Slavonic Enoch: How Russian Monks Preserved an Ancient Jewish Book
An ancient Jewish work about ten heavens vanished from every language in which it was written and read. It survived only in a language that had no alphabet when it was composed, in monasteries its author could never have imagined.
In short2 Enoch is called Slavonic Enoch because it has reached us in full only in Old Church Slavonic, the written language of the Slavic churches. More than twenty manuscripts are known, copied between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries in Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia.
In what language would you look for a Jewish book that was written some two thousand years ago and then lost? Most of us would start with Hebrew and Aramaic, move on to Greek, and perhaps end with Latin and Syriac. It is hard to believe anyone would think of Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of monks in Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia. And yet that is the only place where one of the most fascinating works of antiquity survived in full, the work we now call 2 Enoch.
A book nobody was looking for
In 1880 the Russian scholar Andrei Popov printed a text from a manuscript that had been copied in the town of Poltava in 1679. Its title was The Book of the Secrets of Enoch. The publication made almost no impression. Those who read Russian were not especially interested in ancient Jewish literature, and those who were interested in ancient Jewish literature did not read Russian.
Western Europe heard of the text only in the early 1890s, and assumed it was a Slavonic translation of the familiar Book of Enoch, the one brought from Ethiopia more than a century earlier. Robert Henry Charles, who was working on the Ethiopic book at the time, turned to William Morfill, Oxford's specialist in Slavonic languages. Morfill translated, and it turned out that they were looking at a different work altogether: ten heavens, a creation story known from nowhere else, and an Enoch who is anointed with oil and becomes one of the angels.
The translation came out at Oxford in 1896, and since that day the world has had two Books of Enoch. That edition is also the basis for the text of 2 Enoch that appears on this site.
The road to the monasteries
How did such a work reach Slavic monks? In the ninth and tenth centuries the Slavic peoples received Christianity from Byzantium, and with it they received an alphabet. A people that had no books suddenly needed an entire library, and the monks launched a vast project of translation from Greek. They translated the scriptures and the prayers, but also whatever else stood on the Byzantine shelves, including ancient works that the Greek church itself had almost stopped copying.
That is how, probably in the tenth or eleventh century, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch was translated too. The Greek original was lost, and the translation went on passing from monastery to monastery. The monks who copied it presumably did not know that they held the last copies in the world. To them it was one more useful book about the forefathers of humanity.
More than twenty manuscripts are known today, from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth. The earliest witness is not a religious book at all. It is a Russian legal collection of the fourteenth century called The Just Balance, a kind of handbook for judges, whose editor wove into it passages from Enoch's moral teachings to his sons. Somebody in medieval Russia thought Enoch was useful reading for magistrates.
2 Enoch is not the only book with such a fate. The Apocalypse of Abraham and the Ladder of Jacob, two other ancient Jewish works, are known to us only from Slavonic copies.
Ten heavens or seven
The manuscripts are not identical. They fall into two families, a long version and a short one, and the difference between them is far greater than ordinary copying errors. In the long version Enoch ascends through ten heavens. In the short version there are only seven. Scholars have argued for more than a hundred years over which of the two is closer to the original: whether someone shortened a long book, or someone expanded a short one. The edition on this site follows the long version.
Where the book came from
The big question is who wrote the book, and where. The strongest clue is hidden in a single verse of the creation story:
I gave him a name from the four directions of the world, from east, from west, from south and from north, and I set four special stars for him. I called his name Adam, and I showed him the two ways, the light and the darkness, and I said to him:
2 Enoch 30:13
In English, as in Slavonic, the verse is a riddle. What does the name Adam have to do with the four directions of the world? In Greek it becomes clear at once. The four directions are called anatole, dysis, arktos and mesembria, and their first letters spell the name Adam. Whoever composed this little sermon was thinking in Greek.
Evidence of the book's Jewish origin also remains inside the text itself. The tenth heaven, it says, is called Aravoth in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew word passed into Greek, from Greek into Slavonic, and survived both translations.
From all this most scholars have concluded that the book was written in Greek, by a Jew. Many of them date it to the first century CE, before the destruction of the Temple, because it speaks of sacrifices as something still practised, and some point to the large Jewish community of Alexandria. Others disagree, and the proposals made over the years are spread across about a thousand years. There are few books about which we know so little.
The surprise from Nubia
In 2009 a piece of evidence arrived from a place no one expected. A young Dutch scholar, Joost Hagen, examined fragments in Coptic, the language of Egypt's Christians, which had been found back in 1972 in the excavations at Qasr Ibrim, a fortified site in Nubia on the bank of the Nile. He identified in them passages from chapters 36 to 42 of 2 Enoch. The fragments are centuries older than any Slavonic manuscript.
The meaning is twofold. The book was not an invention of monks in eastern Europe, as some had suspected, and it was also read in the Nile valley, not far from the land where it was probably written. For a hundred and thirty years Slavonic Enoch was a book with a single witness. Now it has two.
From nation to nation
In the book itself God tells Enoch what is to be done with his writings:
And let them spread the books you wrote, from children to children, from generation to generation, from nation to nation.
2 Enoch 33:10
When those words were written, the Slavs did not yet have a written language. The author could not have guessed that the people who would keep his book had not yet learned to write, and that the hiding place would be monastery libraries in lands whose names he had never heard.
We tend to think that books are preserved at the centre: in the great cities, in the famous libraries, in the important languages. The two Books of Enoch teach the opposite. Jerusalem, Alexandria and Constantinople lost them. One was saved by monks in the mountains of Ethiopia, and the other by monks in the forests of the north. Anyone who wants his book to last two thousand years might do well to hope it gets translated into a language that has not yet been born.
