5. Philological and Epistemological Remarks on Enoch’s Science: Response to Papers by Seth Sanders and James VanderKam
Loren T. Stuckenbruck
[☞ p5.1] The papers presented here both offer fine introductions that identify and problematize our understanding of the Enochic Astronomical Book as a product of emerging Jewish tradition that drew upon and departed from received traditions found in the Bible, Ancient Near East and Hellenistic ideas. To a considerable degree, these papers, despite their common focus on the Astronomical Book and interaction with the definitions of “science” by Philip Alexander, complement one another.
[☞ p5.2] The paper by Sanders is concerned with the interplay between etic and emic notions of “science” as it attempts to draw attention to helpful heuristic categories for analysis such as “exact technical knowledge” (that embraces both the production of knowledge based on observation with the application of received knowledge to presciptive command and ritual), or Taubes’ phrase “apocalyptic science”, perhaps better retermed as “revealed science” or observation. Sanders argues on phenomenological grounds—and persuasively, in my opinion—that the Astronomical Book, in its interest in angelic agency in the transmission of calculations and information about heavenly bodies and other natural phenomena, draws on the kind of language which in the Bible priestly tradition (presented as revealed to Moses) is applied to instructions that focus on the tabnernacle/temple and the human body. The shift in the Astronomical Book of Enoch is, then, the use of revelation discourse in relation to cosmology. In categorizing the Astronomical Book as the presentation of knowledge about the cosmos by means of angelic agency, Sanders draws our attention to the passive voice of a verb (corresponding to either 74:1-2 or 78:10), the force of which has been lost through the translation process from Aramaic to Greek and into Ethiopic. He finds an analogy for this loss of the passive (revealed) nature of knowledge in the Book of Watchers where the shift from passive “I was shown” ’ohzayit) to the active “I saw” (Grk. tetheamai, Eth. re’iku) can be observed (no pun intended!). This linguistic textual evidence serves Sanders to counter the third installment of Philip Alexander’s definition of “science” as including “a significant element of direct observation of the physical world” which he regards as hard to reconcile with Greek “science” in which mathematics and calculations are more determinative than observation per se, and which he rightly thinks raises difficulties for what one means when applying the term “science” to begin with (especially when the history and philosophy of science studies are taken into account).
[☞ p5.3] To Sanders’ paper, I would have two comments or questions. For all the laudable interest in the paper in coming to grips with an emic, self-presentational understanding of what knowledge in Astronomical Book both involves and means, the term “science” continues in places to be casually employed. Given the cautions the paper enjoins upon students of antiquity with regard to using discourse about “science” at all (not least in the translations by Wacholder and Whiston, respectively of Pseudo-Eupolemos and Josephus), would one not be advised to find ways to avoid use of the term altogether? A second point I would like to raise is that, although Sanders has rightly noted the use of passive verbs for “seeing” in the Astronomical Book (as well as in Book of Watchers, etc.) as well as rendering of such verbs in the active voice by the time they are found in Ethiopic through the probably intermediary Greek, the Aramaic fragmentary texts also preserve several instances in which the Enochic seer actively “saw” this or that. What Enoch learns may ultimately be a matter of divine revelation given to him—the angel “shows” Enoch knowledge about heavenly phenomena, and, indeed, the predominant verbal form extant with the root ḥz’ is in the passive (cf. ’oḥzayit in 4Q209 25 3; 4Q212 1 iii 21); however, Enoch is still represented as an agent of revelation: in the narrativizing frame in which the knowledge is presented, he is the one who has shown Methuselah “everything” (’ar’ayku-ka kwello in 76:14; 79:1); moreover, at least in the Book of Watchers, the Enochic visionary can also be an active seer (4Q204 1 vi 5; 1 xii 26) “I saw trees” (where it varies with the passive “I was shown a mountain”). Thus, at least on the level of language, the shift from passive to active may already be at work in the Aramaic itself (cf. further the predominant use of the active voice in relation to Enoch’s seeing in the 4Q206 and 4Q207 fragments to the Animal Vision as well as in the Birth of Noah in which Enoch is looking at the heavenly tablets).
