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1916'

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THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Jewish and Christian
Apocalypses By
F. Crawford Burkitt, M.A., D.D.
Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the
University of Cambridge
Fellow of the British Academy

The Schweich Lectures
1913

London
Published for the British Academy
By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press
Amen Corner, E.C
1914

OXFORD : HORACE HART
PEIKTEK TO THE UNIVERSITY

TO THE MEMORY OF
SAMUEL ROLLES Dill VER
THE FIRST OF THE SCHWE1CH LECTURERS
prw . . . myth mim pDiyn bs
J both vi 1

PREFACE
This hook contains the three Schweich Lectures for 1913, printed
almost exactly as they were delivered last November. The only
change of importance is that I have divided the third Lecture into
its two constituent parts, so as to keep the specifically Christian
variety of Apocalypse in a class by itself.
In the Lectures I attempted to confine myself as much as possible
to what I believe to be the fundamental idea which underlies the
great series of Jewish Apocalypses, vir:. the idea of the imminent
Judgement to Come, and further, to exhibit this Idea in connexion
with what I believe to be both its true historical setting and the
ultimate cause of its manifestation. That which gives the Apoca
lypses vitality is the great struggle between Religion and Civilization,
of which the Maccabean Martyrs are the symbol. I omit the adjec
tives. My readers themselves, according as they view the thing, can
say 'between spiritual Religion and material Civilization ' or 'between
fanatical Religion and enlightened Civilization,' — and they will judge
the Apocalypses accordingly. But it seemed to ine worth while to
exhibit the Apocalypses as clearly as possible from this quite definite
and particular point of view, and therefore I found it inadvisable to
expand what I had said by introducing other points of view or more
details into the printed form of the Lectures.
What I have added will be found in the separate Appendices.
These will, I hope, explain themselves to the specialists for whom
they were primarily written. They will at least serve to shew that
I have not ventm-ed to make sweeping generalisations about this
department of ancient literature without making a somewhat minute
study of the principal documents.
The year 1913 saw a grand edition of all the Old Testament
' Apocrypha ' and ' Pseudepigrapha ' brought out under the able and
stimulating editorship of Dr, now Canon, R. H. Charles. Students of

vi PREFACE
the Book of Enoch are under a deep debt of gratitude to Dr Charles,
who now has edited it three times in English and once in Ethiopic.
Is it not time that a literal English translation should be accessible
to all? Poor students of theology can be expected to have read
Daniel, for it is in the Bible ; they can be expected to have read Second
Esdras, for it is at least in ' the Apocrypha '. But the cheapest way
of getting at the plain text of Enoch is still to try and pick up
a second-hand copy of one of the reprints of Laurence's translation,
and this generally comes to about three-and-sixpence. This trans
lation was pioneer work. It was most creditable as a first attempt,
but like all such efforts, especially when made on a bad text, it is
generally inadequate, often obscure, and to young students often
positively misleading. On any theory of the Book of Enoch
either of Dr Charles's translations is vastly superior. I am not
thinking of the needs of teachers and professors, but of young
students and ordinary clergymen. Is it impossible to hope that
Dr Charles and the Clarendon Press will prepai-e a plain translation
for us ? If not, I hope that some one else who knows Ethiopic will
make one. If he does so, let me further beg him to make as few
emendations as possible, — he should follow Dr Charles's MS g almost
always, — and when he feels bound to make an emendation let it be
always quite clear to the reader what the transmitted text is. A text
so prepared would be useful to teachers and could be bought by
students, for I do not think it need cost more than a shilling.
F. C. BURKITT

Weslroad Corner, Cambridge
March, 1914

CONTENTS PAGE
I. The Apocalyptic Idea . . ..... 1
II. The Book of Enoch ....... 17
III. The Minor Jewish Apocalypses . . . . .34
IV. Early Christian Apocalyptic Writing . . . .44
APPENDIX I: On the Greek Text of Enoch
1. The Descent of the Angels  53
2. The Prologue to Enoch  55
3. Enoch and the Valleys of the Dead . . . .65
4. Miscellaneous Conjectures ...... 68
5. On the Astronomical teaching of Enoch . . .70
APPENDIX II: On the Martyrdom of Isaiah . .72
APPENDIX III : On some other Kinds of Apocalyi'ses . 75
INDEX  79

ILLUSTRATION
The Gizeh MS. of Enoch, p. 23 . . . . To face p. 1

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THE GIZEH MS. OF ENOCH, p. 23
TAe BeoAr o/ Enoch begins in the middle of line 8 {marked with a cross).

To face p. 1

JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSES.
I. THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA.
The subject announced for the present series of Schweich Lectures
is "Jewish and Christian Apocalypses". It is a subject upon which
much has been written of late years, especially by specialists for
specialists. Besides this frankly specialist literature there has not
been wanting a great measure of recognition of the importance,
in a general way, of these Apocalypses and the state of mind which
they reflect, for the history of Early Christianity. But the Apo
calypses themselves are still unfamiliar to most people, and indeed
there are a good many reasons against their becoming popular in the
present day. Both as wholes and in detail they are strange and foreign
to our ways of thinking and writing : they need, in fact, a great deal
of what is called ' Introduction ' to make them comprehensible at all.
Before coming, therefore, to the Apocalypses or to the circumstances
that called them forth, I wish to make a few remarks on certain
ideas and conceptions with which the Apocalypses are fundamentally
concerned. The Sistine Chapel is familiar to all in this travelled age. As you
all know, it is the private chapel of the Popes and it was decorated by
the greatest artists of the time. The Popes for whom the work was
done, and the artists who did it, were all profoundly influenced by the
Renaissance, by the revival of the literature, the art, the ideas of
heathen Greece and Rome. Those who do not admire the Sistine
Chapel as an example of Christian Art generally complain that
it seems to them pagan : at least it is free from the reproach of being
overmuch mediaeval. Let us consider for a moment what the scheme
of decoration really is. We will not go into the Chapel as if it were
a mere picture-gallery, walking about freely from point to point. We
will take no looking-glasses in our hands or lie on our backs to
examine the ceiling. No doubt persons attending Mass have in all
ages turned their heads occasionally from side to side and looked up at
the roof. Those who do so at the Sistine Chapel see on their left scenes
from the Old Testament and on their right the fulfilment in the
B

