ARAMAIC BOOKS OF ENOCH

The destruction wrought by Roman soldiers, by rodents, by insects, and above all by the ravages of the centuries on the treasures of the central library of the Essene settlement at Ḥirbet Qumrân, hidden in Cave 4 in the summer of 68 A.D., has had a merciless effect on our Enochic manuscripts. Scarcely any fragments offer continuous passages. The majority are reduced to tiny pieces, in truth minute crumbs, whose identification and restoration demanded great reserves of patience and ingenuity. To quote a novelist: "He began to study the scroll with the frenetic patience that characterizes this kind of scholar, capable of losing his eyesight studying for twenty years a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls." Original: "Il se mit à étudier le rouleau avec la patience frénétique qui caractérise ce genre de savants, capables de perdre la vue en étudiant pendant vingt ans un fragment des Manuscrits de la Mer Morte."

Figure 1 tabulates the fragments of 4QEn in relation to the sections of the Ethiopic Enoch. If we compare the sections represented by our fragments with the Ethiopic text, the balance appears fairly satisfactory. For the first book, the Book of Watchers, we can calculate that exactly 50 percent of the text is covered by the Aramaic fragments; for the third, the Astronomical Book, 30 percent; for the fourth, the Book of Dreams, 26 percent; for the fifth, the Epistle of Enoch, 18 percent.

Figure 1 also makes clear the "codicological status" of the scrolls. It can be seen that Enᶜ brought together in the same volume three of the documents attributed to the antediluvian patriarch; to these should be added, in all probability, the Book of Giants. Enᵈ and Enᵉ each contained the first and fourth books; both were perhaps originally tetralogies. The scribes of Enᵃ and Enᵇ probably transcribed only the Book of Watchers, whilst the scribe of Enᵍ copied only the Epistle. The dates of the 4QEn manuscripts are spread over the second and first centuries B.C.