB 83 (1976): 390-399
[☞ endnote-chapter4-34] 34 Cf. the narrator’s presentation of the tablernacle’s construction in Ex 35-40. As we shall see below, Enoch’s later perception of a visual model of the patterns of cosmic order in the later Qumran edition of EnAstr (4Q208, the earliest known version c. 200 BCE, contains no narrative framework, while the edition underlying 4Q209-211, all c. 50 BCE, display evidence of a narrative framework—see further for discussion). Crucially, Enoch is shown the “calculations” of the luminaries’ movements: ח]ש֯בון אחרן אחזית לה “I was shown another calculation for it” in 4Q209 25 3 (corresponding to 1 En 74:1 or 78:10). And 1 En 72:1, the narrative frame of the Astronomical Book, describes Uriel as showing Enoch not only the physical position and temporal cycle of each luminary, but also their “names, places of origin, and months” as well as their “books.”
[☞ endnote-chapter4-35] 35 Literally “as he showed you,” but since the narrative is unambiguous that the agent of showing (God) is also the speaker (who would have to be marked in the first person), the literal translation is not plausible. This phenomenon, known as the impersonal passive, is well known in Biblical Hebrew as well as e.g. Medieval Latin. On both, see Paul Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (SB 27; Roma: Pontificio istituto biblico, 2006, 2nd ed.) § 128b.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-36] 36 Compare the reference back to this vision in Num 8:4, “According to the vision that the LORD showed Moses, so he made the lampstand.”
[☞ endnote-chapter4-37] 37 It is worth emphasizing that “medical” observation of the body was not separate from ritual procedures that we may consider magical. While Gen 1 and Lev 12-15 involve systematization of observed phenomena, Lev 12-15 share explicit stipulation to observe “medical” signs in the body with Num 5, a redactionally complex text which at least in its final form contains an incantation. A useful study of its editorial character is Michael Fishbane, “Accusations of Adultery: A Study of Law and Scribal Practice in Numbers 5:11-31,” HUCA 45 (1974): 25-46.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-38] 38 For an early attempt at this see Franz Cumont’s 1912 Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s sons). The intellectual framework provided by Jonathan Z. Smith does not seem to have been surpassed. See his “Wisdom and Apocalyptic,” in Religious Syncretism in Antiquity. Essays in Conversation with Geo Widengren (ed. B. A. Pearson; Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975), 131-156, repr. in J. Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (SJLA 23; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 67-87.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-39] 39 This issue is hardly restricted to the study of Judaism; in fact it is a general problem in the periodization of the human sciences, above all apparent in theories of modernity. As I summarized the arguments of the anthropologist John Kelly, “if everyone agrees that everything interesting happens in the modern period, then by definition modernity becomes very difficult to understand because it does not really come from anywhere and there is nothing to compare it to historically.” Introduction, Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, 5.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-40] 40 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years. For an analogous apocalyptic renarration of a preexisting descriptive genre—of myth—compare the groundbreaking analysis of the relationship between the throne-visions of Daniel, the Book of Watchers, and the Book of the Giants (demonstrating the typological priority of the editorially later vision of Daniel) by Ryan Stokes, “The Throne Visions of Daniel 7, 1 Enoch 14, and the Qumran Book of Giants (4Q530): An Analysis of Their Literary Relationship,” DSD 15 (2008): 340-358.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-41] 41 Ben-Dov, “Scientific Writings in Aramaic and Hebrew at Qumran,” 387.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-42] 42 While it also appears in the Book of Watchers (see below), in the Astronomical Book the phrase is only preserved in the fragmentary passage 4Q209 25 3, corresponding to 1 En 74:1 or 78:10: [ח]ש֯בון אחרן אחזית לה די אזל “I was shown another calculation of it, when it goes …”, but it corresponds to a pattern in the Ethiopic (visible in both 74:1-2 and 78:10) in which the simple active “I saw” is used, with the angel Uriel added as agent in an explanatory phrase. Józef Milik explains that this is due to a tendency of the Greek translations, passed on to the Ethiopic, to render Aramaic passives as actives. See Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 202.