2 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
New. If they glance at the roof, they see the creation of the world
and the beginnings of history as taught in Scripture and tradition.
The pious worshipper will perhaps not care thus to look about
him. But there is one thing which he cannot well help seeing. He
cannot raise his eyes to adore the consecrated Host without being
confronted with the Last Judgement. Behind the Priest, behind the
Altar, behind the lighted candles, behind the sacred drama of worship,
the Last Judgement is always there. The only thing that stands
between the Christian worshipper and Hell is the Priest and the
Altar. The symbolism of the Last Judgement, as presented in Christian
Churches, is not always exactly the same as in the Sistine Chapel.
At Ulm, and formerly in many English Churches, it was represented
on the Chancel Arch, so that the Altar was exhibited as the one open
door through which the worshipper might take refuge. But however
it might be figured, it stood in the centre of conviction, both in
popular belief and in the official creed. The Pope's Chapel, for all
the classical detail in the paintings, faithfully reflects the Christian
scheme of things : behind everything the Last Judgement looms
in the background, universal, inevitable.
The guide-books tell us that Michaelangelo's great picture owes
a great deal to Dante. I have no doubt that this is true in the sense
in which .the statement is made, i. e. in the arrangement of details.
Nevertheless there is a sense in which Dante's poem marks the
triumph of a quite different order of ideas, which robs the idea of the
Last Judgement of most of its significance. Dante goes to the Other
World, he sees the dead in Paradise, in Purgatory, or in Hell. For
all intents and purposes the Last Judgement has no meaning for
them : they are judged already. After such and such a time or mode
of probation one by one the souls in Purgatory will leave it to join
the souls in Paradise, just as one by one they had arrived. The
Other World is a place, which individuals enter one by one when they
die ; the conception of the Last Judgement, on the other hand, makes
the Other World a time, an era, which all individuals experience
simultaneously, a "Divine Event to which all Nature moves". It
is this Divine Event that is set forth by the Apocalypses. The
doctrine of the Apocalypses is the doctrine of the Last Judgement.
For the study of Early Christianity it is most important to keep in
mind the distinction between the doctrine of a Last Judgement and
other forms of belief in retributive justice and in life beyond the
grave. This is particularly the case when it comes to a question

THE LAST JUDGEMENT 3
of origins. That the Powers above us are just and that evil will not
go in the end unpunished has been the conviction of many races of
mankind : it is not necessary to look for a historical nexus every time
this belief finds expression. The same may be said of belief in
the persistence of a man's spirit or ghost. And it is an easy, though
not a logically necessary step, to combine the two beliefs and to hold
that the comparative happiness or misery of a man in his future life
depends on his past. Systems so different as Indian and Egyptian
Religion agree in this. But the notion of a future general Assize, at
which all wrong will be put right, not always with special reference to
individual cases, is a peculiar conception. It is certainly not universal,
or even widespread, and we may therefore suppose that it required
a very special train of circumstances to develop it.
One thing appears to me to be quite certain. It seems to me
certain that the doctrine of a future general Assize held no place
in the Graeco-Roman world, apart from the beliefs of Jews and
Christians. The period between the eras of Alexander the Great and
the Emperor Constantine, those six centuries during which Christianity
grew up, was an age of syncretism, of the mingling of religions,
a period during which European civilization was especially influenced
by Oriental beliefs. It was the age of the Mystery-religions, the
religions of Isis, of Mithra, of Attis. The dominant philosophies, as
we are more and more coming to see, were the result of the blending
of Greek thought with Oriental beliefs and teachings. Oriental
Astrology was in itself a religious philosophy ; it was an attempt to
formulate the influences which to a certain degree moulded the lives
of all the dwellers under the roof of heaven. One school of Philo
sophers, the Stoics, even taught the doctrine of a future general
conflagration, but this is quite a different thing from the Last Judge
ment. The Stoic conflagration merely started everything over again,
to retread the old circle. Graeco-Roman religion, speaking generally,
did not see in History the working-out of a Divine Purpose.
I said just now that the doctrine of a Last Judgement required
a very special set of circumstances for its development. It will not
be a part of my aim in these Lectures to trace the growth of this
doctrine among the Jews from its origins. It is commonly said
to have been taken over by the Jews from Zoroastrianism, and there
may be some truth in this view. But for us the more important
thing is to notice that the seed fell on congenial soil, from wherever
it may have originally come. What I wish specially to emphasize is
the difference between Judaism and the contemporary Hellenistic,
Graeco-Roman, beliefs. Let us grant for the moment that the
b2

4 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
Jewish hope was coloured by Zoroastrianism : Mithraism, in any case,
was in great part ultimately derived from Persia. Why, then, was
a doctrine of Last Judgement so prominent in the one religion and
not in the other ?
Here we come, in a very real sense, to the heart of our subject.
I believe the main peculiarities, the main differentia, of post- Alex
andrian Judaism to arise directly from the actual history of the
Jews, in a word, to be the result of the great struggle between
Judaism and Hellenism.
It is during the two centuries and a half that extend from the
Maccabean Rising to the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, from
170 b. c. to 70 a. d., that the world in general is confronted with the
Jewish Nation. Before the Captivity its history had been simply
that of one among many petty nationalities of Palestine. The annals
of Sargon or of Sennacherib betray no consciousness that the subjects
of the King of Jerusalem were different in thought or customs from
other people. After the Return the Jews had lived unnoticed in
quiet. After the Destruction of Jerusalem, again, the direct political
power of Judaism is gone ; the Jews become a Church, an inter
national Society, rather than a Nation in the ordinary sense of the
word. But in the interval Judaism had played a truly national part ;
it became during those two-and-a-half centuries a kingdom of this
world, an alternative to Civilization as then understood, actually
before the eyes of men.
It is a curious fact that the parts of Israelite history with which
most of us are familiar are concerned with the preparation of the
Jews for their peculiar role rather than with the part they actually
played in general history. The kingdom over which the princes of
the House of David ruled made very little mark on the ancient
world, and when the hill-fortress of Jerusalem stood in the way of
the great empire of Babylonia it fell, and the kingdom of Judah fell
with it. The Jewish State collapsed, and there was nothing to
indicate to an outsider that any part of the social organisation would
survive. As a matter of fact, as we all know, the religion of the
Jews — or at least of a part of them — had undergone a strange and
unique development, the result of which was that it did not die with
its mother the old Jewish State. Two generations later, when there
is a change of Empires, some of the heads of the Jewish communities
in Babylon are still Jews, and they return to set the life in their old
home going once more, and to worship the God of their fathers as
aforetime. The history of the age of Ezra is full of unsolved historical