[☞ p5.4] The paper by VanderKam offers a helpful summary of what can be said about the general content of the Astronomical Book, based on what the extant Aramaic fragments and the Ethiopic version hold in common. He also offers a list of texts, mostly based on the Ethiopic version, in which Enoch is presented as an active seer, a revealer to Methuselah, or one to whom Uriel shows. In the presentation as a whole, VanderKam seems less concerned with definitions of “science” than Sanders. VanderKam, too, concerns himself with Philip Alexander’s essay on “Enoch and the Beginnings of Jewish Interest in Natural Science”. However, he does not so much question Alexander’s definition of “science” itself as he evaluates several views advanced by Alexander that may be questioned: the reason for angelic agency being the domestication of alien wisdom, a purported Moses-Enoch rivalry, the use of Aramaic by priestly circles in Jerusalem, and the extent of “science” at work in the Astronomical Book. In countering Alexander, VanderKam’s own understanding of the context within which the Astronomical Book arose becomes clear: (i) influenced by traditions such as Mul.Apin and Enuma Anu Enlil 14, the Enochic author is more likely to have undertaken the work “in the eastern diaspora”; (ii) there is no evidence for a Moses-Enoch rivalry (something that Sanders’ comparison of modes of knowledge in the priestly tradition in the Pentateuch with Astronomical Book would seem also to bear out); (iii) the use of an angelic mediator for the astronomical material is “exegetical” (Enoch walked with “elohim”) rather than an attempt to give alien wisdom a place within Jewish tradition; and, to quote VanderKam, (iv) “The science in the Astronomical Book of Enoch meets the criteria that Alexander lists but does so more fully than he indicates.” Although with Alexander, VanderKam acknowledges that Astronomical Book has probably reduced complex phenomena regarding the moon and sun into overly simple patterns, he still claims that “the science contained in it [i.e. the book] is based … on observation”.
[☞ p5.5] In this last point, we may notice where VanderKam and Sanders part company. Sanders does not do away with the category of “observation” altogether, but emphasizes this as “revealed”. VanderKam’s emphasis seems to move in the other direction. Though arguing a certain indebtedness on the part of the writer to Genesis 1 and 5 and the Flood narrative as well as to the approach to the fixity of the created order found in Jeremiah 5:22-23 and 31:35-36, VanderKam places more emphasis on the writer’s claim that the knowledge of the book is based on “observation”. As such, the Astronomical Book belongs to what Drawnel refers to as “didactic literature” and its purpose, though presented simply as knowledge transmission by a father to a son or teacher to pupil, would have been “to produce something very schematic to provide basic knowledge to aspiring priests or others whose work would require some knowledge about the structure of the creation.” Here VanderKam implies something that Sanders’ paper does not: knowledge for priests “whose work would require” it suggests that for VanderKam the 364-day scheme was, at least in the eastern diaspora a practical (not simply an ideal) calendar. One might be interested in whether Sanders concurs with this, especially since Sanders finds in the Astronomical Book the bringing together of aspects from different spheres of “exact descriptive knowledge” (cosmos, temple and the human body), thus relativizing the distinction between “observation” of nature and prescriptive command/ritual with which language of “revealed” is more immediately associated.
[☞ p5.6] Within the discussion about the degree to which the Enochic Astronomical Book relates to ancient “science”, a significant framework—a framework that is specifically Jewish and not “science” in any way, not even in the ancient world—should not be forgotten. The book opens at 1 Enoch 72:1 with the following superscript: “The book about the motion of the heavenly luminaries all as they are in their kinds, their jurisdiction, their time, their name, their origins, and their months which Uriel, the holy angel who was with me (and) who is their leader, showed me. The entire book about them, as it is, he showed me and how every year of the world will be forever, until a new creation lasting forever is made.”1 The italicized words indicate that, whatever the value of revealed knowledge about the heavens may consist of, that knowledge is considered to be a temporary structure that at a decisive future time will be replaced by a more eternal one. Thus in the Astronomical Book we have to do with revealed knowledge (according to what is disclosed to the Enochic seer through the agency of Uriel) and a future, more eternal order of things designated as a “new creation”. Revealed knowledge, then, is not necessarily permanent; what is revealed is, as a matter of principle, provisionary. We may legitimately ask, then, how much this opening of the book remains operative in everything that follows and, further, implies an eschatological framework that validated discourse that otherwise may have shown heavy influence from existing traditions of observing heavenly bodies that circulated in the Ancient Near East and to which the Enochic author(s) here fell heir.
[☞ p5.7] I have learned a great deal from both these papers. They both argue that the notion of “observation” is operative in the claims being made in the Astronomical Book. However, our papers seem to differ with regard to the kind of observation that characterizes the way the book presents itself and they seem to differ regarding the origin of angelic mediation that the book sustains.
[☞ endnote-chapter5-1] 1 The translation is that of George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 96.
