Slavonic 2 Enoch (Prof. Szönyi)

Article

The Old Testament treats Enoch very sparingly (Fig. 12.1). From Genesis 5:18–22 we learn that Enoch lived 365 years; at the age of 65 he begat Methuselah, then ‘walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.’ Enoch’s great grandson was Noah, who by God’s grace transferred earthly life, including humanity to the postdiluvian world. From the New Testament letter of St. Jude we also learn about Enoch’s important prophecies and St. Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews also mentioned Enoch as somebody who was righteous and had unshaken faith (11:5).

Genesis 6 is not very clear, it has contradictions and ambiguities that have been generating fierce debates from the time of the Church Fathers to today (VanderKam’s Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition and also his Enoch, A Man for All Generations, Joh. Chrysostom, Hom. 20).

The origins of the Enoch-mythology go back to Sumerian times and show some kinship with the story of Gilgamesh (See Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic; and Greenfield and Stone, ‘The Books of Enoch and the Traditions of Enoch’). On this basis the story of the Watchers and most other parts of the book were written in Hebrew or Aramaic in the time of the Second Temple. Large fragments of this text survived among the Dead Sea Scrolls causing great scholarly sensation in the middle of the twentieth century (Milik, The Book of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments…; VanderKam and Adler (eds.), The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity; Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis; Boccaccini (ed.), Enoch and Qmran Origins). Some time in the first or second century ce, the Book of Enoch was translated into Greek (we have the whole story of the Watchers) and from this yet another translation was made into Ge’ez, the language of the Christian Church of Ethiopia where the book became canonized among the books of the Old Testament. About the same time the Greek text was further developed and translated into Old Church Slavonic where it survived among the sacred texts of the Orthodox Christian Church, becoming known as 2 Enoch (Andersen: 2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of ) Enoch. See also: Böttrich, Weltweisheit, Menschheitsethik, Urkult: Studies zum slavischen Henochbuch; Orlov, ‘Celestial Choirmaster: The Liturgical Role of Enoch-Metatron in 2 Enoch).

1. 2 Enoch was used only in the Orthodox Slavic community and 3 Enoch was only known to Hebrew mystics. The figure of Enoch, however, was intriguing even on the basis of the Biblical text, especially after he and Eliah were identified with the witnesses of the measuring of the Temple mentioned in St. John’s Revelations (11:3) (Fig. 12.3). To complicate things, 2 Enoch was discovered in the late nineteenth century, while 3 Enoch became known to scholars only in the early twentieth (see in Badalanova-Geller, 2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of ) Enoch: Texts and Contexts).