THE JEWISH NATION IN HISTORY 5
problems, but certain things are clear enough. It was no doubt
a day of small things. The returned exiles aspired to play no great
political part ; their chief desire was to be left alone to practise their
religion. But insignificant as they might be in numbers and imme
diate influence, they were now a peculiar people. They were quite
conscious of the fact themselves, and made their neighbours conscious
of it. They were the People: the rest of the world were Gentiles.
They now possessed the Law of God in black and white, a Law that
had been given to them to keep at all costs.
From the days of Ezra begins that most characteristic product of
Judaism — the Study of the Law. The community existed for the
sake ofthe Temple and its worship, for the sake of the ritual practised
at the Temple. To surround Jerusalem with a wall, and gradually
to raise up a fence for the Tora, as a later age phrased it — that was
a sufficient ambition. The Word of God had been already given to
them, and so the race of the Prophets came to an end and that of
the Scribes took its place.
The work of the Scribes was far more important than it was once
thought to have been. The wise men of Israel who came after Ezra
had the Law already, but it was they who brought the Prophets
into the form in which we read them, and the Psalms, whatever
ancient fragments they may possibly contain, were in the main their
work. To the Prophets it had been given to make the Religion
of Israel, but the Scribes made the Bible. It is difficult, when we
think of the immense effect that the Old Testament has had, to find
words high enough to describe the importance of the work of the
Scribes for after generations. And yet it was secondary and deriva
tive. The Scribes had not in themselves the direct and masterful
authority that belonged to the Prophets who went before them.
They were not commissioned themselves to say 'Thus saith the
Lord'. And so when the crisis came we find a new phenomenon.
The Jew who feels himself to have a new message for his brethren
shelters himself under a pseudonym. The original literature of the
two centuries and a half that preceded the capture of Jerusalem is
either anonymous, or it professes to be the work of some worthy of
old time. It is a remarkable 'act, that during the period when the
Jewish Nation was actually playing a great part in the world's
history, a part which was the direct outcome of the ideas which
animated the people, there are hardly any avowed Jewish writers,
till we come to the commentator Philo and to the Christians. It
was a literary age, and in it a great quantity of Jewish literature
was produced, some of which had great influence. But almost all of

6 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
it was published in the name of some ancient hero, as a vision of the
future which he had received.
It is well, I think, to remind ourselves at the outset that the
authorship of the Book of Daniel is no isolated problem. Baruch,
Ezra, Solomon, Moses, the Twelve Patriarchs, Noah, Enoch, Adam,
— all these had Apocalypses or Testaments fathered upon them. It
is difficult to know in particular cases how far the pseudonymity was
an understood literary artifice and how far it was really deceptive.
What, I think, is clear is that both authors and readers believed
that if any Revelation from God was true, it could not be new. It
must have been given to the great Saints of antiquity. The Christian
Apocalypse of John, as we read it, may be a compilation of different
dates, or a reissue of an earlier book, but in this respect the core of
it breathes a new spirit. " / John, your brother and companion in
tribulation, . . . / heard a voice which said, Write to Ephesus and
the rest of the Churches " : — this is new. It is a new message, given
to the contemporary Seer, and it marks the end of the type of writing
which we are to study.
The great spiritual crisis that befel the Jews of the second century
before our era was not the result of any development of Jewish
thought. It was brought on from without. To the pious Jew was
offered by Antiochus Epiphanes the alternative of death or assimila
tion to the Heathen world around him, and he chose rather to die.
And here, as in so many other crises of history the saying was verified
that whoso hateth his present life shall keep it and obtain life in
a greater and larger sense. It was under Antiochus that Israel rose
up once more to be a nation, baptized to a new life in the blood of
the Martyrs.
I am not going to attempt to tell the story of the great struggle
between Judaism and Hellenism, or to appraise the great debt that
even our modern world owes to the Jews for preserving elements vi
religion that were absent from the rather vulgar Hellenic ideals of
the Seleucid Empire. The point I wish to make is this, that during
the period we are considering Judaism came to play an imperial part
in the history of civilization, and that as a consequence Judaism
learned — the modern catchword is convenient — ' learned to think
imperially '.
What I mean may be illustrated by a comparison between the
prophecies against the nations in Ezekiel and Jeremiah as contrasted
with those in the Book of Daniel. In Jeremiah and Ezekiel we have
announcements of Divine vengeance upon the enemies of Israel, but

THE KINGDOM OF GOD 7
it is all piecemeal and detached.1 In Daniel, on the other hand,
there is a philosophy of universal History : " the great Gentile
kingdoms, like the Greek supremacy of the Seleucids and Ptolemies
which seemed so overwhelming and terrible, are shewn as phases in
a world process whose end is the Kingdom of God".2 Even now
' the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to
whomsoever He will' (Dan iv 17). Intensely patriotic as was the
author of the book of Daniel, there is something cosmopolitan about
his outlook on the world. The Stone cut out without hands does
not merely claim the right to exist: it is the conscious rival of the
Imperial Statue. In other words, Judaism is to the author of
Daniel a cosmic world-religion, and that not merely by detached and
occasional glimpses, but consciously and all the time.
Meanwhile the persecuted Saints of the Most High, the Jews who
are faithful to the true religion, are in the utmost extremity of
distress. Surely God (they thought) will soon, very soon, arise to
avenge His own and bring in His Kingdom that will last for ever.
Here you have the other side of the picture of Jewish world-religion,
the other side of the struggle of ideas between Jewish Religion and i
Greek Civilization, and this is the expectation of the Kingdom of
God and the belief that its Coming is imminent. The Kingdom of
God — that is the central idea. It is the New Age, the new state
of things that will come about when the great agony has ended by
God's victorious intervention on behalf of His Saints, when He comes, I
or sends His Representative to come, to set the world right.
In the two following Lectures I intend to describe some of the
outstanding features of certain of the Apocalypses in which this
hope found its most characteristic expression, and to discuss certain
problems connected with their interpretation. But before coming to
details I wish to say something about the influences which ultimately
threw almost all these Apocalypses out of favour. I feel it is
most important that we should see from the beginning what they
signify as a class, what their function was in Jewish thought gener
ally. If we get them into focus as a whole, we shall avoid regarding
with disproportioned attention individual features and individual
difficulties which are, after all, of subordinate importance.
It would perhaps be unphilosophical to assert that the expectation
of the Kingdom of God, of God's approaching intervention, was caused
1 See especially Ezek xxix IS ; the Prophet is unable to imagine a new arrange
ment of the world he had known, a world with no Egypt at all.
2 Edwyn Bevan, Jerusalem under the High Priests, p. 86.