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-43] 43 For a careful analysis of this grammatical form and new arguments about its vocalization see the definitive study by Edward M. Cook, “The Causative Internal Passive in Qumran Aramaic.” f/c in Aramaic Studies. Pace Beyer, who vocalizes ’oḥzīt, Cook points to the sporadic writing of the diphthong with 'alef in Qumran Aramaic and the presence of an uncollapsed diphthong in Biblical Aramaic. Contrast Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer: samt den Inschriften aus Palästina, dem Testament Levis aus der Kairoer Genisa, der Fastenrolle und den alten talmudischen Zitaten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), s.v. חזי.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-44] 44 Note in the Genesis Apocryphon the important role of Noah’s חשבון in the completion of the first stage of his history, after ten jubilee periods, which culminates in his seeing of a vision (חזיון); see 1Q20 VI 9-11.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-45] 45 Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 9:8; for a brief presentation and a comparable text from Josephus see the Appendix, below.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-46] 46 The reading אחזיאת (here spelled contrastively with the peal active אחזית) is made plausible here by the parallel in the following sentence, as well as considerations of letter spacing in the fragments.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-47] 47 An observation which only reinforces the conclusion of Michael Knibb that “the Greek text of Enoch, so far as it is known, and even more the Ethiopic cannot simply be regarded as translations of the original Aramaic text known from the Dead Sea fragments.” See “The Book of Enoch or Books of Enoch? The Textual Evidence for I Enoch” in The Early Enoch Literature (ed. G. Boccaccini and J.J. Collins; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 25.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-48] 48 4Q204 is said to be derived from a text c. 100 BCE. Knibb, “The Book of Enoch,” 26.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-49] 49 Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 57, where he explains the exception of the historical summary in the (later) Animal Apocalypse. Nickelsburg has discussed this issue in at least four venues, including “Scripture in 1 Enoch and 1 Enoch as Scripture,” in Texts and Contexts. Biblical Texts in Their Textual and Situational Contexts. Essays in Honor of Lars Hartman (ed. T. Fornberg and D. Hellholm; Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995), 333–354; idem, “Enochic Wisdom. An Alternative to the Mosaic Torah?,” in Hesed ve-emet: Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs (ed. J. Magness and S. Gitin; BJS 320; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 123–132; and “Enochic Wisdom and Its Relationship to the Mosaic Torah,” in The Early Enoch Literature, 81–94.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-50] 50 “Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2069 and the Compositional History of 1 Enoch,” JBL 129 (2010): 485-505.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-51] 51 Even in this meticulous treatment, Milik’s tendency to give priority to his reconstructions over the attested physical evidence occasionally obscures the epigraphically clear readings, as in his treatment of the Astronomical Book fragment. Because he reconstructs an unattested beginning to the sentence with the angel Uriel as the subject of an active form of חזי, he is forced to translate the clear reading of the first person aphel passive asyndetically as “[and Uriel demonstrated to me] a further calculation by having shown it unto me that …” Milik, The Books of Enoch, 293. For a harsh verdict on Milik’s practices see the statement of Greenfield and Stone that “unless the reader has recourse to the diplomatic transcription, or better yet to the plates themselves, he will not always be sure as to where restoration begins and the actual text ends; indeed he cannot always be sure as to how much there actually is in the text since Milik’s readings are not always confirmed by the photographs, and by direct examination of the fragments.” See “The Books of Enoch and the Traditions of Enoch” Numen 26 (1981): 90-91. For a further instance of problems arising from the emphasis Milik placed on reconstruction see Chesnutt, “Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2069.”
