The Book of Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Thousands of jigsaw pieces, spilled across a table. There is no box, and no picture showing what is supposed to come out. The pieces belong to several hundred different puzzles that have been mixed together. Most of them are missing. Some are smaller than a fingernail.

That is what the work looked like for the scholars who sat in a museum in East Jerusalem in the 1950s, facing the finds from Cave 4 at Qumran. Among the thousands of scraps of parchment on the tables lay the remains of a book that nobody had seen in its original language for almost two thousand years.

What was found at Qumran

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered from 1947 onward in the caves near the ruins of Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Cave 4, discovered in 1952, was the richest of them all: it held thousands of fragments from hundreds of manuscripts.

Among these fragments, remains of eleven different manuscripts of 1 Enoch were identified, all in Aramaic. Seven of them contain parts of the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Dreams and the Epistle of Enoch. Four others contain the Book of the Luminaries, the astronomical part of the book. None of them is complete. These are fragments, sometimes a few lines and sometimes single words. They survived thanks to the dry climate of the Judean Desert. In a damper place nothing would have been left of them.

For comparison, fewer copies were found at Qumran of most books of the Bible. Whoever lived there, or whoever hid a library there, read the Book of Enoch a great deal.

Twenty-four years of waiting

The Enoch fragments were entrusted to Józef Milik, a Polish-born priest and scholar who was considered the most gifted decipherer on the scrolls team. The work was painfully slow. He had to identify which fragments belonged to the same manuscript, read blurred letters, and fit every piece into its place with the help of the Ethiopic translation and the Greek fragments.

The full edition was published only in 1976, twenty-four years after the discovery. One can be angry about the delay, and many were. One can also remember that Milik was working with crumbs, and that most of the sentences he had to reconstruct from a word or two.

The first discovery: the language

Until Qumran the world knew the Book of Enoch mainly in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, and in Greek fragments. Scholars assumed the original had been written in Hebrew or in Aramaic, and argued about it for generations. The fragments from Cave 4 settled the argument: the book, or at least most of it, was written in Aramaic, the spoken language of the Jews of the Land of Israel in the Second Temple period.

There is something moving about this. A book that wandered from Aramaic to Greek, from Greek to Ge’ez, and from Ge’ez to the languages of Europe, was found at last in its own language, a day’s walk from Jerusalem.

The second discovery: the age

The oldest manuscript of the Book of the Luminaries is dated, by the shape of its letters, to the late third or early second century BCE. The early copy of the Book of the Watchers is also from the first half of the second century BCE. A manuscript is always a copy of something older, so the works themselves were written even earlier, in the third century BCE at the latest.

The significance is not self-evident. It means that the early parts of the Book of Enoch are older than the Book of Daniel, the latest book in the Hebrew Bible. The story of the angels who came down on Mount Hermon is not a late legend that grew up on the margins of the Bible. It was written when the Bible itself had not yet been closed.

The third discovery: what was missing

Sometimes the most important find is the one that was not found. The Book of Enoch as we have it is made up of five parts. Fragments of four of them were found at Qumran. Of the fifth part, the Book of Parables, chapters 37 to 71, not a single line was found.

This is no minor detail. The Book of Parables is the part in which the heavenly figure called “the Son of Man” appears, and it is the part that has most occupied scholars of early Christianity. Its absence from Qumran strengthened the view that it is the latest part of the book. Many scholars date it to the end of the first century BCE or to the first century CE, though the debate has not been settled.

Instead, something else was found at Qumran: several copies of an Aramaic work that had been unknown before, the Book of Giants. It tells the story of the children of the angels from their own point of view, their dreams and their fear of the approaching judgment. Milik even proposed that the Book of Giants originally stood where the Book of Parables stands now, though most scholars have not accepted the proposal.

The fourth discovery: the Ethiopic text is reliable

Another question hung over the Book of Enoch. Its complete text reached us through two translations, from Aramaic into Greek and from Greek into Ge’ez, and through centuries of copying. How much of the original was left in it?

The comparison with the Aramaic fragments gave a reassuring answer. In most places the Ethiopic text is fairly faithful to the original. The exception is the Book of the Luminaries: its Aramaic text was much longer and more detailed, and the translators, or the copyists, shortened it. Anyone who has ever tried to read tables of sunrises and sunsets will understand them.

Who read the Book of Enoch at Qumran

The scrolls also teach us about the readers. The people who kept this library followed a calendar of three hundred and sixty-four days, the calendar the Book of Enoch describes in detail. They also copied the Book of Jubilees, which relies on the writings of Enoch, and one of their own works mentions “the Watchers of heaven” who fell. Another scroll, which expands on the stories of Genesis, tells of the wondrous birth of Noah much as the end of the Book of Enoch does.

We do not know for certain who these people were. Most scholars identify them with the Essenes, a sect described by ancient writers, and others disagree. Either way, the Book of Enoch was no curiosity for them. It was part of a whole worldview, which included angels, a heavenly calendar, and the expectation of a day of judgment close at hand.

A distant generation yet to come

At the opening of the Book of Enoch, Enoch says for whom his words are intended:

My words are meant not for this generation, but for a distant generation yet to come.

1 Enoch 1:2

Whoever copied these words onto parchment and placed the scroll in a cave above the Dead Sea could not have known how distant that generation would be. We are used to thinking that we are the ones who discover the past. Sometimes it seems that the past simply waited patiently for us to arrive.