8 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
by the great struggle between Judaism and Hellenism, between the
Jewish and Gentile ideals. But this expectation was certainly stimu
lated and coloured by the struggle. While the struggle lasted Israel
was playing a great part on the world's stage, great, that is, from the
point of view of the play of ideas and of their subsequent influence,
and Israelite thought re-echoed the national activity. After a while
came the reaction, or rather I should say, after a while there came
a wholly new set of national conditions, and Jewish thought under
went a reconstruction to suit these altered conditions. In the year
70 a. d., after the capture of Jerusalem, the Jewish State was destroyed.
Great departments of the national life ceased altogether to exist
materially ; if they continued at all, they could only continue as
ideas, in (so to speak) a spiritual form. The Jewish State, the
sacrificial worship, the office of the priests, the Feasts, the pilgrimages
to the Feasts, all that in the New Testament is associated with the
Sadducees or the Herodians — all these disappeared. To quote the
words of the Apocalypse of Baruch, ' Zion hath been taken from us,
and we have nothing now save the Mighty One and His Law'
(lxxxv 3).
It was a wonderful achievement for Jewish Religion to have rallied
at all after the sack of Jerusalem in the year 70, and again after
Bar Cochba's rebellion two generations later in Hadrian's time. It
is not surprising that such catastrophes should have modified Jewish
Religion : the wonder is that it should have survived at all, and that
it should have survived in such a way as to retain real continuity
with the past. When it is stated that Rabbinic Pharisaism after the
destruction of the Temple differs largely from Pharisaism before that
date we ought, I venture to think, be very careful that we express
this obvious truth in such a way as to be just to Johanan ben Zakkai
and the other founders of the Rabbinical Religion.1 Some of you
1 The name of Johanan ben Zakkai is hardly known among Christians, but to
him more than any man is due the survival of Judaism as an organized religious
system after the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70 and the cessation of the Sacrifices.
He had been a pupil of Hillel, so that he was probably only a few years junior to
S. Paul. During the Siege, Johanan b. Zakkai escaped out of Jerusalem and
obtained permission from Titus to retire to the village of Jabne or Jamnia, and teach
there openly. When the news of the fall of Jerusalem came to Jamnia, Johanan's
disciple Joshua b. Hanania cried out ' Woe to us, because the place is destroyed
where they make propitiation for the sins of Israel ! ' But Johanan answered ' My
son, let it not grieve thee ; we have yet one propitiation equal to it, and what is that
but the bestowal of kindnesses ?— even as it is written " I desired kindness and not
sacrifice ".' Compare Matt xii 7 and the saying of Simon the Just in Aboth i 2.
A good account of Johanan is to be found in Bacher's Agada der Tannaiten, ed. 2,
pp. 22-42. In N.T. style Johanan's name would be John the son of Zacchaeus.

JOHANAN BEN ZAKKAI 9
know, some of you perhaps know by heart, the first two chapters of
A both, where the chain of Teachers is set out from the men of the
Great Synagogue who learned from Ezra, through Hillel and
Shammai, to Johanan ben Zakkai. The succession is genuine. It
would ill become me as an Anglican Churchman, who values the idea
of apostolical succession and the organic continuity implied by it, to
regard the spiritual descent of Johanan from Ezra otherwise than
with respect and sympathy. The religion of Johanan ben Zakkai is
a legitimate child of the religion of Ezra. I am only putting before
vou the view that it is not the only legitimate child ; and further,
that in adapting itself to the altered conditions of existence after 70
the Rabbinical Religion was obliged to abandon part of the inheri
tance of former generations.
One of the first problems before the newly-organized Judaism was
to make a fence for the Law in a very direct sense, to fix in fact the
limits of the Canon of Scripture. By 70 a. d., indeed, the main con
tents were beyond controversy, but the final delimitation had yet to
be made. Among the Jews, as among the Christians, the growth of
the Canon of Scripture had been an almost imperceptible and natural
process, extending over a series of generations. No one can say
precisely when the Books of Kings among the Jews, or the Acts of
the Apostles among the Christians became Canonical Scripture. The
final stage we can just trace to some extent, because it is more or less
a conscious process. The wall is already there, and the last comer is
helped over it, not without protests, just as the coping stone is put
on. Every one has heard of. the saying of Rabbi Akiba about the
inclusion of the Song of Songs — ' all the Hagiographa are holy, but
the Song of Songs is Holy of Holies ' — but about the rejection of the
Writings that in the end were rejected we know very little. " It is
for us ", says Wellhausen, " hard to understand why Koheleth was
accepted and Ben Sira not, why Baruch was excluded and Daniel not,
why Esther was appreciated and 1 Maccabees not." x A more or less
satisfactory explanation can indeed be given in each case, the result
being known, but one feels that almost equally satisfactory explana
tions would have been forthcoming, had the result been different.
However that may be, the Canon of Scripture was defined, with the
inevitable result that the rejected books gradually became forgotten
and ceased to exercise any influence on Jewish thought. And indeed,
whatever surprise we may feel about the disappearance of particular
books, it is easy to see that most of the Apocalypses would have been
out of place in the reformed Judaism of Jampia and Tiberias. But
1 Bleek's Einleitung (1878), p. 552.

10 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
that is no reason for underestimating their part in the older religious
life of Jerusalem and the dominions of Herod Antipas, in the days
when the Temple was yet standing and the Jewish State was still
a reality. Above all, these documents are important to the Christian
student, because he is less concerned with the reconstruction of
Judaism under Johanan ben Zakkai and his successors, than with the
general conditions of Judaism before the Destruction of Jerusalem.
Most important of all is the case of the Book of Enoch. There is
a curious passage about this famous work in Tertullian, who happens
to quote the Book of Enoch for the sake of the tradition that the
fallen Angel Azael taught women the use of cosmetics and jewellery.
Tertullian, having remarked that he knows the scripture of Enoch is
not received by some on the ground that it is not admitted into the
Jewish Collection, goes on to say : ' since Enoch in the same Scripture
also predicted concerning the Lord, by us Christians the view is not at
all to be rejected that it does concern us, and we read that all scripture
which is suitable for edification is divinely inspired (2 Tim iii 16).
That by the Jews it should seem to have been afterwards rejected,
like most of the other things that have a Christian ring, is not so
very wonderful, i. e. if they have not received certain Scriptures about
Him whom they would not receive when He was speaking to them in
person.' x And Tertullian adds that the Book of Enoch has also in
its favour the apostolic testimony of the Epistle of Jude.
The fierce and dogmatic Christian rhetorician, himself more than
half a heretic, does not express himself in the language of modern
criticism, but I venture to think his, words have a real meaning for
the historian of ideas. What were the reasons that made ' Enoch '
an honoured book to Tertullian and his Church, that caused it to be
quoted in Jude and Barnabas, and referred to besides in 1 Peter and
elsewhere in the New Testament, and (what is more important) made
it part of the background of the earliest Christian teaching, of the
teaching of Jesus Himself? What were the reasons that caused it to
be proscribed and forgotten by orthodox Judaism, so that hardly
a memory of it survives in Rabbinical literature ?
We cannot answer these questions with the cheery assurance of the
apologists of a past generation, and say that Enoch was rejected
because it was a forgery, while Canonical Scripture is genuine and
historical. We live in an age which has fully realised that neither
Esther nor Daniel is historical, an age which does not take its beliefs
about the origin of man and the universe from Genesis any more than
it does from Enoch. We have rather to consider, as well as we can,
1 De Cultu Fern, i 3.