[☞ endnote-chapter4-52] 52 Isaac’s translation reads this way for all of the relevant parts of the Book of Watchers (Chapters 31, 32: p. 28; 74: p. 53; the exception is the Astronomical Book’s “Then Uriel showed me” in 78:10 on p. 57). See Ephraim Isaac, “I (Ethiopic Apocalype of) Enoch” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (ed. James Charlesworth; New York: Doubleday, 1985), vol 1. George Nickelsburg notices the Aramaic of 31:2 (see Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36; 81-108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) ad loc with note a, but the rest of the Aramaic manuscript evidence passes without notice. VanderKam places the Aramaic fragment at 74:1 and cites the Aramaic text in a footnote without comment but ignores it in his translation. See George Nickelsburg and James C VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2 : A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 37-82 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 440. Matthew Black’s edition carefully follows the Aramaic in the Book of Watchers, but since the Astronomical Book follows the Ethiopic and is relegated to an appendix the overall pattern is also invisible here. See Black, James C. VanderKam, and O. Neugebauer, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition with Commentary and Textual Notes. (Leiden: Brill, 1985). The Aramaic evidence neither affects the translation nor is noted in the apparatus of S. Uhlig, Das äthiopische Henochbuch (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1984)
[☞ endnote-chapter4-53] 53 For the phrase see 4Q213 2 15 (Beyer, Aramäische Texte, 194), corresponding to the Greek Testament of Levi 2:5ff.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-54] 54 For the linguistic category and its application to narrative and culture see Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology (ed. Johanna Nichols and Wallace L Chafe; Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1986). A particularly clear set of examples is available from Quechua, a well-studied language with mandatory evidential forms spoken in Peru and Ecuador, where there are three evidential morphemes:-mi indicating certain knowledge based on sensory experience-shi indicating indirect knowledge based on verbal reports-chi indicating uncertain knowledge based on conjecture.Thus example 1866 from David John Weber’s A Grammar of Huallaga (Huanuco) Quechua (Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 1983) is Qam-pis maqa-ma-shka-nki “You hit me” would have to have either -mi, -shi, or -chi suffixed to the end, giving three possible meanings: with -mi “I saw/felt you hit me”; with -shi “(I was drunk at the time but) someone told me you hit me”; with -chi “(a bunch of people beat me up and) I think you were one of the people who hit me”.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-55] 55 Compare to other categories such as quotative evidentials, which signal that someone else is the source of the statement made. For a comprehensive, if sometimes polemical, description see Alexandra Aikhenvald, Evidentiality (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[☞ endnote-chapter4-56] 56 I thank Alexander Jones (personal communication, February 2011) for the phrase.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-57] 57 Occidental Eschatology, 33.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-58] 58 Rochberg, “The Cultural Locus of Astronomy in Late Babylonia,” in Die Rolle der Astronomie in den Kulturen Mesopotamiens (ed. H.D. Galter; Grazer Morgenländische Studien 3; Graz: GrazKult, 1993), 45.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-59] 59 “Maṣṣartu: The Observation of Astronomical Phenomena in Assyria (7th Century BC)” in The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VI (ed. Enrico Maria Corsini; ASP Conference Series 441; San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2011), 370, n31.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-60] 60 Ben Zion Wacholder, Eupolemos. A Study of Judaeo-Greek Literature (Cincinnati: HUC, 1974), 313–314. Similarly Gifford’s 1903 translation, “and it was he who introduced astronomy and the other sciences to them.”
[☞ endnote-chapter4-61] 61 Compare similarly Josephus’ representation of Abraham as deducing knowledge and using persuasive arguments, as analyzed by Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist and Father of the Jews: Josephus, Ant. 1.154–168, and the Greco-Roman Discourse about Astronomy/Astrology,” JSJ 35 (2004): 119-158.
[☞ endnote-chapter4-62] 62 Louis Feldman, Judean Antiquities 1-4, vol. 3 of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, (ed. Steve Mason; Leiden: Brill, 2000) apud Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist,” 132-133.
