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Re: Qumran question (fwd)
This message has been crossposted from Ioudaios because it contains a
substantive summary of David Suter's work on 1 Enoch and angels.
Avital Kobayashi Pinnick
list moderator
Orion
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 02:50:34 EST
From: David W. Suter <dsuter@catadon.stmartin.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <ioudaios-l@lehigh.edu>
Subject: Re: Qumran question
On Sat, 2 Mar 1996, Ian Hutchesson wrote:
> To David Suter,
> I get the idea you are hiding your work on 1Enoch!
Ian, the substance of the position is in "Fallen Angel, Fallen Priest"
article in the 1979 _Hebrew Union College Annual_, which I think I have
mentioned to you on at least one occasion. Maxwell Davidson had a
critique of it in his recent book, _Angels at Qumran_, to which I replied
in a review on IOUDAIOS REVIEW, available through the archives. I am of
the opinion that there is a continuing critique of priestly marriages
extending from the Ezra literature down at least into the second century
BCE, and that there are correspondences between the accusations directed
against the Watchers in the Book of the Watchers and the material in CD,
which also mentions the Watchers in the context of a list of great
sinners. The Book of the Watchers I understand to be 3rd century BCE and
CD 2nd century. Davidson points out that it seems that the Book of the
Watchers is not produced by the people who produced the sectarian
literature distinctive to the Dead Sea Scrolls and must have been brought
into the group from somewhere else (a position that I think is
essentially correct). He tries to distance 1 Enoch from the sectarian
literature as far as possible by contrasting their "theologies" (Enoch
speaks of good angels going astray, while the two spirit theology is
characteristic of the sectarian literature); however, he makes the mistake
of ignoring things like Jubilees in which the fallen angel material and
the rudiments of the two spirit theology (note the role of Mastema) stand
side by side.
> Since fragments of most sections of 1Enoch were found among the dss, we get
> the idea these books were significant there, so how about dropping a bit
> more of your research on us?
1 Enoch may have been pushed to the sidelines fairly early on at Qumran
(there have been some suggestions to this effect in the literature over
the last thirty or forty years). Jubilees may have functioned as the
conduit of these traditions. In _The Dead Sea Scrolls Today_, Jim
VanderKam argues that given the criteria he used for determining what
served as scripture at Qumran, Jubilees passes a number of tests,
including number of copies and citation in other works.
>
> Your post hints that the book of the Watchers is after the time of Judas
> Maccabaeus, if you are following the conventional position regarding the
> scrolls. Yet Milik thinks it is older than Genesis 6:1-4. How does this fit
> your analysis?
>
Milik is not the first to think that; however, 1 Enoch 6 strikes me as an
exegetical expansion of Genesis 6. One might argue that in expanding
upon scripture it draws upon some of the same traditions that underlie
Genesis; however, Genesis speaks of the "sons of the gods" while 1 Enoch
makes them angels. If you are interested in discussions of the
traditions and the way they come together in 1 Enoch, I suggest searching
out articles by Deborah Dimant and George Nickelsburg in JBL from around
1980.
> Come on David, spill the beans!
Ian, I think I have "spilled the beans" on various occasions and in
various ways, but I respond to your question about what various ones of
us think about the DSS and the site at Qumran only to be upbraided for
not giving you a dissertation on 1 Enoch in the process. If you want
people to be more forthcoming with information, you might adopt a
different strategy.
>
> Ian Hutchesson
> By the way, are you still aiming for an Enochian Web-site? If so, will you
> have it up before the turn of the century (guffaw, guffaw)? (Shoot him, will
> somebody?)
Ian, I think I offered to get a student assistant to scan in an English
text of 1 Enoch before we discovered that it was already available on one
web site or another, but I'm somewhat at a loss as to a promise to
produce a web site, certainly by this time. I wouldn't mind having a web
page which would undoubtedly have Enoch material on it, but that is hardly
possible when one's office computer is a 286. That does get upgraded in the
next week or two, but it still takes time to figure out how to make a web
page work. Now, if you want other scholars to tell you what they're
doing, you might at least try to treat them with a little more civility
than I read in your post.
David Suter
Saint Martin's College
> >
>