CHERISHED BY CHRISTIANS 11
what the Book of Enoch must have meant to the Jew of the times of
Alexander Jannaeus and of Herod, to the Jew and the Christian of
the time of the Destruction of Jerusalem, to the Christian of later
ages. Modern scholars are pretty well agreed as to the Palestinian origin
of the Book of Etioch, and that it had attained its present form
before the Christian Era. What is in dispute is the original form of
its constituent parts and the dates to which they should be assigned.
For our purpose just now this does not matter so much. It is not
disputed that the book quoted in the Epistle of Jude is our Enoch;
it is our Enoch, the work preserved in full in Ethiopic and for the
first third in Greek, that the early Christians read and the Rabbis
rejected. And the problem before us is to discover why this Pales- f
tinian book attracted the one party and failed to attract the other.
We must find a general reason, for none of the Apocalyptic writings,
with the exception of Daniel, was received by the reformed Judaism
of Jamnia and Tiberias. The only reason for the exception must
have been that the position of the Book of Daniel in the Jewish
Canon of Scripture was already assured before the Destruction of
Jerusalem. This view, it may be remarked in passing, is borne out
by the particular respect shewn to it by such widely separated repre
sentatives of 1st century Jewish thought as the Synoptic Gospels and
Josephus. But Daniel is a solitary exception. Every one of the
others, the Apocalypses or Testaments of Adam, Enoch, Noah,
Abraham, the Twelve Patriarchs, the Book of Jubilees, the Assump
tion of Moses, the Apocalypses of Ezra and of Baruch, were all
excluded. Indeed their claims do not seem to have been seriously
considered. Among the Christians, on the other hand, they were
long current, and Christian Apocalypses, such as the Ascension of
Isaiah, were composed in imitation of them, not to speak of more
original works, such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the canonical
Apocalypse of John. After a time the Apocalypses fell out of favour
in the Christian Church also, as the expectation of the speedy end of
all things gradually faded away. But they had been rejected from
the first by the Jewish Schools that survived the Destruction of
Jerusalem. Naturally the word * rejection ' does not mean that Johanan ben
Zakkai and his scholars tried the claims of Enoch and, on considera
tion, came to a view unfavourable to its canonicity. Before a book
becomes canonical, it must become at least interesting, and we have
to find out why the book that was so interesting to Jude and the
Christians was not interesting to Johanan and those who worked with

12 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
him. Official canonicity is only the final seal: the fate of a book
has generally been determined long before the official decision is
pronounced. I have quoted to you a piece from Tertullian about Enoch, to
exhibit to you the motives that made it an honoured book in the
Church. What saying shall we take to sum up the reasons why the
Apocalypses were not preserved by the Synagogue ? I will venture to
take as my text the saying of Johanan ben Zakkai, that God revealed
to Abram this world, but the world to come He did not reveal to
him.1 I believe that this saying really implies the renunciation of the
Apocalyptic idea, the notion that the Kingdom of God was an
external state of things which was just upon the point of being mani
fested, and (as a corollary) that the person of insight could know
something about it beforehand. It was this idea that inspires the
whole series of Jewish Apocalypses, that was the central thought of
the earliest preaching of Christianity, that intoxicated the Jewish
people in their wild struggle with Rome. Johanan ben Zakkai, as
you all know, had no false hopes about that struggle. He kept
a sober mind, like Jeremiah before him. He saw the inevitable
destruction of Jerusalem ; and so, when the crash came, and the sacri
fices came to an end, he was prepared to guide Jewish thought and
religion into new channels, not less profound, if necessarily more
narrow, than those along which they ran of old. He was content to
let the future age wait for God's good time, when it should please
Him to reveal it, and perhaps it was as well that he could not foresee
the future, or he might not have had the courage to begin his epoch-
making work in the Vineyard at Jamnia.
We read in the Gospel that Wisdom is justified of her children.
Like certain of the sayings in Pirke Aboth the exact meaning of this
pronouncement in its original context is somewhat obscure, and the
wise have held differing opinions about it. But if we may for once
take it in the sense that the wisdom of a course of action is to be
inferred from its results, then we may recognise the wisdom both of
the early Christians and of those Jews who rallied round Johanan ben
Zakkai. The work of these two companies was very different, their
aims, their ideals were different, and it is therefore not surprising that
they travelled along different roads. ' The Kingdom of God at hand'
— that was the Christian watchword. A New World, a wholly new
i Ber. rab. 44 (on Gen xv 18) : )b rhi tib N3H D^lyn blt< ',b nbl iim D^1J?n.
R. Akiba, on the contrary, said that God revealed to Abram both this world and
that which is to come —but Akiba, unlike Johanan ben Zakkai, believed that the
Kingdom of God was at hand, and lost his life as an adherent of Bar Cochba.

REJECTED BY THE RABBIS 13
state of things is on the point of arriving : watch and be ready, and
above all do not cumber yourselves with your old possessions, your
pld traditions, your old affections. I am not asking you to forget the
personal influence of Jesus upon those who accepted Him as their
Master, for indeed without it you lose the cord that both binds the
Christians together and supplies the current of their enthusiasm.
But that enthusiasm of the early Christians was directed to the Good
Time Coming. And the historian of religion can now see quite clearly
what advantages thjsr detachment gave to the Christians. From our
vantage-ground we qan see very well that the Jewish State had become
impossible, that it was only a question of time, before the Roman
Empire would come and crush it out of existence. According to all
a priori probability the Religion of the Jews would disappear with
their national existence, — and, as a matter of fact, many of the most
characteristic features of Jewish religious life did disappear at the
Destruction of Jerusalem and have never been renewed to this day.
The Jewish State perished, but it left two daughters, Christianity and
the Rabbinical Religion, which succeeded each in its own way in '
adapting its life to the new conditions.
I believe further that the faith of each of these descendants of
ancient Judaism was justified by the result, different as the course
of events turned out to be from what had been expected. The
Christians expected the visible return of their Lord to judge the
nations : they received instead the Roman Empire itself. They were
justified in their expectation of a wholly new state of things, in their
belief that the old state of things was worn out and ready to vanish
away, and that in them alone were the seeds of life that were destined
in due time to replenish the thought of the Western World. But for |
the venture of faith made by the early Christians, but for their belief
in the New Age, the religion of Amos and Jeremiah would never
have permeated the civilization of Europe. And those who believe I
in Religion believe that the faith of religious men in the obligations
of right and wrong, and in the Power that makes for righteousness, is
what keeps civilization alive, that makes it possible.
With this belief in the New Age the Christians naturally valued
the books that told them of it. Their hope was in the future, the
future just before them, in the Day of Judgement when the Son of
Man would come and inaugurate the reign of the Saints. It was
only when the vision faded away that these books fell out of favour.
But by that time the Christian Church had struck root in new soil, in
the Graeco-Roman civilization. It was living in the new world already,
breathing the new air of Christian fellowship.

14 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
Let us turn now to the other side of the scene. The Christian
movement did not attract the majority of the Jewish nation. Like
other nations, like the English, the majority were disinclined to
sacrifice everything for an ideal ; there were doubtless many like the
Rich Young Man in the Gospel, who was not willing to leave his
great possessions and follow Jesus, — great possessions that he or his
heir probably lost when the nation drifted into the disastrous war
with Rome. Yet nothing would be more unjust than to regard the
whole body of the Jews who did not become Christians as worldly
or indifferent. There were others, and among them were some of the
most deeply religious of the Jewish people, to whom the Christians
seemed to be men who in ignorance were giving up the substance for
the shadow. Israel was what it was by reason of God's Law, a Law
sacred and divine in itself, the true interpretation of which had been
handed down from generation to generation, an interpretation open
to all who take the pains to learn it from those who had given their
lives to its study. The Law of the Lord was a perfect Law, and it
had been given to Israel to keep. It was a treasure-house of all
wisdom : if any one be curious about the world to come, that which
is fit for him to know about it may perhaps be found hidden in God's
Law ; if not, then it is probably an unsearchable secret. In any case,
the first duty of an Israelite is to study the Law of his God, not to
search in books of doubtful authenticity for the signs of the end of
the world. "The trivial round, the common task,
" Will furnish all we ought to ask,
" Room to deny ourselves," —
(this last is a Christian phrase, is it not ? Let us emend it for our
present purposes into Room to walk straighter yet),
— "a road,
" To bring us daily nearer God."
I have ventured to use the language of the well-known Christian
Hymn, in order that we may not forget that the frame of mind I am
describing is eminently religious. It was an ideal of pious learning.
I am not convinced that it was the dominant or the most popular
ideal of religion in Israel during the first three-quarters of the first
Christian century, during the period depicted in the Gospels. I
should not be surprised, if during that exciting period the learned
casuist may have often appeared dull and pedantic to the eager
Apocalyptists, the half-heathen politicians, the fierce and uncom
promising Zealots. The learned casuist could wait: his time was

THE RABBINIC RELIGION 15
coming. When in the words of the Apocalypse of Baruch nothing
was left save the Mighty One and His Law, the Rabbi was ready
to guide his brethren along such of the old paths as still they were
permitted to tread, and to shew them by precept and by example how
to wait for the manifestation of the Sovereignty of God by taking
upon themselves the Yoke and realising God's Sovereignty within
them. The work of the Rabbis, of Johanan ben Zakkai and his successors,
was quietly heroic, and they succeeded so well in their reorganisation
of Judaism that their work stands to this day. But — and it is here
that the Apocalypses are directly concerned — they were able to carry
their work through, just because they had dropped the conviction
that had produced the Apocalypses. That is the reason why these
Jewish documents, speaking generally, are preserved in Greek and not
in Hebrew, by Christians and not by Jews.
I fear that I may seem to some of you to have wandered very far
this evening from the proper province of Biblical Archaeology, and
that some of my remarks may sound too vague and general, not to
say homiletic, to be useful for the study of the ancient Apocalypses.
But I am convinced that by far the most important thing for the
student of these venerable documents, be he Jew or Christian, is to/
look at them from the right point of view, from the right historical j
point of view. They are not great in themselves. They are not
worth much as literature, or as contributions to thought. They
throw no light directly on the problems of our time, in the sense
that Aeschylus or Plato, Amos or the Gospels, throw light. If one r
goes to the Apocalyptic literature for edification one does not get '
it. The most you arrive at is a sort of patronising approval for such
elements as the ethical maxims in the Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs. No, the value of the Apocalypses is of quite a different order.
They are the most characteristic survival of what I will venture to
call, with all its narrowness and its incoherence, the heroic age of
Jewish history, the age when the nation attempted to realise in
action the part of the peculiar people of God. It ended in cata
strophe, but the nation left two successors, the Christian Church '
and the Rabbinical Schools, each of which carried on some of the
old national aims. And of the two it was the Christian Church that \
was most faithful to the ideas enshrined in the Apocalypses, and it
did consider itself, not without some reason, the fulfilment of those
ideas. What is wanted, therefore, in studying the Apocalypses is,
above all, sympathy with the ideas that underlie them, and especially

16 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
with the belief in the New Age. And those who believe that in
Christianity a new Era really did dawn for us ought, I think, to have
that sympathy.
What has happened to the Apocalypses is, after all, very much
what has happened to the most striking external product of their
age, I mean to the Maccabean Princes and the Martyrs through
whose courage they rose to power. The Maccabeans proved in the
end to be only worldly tyrants, and no one would gather from
Talmudic sources how great a part they played in preserving Israel
from a fatal penetration by Hellenic ideas. It is through the book
called 1 Maccabees, preserved in Greek by the Christians, that we
know of their heroic efforts. And the Martyrs, whose readiness to
die for the faith was the bulwark of Israel's resistance, both passive
and active, their fate is even harder. Their simple courage is en
shrined in a wordy and rhetorical Greek tale, full of errors of fact
and of taste. Yet in a very true sense it is on them that the founda
tion stone of the Christian movement was laid. They first set the
example of Martyrdom, of passive resistance to what they could not
actively prevent, for the sake of loyalty to an ideal. The oldest tale
of these Martyrs is the story of Eleazar the aged priest and of the
Woman with her seven sons, told in 2 Mace vi and vii. As I have
just said, the tale as told there is wordy and rhetorical, and full of
errors. Yet the historical investigator, who knows how heroic a
movement is there represented and how far-reaching were its ultimate
results, must regard the story with sympathy and some measure of
respect. So also with the Apocalypses. They also are wordy, they
contain errors of fact and of taste, and the New Age which they
announce proved, when it came, to be different from what the Apoca-
lyptists had anticipated. But we read them with sympathy when
we think not only of the great movement which they heralded, but
also of the unconquerable hope in . the future to which they testify.
We study the Apocalypses to learn how our spiritual ancestors hoped
against hope that God would make all right in the end, and that we
their children are here to-day studying them is an indication that
their hope was not wholly unfounded.

17

II. THE BOOK OF ENOCH.
The Book of Enoch is often referred to, but it is hardly so well
known in fact as it ought to be, except to quite a small class of
students. And indeed it is an odd and in some ways a not very
attractive conglomeration. It is best therefore to begin at once with
the prime reason that gives the book interest to us, and this is, its
influence on the Christian Movement. 'Wandering Stars', we read
in the Canonical Epistle of Jude, 'to these Enoch also, the seventh
from Adam, prophesied, saying "Behold, the Lord came with ten
thousands of His Holy ones to execute judgement upon all, and to
convict all the ungodly of all their works of ungodliness which they
have ungodly wrought, and of all the hard things which ungodly
sinners have spoken against Him ".' -1 This is a definite quotation
which cannot be gainsaid. As a matter of fact, the words quoted
are the last sentence of the opening paragraph of the Book of Enoch.2
It is no mere illustration, no coincidence of ideas. ' Enoch ' is quoted
by name as inspired prophecy. This famous passage is very far from
being the only trace of the influence of Enoch upon the New
Testament, but it is the clearest and the best known. It is the best
starting-point for our discussion of the book.
One thing may be noted at the outset. S. Jerome, in his account
of Jude in De Viris Ilhistribus, says that inasmuch as in the Epistle
a testimony is quoted from ' Enoch ', an apocryphal Book, it is rejected
by most. This unfavourable verdict has curiously persisted almost
to our days in a different form. In the nineteenth century not so
much stress was laid on canonicity as on date and authorship. Part
of the reason that led some distinguished scholars to put the Epistle
of Jude in the 2nd century a.d., and %o question the right of
its author to call himself the brother of James, was derived from the
approval with which it seemed to stamp an ' apocryphal ' writing.
There was a widely-spread feeling that pure original Christianity must
have been self-contained and rational, and in no sense based on
unfamiliar and unhistorical Jewish legends. In a similar spirit the
' calmness ' and ' sobriety ' of the canonical Bible stories, both of the
1 Jude 13-15.
2 Enoch i 9 according to the modern chapters and verses.
C

18 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
Old and New Testaments, were very often contrasted with the
4 extravagance ' of uncanonical ' fables '.
I well know that I am now touching upon a large and very thorny
subject, into which it is not the province of these Lectures to go.
My chief object in mentioning it here is to remark that this view does
not carry us very far when we are tracing back popular beliefs and
popular enthusiasms to their earliest forms. The one thing quite
certain about the early Christians is that they were enthusiasts ; those
who joined them joined because they were enthusiasts, and the first
expression of their hopes and fears were unrestrained and sometimes
crude. The early Christians were ' full of new wine '. We are more
likely to find bad literary and historical criticism in an ' early ' Chris
tian document than a ' late ' one : ' moderation ' is likely to be
the mark of the second generation rather than the first, and certainly
the respect paid in the Epistle of Jude to the Book of Enoch
is no reason for putting that Epistle late. In the next Lecture
we shall see that something similar may be said about the date of the
Christian Apocalypse called the Ascension of Isaiah.
To return to ' Enoch ', it must be frankly confessed that the mode
of quotation in Jude does imply that the writer of the Epistle believed
that the Book of Enoch was the work of the Patriarch. It would be
a very interesting subject to investigate to what extent the reputed
authorship of pseudonymous books actually secured or influenced their
reception in ancient times. What is certain is that when they were
rejected it was on grounds of doctrine rather than of historical scepti
cism, although we may gather from Tertullian that some people did
wonder how the Book of Enoch escaped the Flood.1 But there
is another aspect of pseudonymous authorship to which I venture
i to think sufficient attention has not been given. It is this, that the
names were not chosen out of mere caprice; they indicated to
a certain extent what subjects would be treated and the point of view
of the writer.
For example, there is the Apocalypse of Baruch. The historical
Baruch lived in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. Consequently in
his Apocalypse he is supposed to be acquainted with the names of the
personages who figure in the pre -exilic history of Israel. But though
1 My friend Mr G. R. S. Mead has reminded me that this question was also con
sidered by those who received other 'writings' of Enoch, as appears from the
Gnostic work Pistis Sophia 354, according to which the "Books of leu" were
deposited by Enoch in the rock of Ararat and miraculously preserved there from
the Flood by a ' Ruler ' superior to Fate. In the Book of Enoch itself Enoch gives
his teaching quite openly to Methuselah, e. g. lxxxiii 1, lxxxv 2.

JEWISH PSEUDONYMITY 19
the real interest of the author is in the fate of the Jews after the
Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, 'Baruch' mentions no one
by name later than the day of the historical Baruch. In the
Assumption of Moses, given out as the last dying-speech of Moses to
Joshua but really dating from about 9 a. d., the history of Israel is
sketched in figurative though quite comprehensible terms. But no
name is mentioned. As I once wrote elsewhere,1 the Seers of old are
supposed to foretell events and to understand doctrines, but they must |
be silent about names. Daniel may predict the wars of the successors
of Alexander, and in chap, xi we can even follow the details of their cam
paigns, but he must not mention the names of Antiochus and Ptolemy,
of Antioch and Alexandria. If he needs to announce the coming of
the great over-sea Power from the West, he must not mention
the Romans, for the name was unknown in the days of Belshazzar ;
he must speak of the ships of Chittim.2
But further, the choice of a name shews more or less what problems
occupy the writer's mind. Baruch and Ezra were Jews in the strict
sense of the word, members of the organized historical Jewish Church-
Nation, men to whom no sacrifice was valid outside Jerusalem. Their
outlook is the strictly Jewish outlook, God is to them above all
things the God of the Chosen People, the problems dealt with are
concerned with the fortunes of the Chosen People. And so in the
books which bear their names the consummation of all things is
found in the Messianic Kingdom. The outlook is national. How
different from this is the Book of Job ! Here the scene is laid in
patriarchal times and the place is somewhere far away in the East.
Why ? Because the writer, who I do not doubt was also a strict
Jew, wished to speak about some of the problems of human life
apart from the individualities of Jewish customs, divinely enjoined
though they might be.
So it is with the Book of Enoch. Enoch was the great-great-grand
father of Shem, but he was the great-great-grandfather of Ham and
Japhet too. What was Enoch's nationality ? He might appropriately
reply Homo sum, and accordingly no spot on the wide earth is alien
from him, though its centre is still Jerusalem. In the course of his
long book there occurs a Vision of the history of mankind, in which
the centre of interest is, of course, the fortunes of the Chosen People,
but elsewhere the outlook is to a certain extent cosmopolitan. The
Sun and the Moon and the Stars, about which Enoch has so much to
tell us, shine equally on Jew and Gentile. And the theme of the first
part of the work, the Origin of Evil, has (alas !) equal interest for all
1 Journ. of Tlieol. Studies xiii 374. * See Dan xi 30.
c2

20 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
races. The writer was surely an orthodox Jew and his book was written
for his countrymen to read, but like the Book of Job it is concerned
with mankind and the world inhabited by mankind as a whole ; it
attempts to "justify the ways of God to men", and not only His
dealings with the custodians of His Revelation in Judaea.
The contents of the Book of Enoch are, very roughly, as follows :—
After a short Prelude, which strikes the dominant note of the
whole literature with its announcement of impending Judgement
(i-v), we are told the story of how the ' Watchers ', i. e. the Angels,
sons of God, came down to earth and married the daughters of Men,
thereby bringing all sorts of evil on mankind, first, because their off
spring were Giants who devoured men and crops, and secondly,
because the Arts and the Sciences were taught by the Watchers to
their wives and to the other human beings with whom they came in
contact (vi-viii). The leaders of the Watchers were named Semiaza
and Azael (or Azazel). Moved by the cry of men suffering under the
horrors of Civilization, the Most High interferes. Azael and his
companions are to be punished and the earth is to be cleansed by the
Flood, and only the son of Lamech, i.e. Noah, is to escape, so that
mankind may be started afresh from his descendants (ix-xi).
Before all this had happened Enoch had been taken to live a kind
of life between earth and heaven. It was he who had been deputed
to announce the Divine Sentence against Azael. Azael appeals for
mercy, and Enoch prepares and presents Azael's petition before the
Most High, but it fails : Azael is reduced to impotence for ever and
his monstrous offspring become the demons in the air all round us
(xii-xvi). Enoch is then taken by holy Angels to view the world from the
West to the East (xvii-xxxvi). He sees everything, even to Chaos
and beyond Earth and Heaven. He sees also the deep Valleys where
the spirits of the dead will be kept till the Day of Judgement (xxii).1
Here ends the First Book. The Second, called the Parables or
Similitudes of Enoch, contains Enoch's visions of the pre-existent
Elect Messiah, often called in this section ' the Son of Man ', who at

1 The description is somewhat difficult to follow in parts, because the transmitted
text is full of small errors. But it appears that of the four Valleys one will be suf
ficient to contain the spirits of the righteous : this Valley is bright and there is a
fountain of water in it (xxii 2). One of the four Valleys is apparently reserved for
those who are neither righteous nor definitely wicked, like Kipling's Tomlinson, and
like Tomlinson they fail to attain either to Heaven or to Hell (xxii 13). For the
text, see Appendix I.

ITS CONTENTS AND ITS INTEREST 21
the appointed time will judge the Kings and the mighty rulers ofthe
earth and vindicate the oppressed righteous. In this section God is
generally called the ' Lord of Spirits ' (xxx vii-lxxi).
The Third Book is astronomical, and teaches that the year has, or
should have, 364 days (lxxii-lxxxii).
The Fourth Book contains Enoch's Vision of Israelite history,
which ends some time during the Maccabean period (lxxxiii-xci).
This is followed by admonitions and somewhat vague prophecies of
the future (xcii-cv). At the end comes an Appendix about the birth
of Noah, only loosely connected with what goes before (cvi-cviii).
Such are the contents of the Book, or rather the Books, of Enoch.
There is reported in the Talmud a saying of Rabbi Akiba, to the
effect that he who reads outside, i. e. non-canonical, books is like a man
reading a letter that has no sense. I think that those of you who
have tried to read ' Enoch ' will agree that the first impression it
leaves is that of words with very little sense. The Greeks called the
universe the Cosmos, meaning thereby an ordered whole ; ' Enoch ' is
the most unhellenic of writings, and seems to be dominated by the
very Spirit of Chaos, if there be such a thing.
Nevertheless it is an attempt to see the world steadily and to see
it whole, to unify the physical world, the moral world, and the
political world, the world, that is, of the national destiny of God's
chosen People. It contains a serious attempt to account for the
presence of Evil in human history, and this attempt claims our atten
tion, because it is in essentials the view presupposed in the Gospels,
especially the Synoptic Gospels. It is when you study Matthew,
Mark and Luke against the background of the Books of Enoch that
you see them in their true perspective.
In saying this I have no intention of detracting from the impor
tance of what the Gospels report to us. On the contrary, it puts
familiar words into their proper setting. Indeed it seems to me that
some of the best-known Sayings of Jesus only appear in their true
light if regarded as Midrash upon words and concepts taken from
Enoch, words and concepts that were familiar to those who heard the
Prophet of Galilee, though now they have been forgotten by Jew
and Christian alike.
An instance of what I mean is to be found in the Saying about the
Unclean Spirit reported in Matt xii 43-45, Lk xi 24-26. "The
unclean spirit ", said Jesus once, " when it is gone out of the man
passes through waterless places, seeking rest and finding none ; then
it says ' To my house I will return from whence I came forth,' and on

22 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
coming finds it swept and garnished. Then it goes and takes with it
seven others worse than itself and they enter and dwell there — and
the last state of that man becomes worse than the first." Matt xii
44 adds that it was empty as well as swept and garnished, and when
the Saying is used in the pulpit most of the weight is usually made to
fall on this addition, though I doubt whether it be more than a gloss
added by the Evangelist to bring out the assumed sense. In any
case the passage is treated as a sort of revelation about what may be
called the Natural History of demons and demoniacs, as so much
information given. That I am sure is wrong ; the Saying does not
give information at all. It simply assumes the then popular belief
about demoniacs and the cause of their affliction, a belief which is set
forth at length in Enoch, chapter xv. There we read that the
demons are the progeny of the heavenly Sons of God and the
Daughters of men. They are ' spirit ' like their fathers, but they
cannot rise far from the surface of the earth, the home of their
mothers, and they are evil, "oppressive, destroying, attacking,
wrestling, casting men upon the ground,1 making them run mad,
spirits that can eat nothing but fast all the time and thirst and dash
themselves about. And these attack the sons of men and women,
because they have come forth from them." It is the same doctrine
as is presupposed in the Gospel ; the unclean demons are about in
the air, seeking rest and finding none except in a human body. But
if you look at the context in the Gospel, you will find that the point
of the Saying of Jesus is not to give information about the demons,
but to draw a comparison between what was commonly believed
about the recurring attacks suffered by a ' demoniac ' and the state of
mind of the Jewish people. " So will it be also to this evil genera
tion ", said Jesus according to Matthew, and whether this part of the
Saying be authentic reminiscence or an interpretation of what has
gone before, it certainly hits the general meaning. " It is by no pact
with the powers of evil ", says Jesus in effect, " that I exorcise unclean
spirits from those you bring to me ; I am neither setting forth a new
doctrine nor practising new and unlawful methods. If I can do good
to men because the ' spirit ' that is with me is the spirit of God, it
shews you the Kingdom of God at your doors before you were aware
of it (effrdaoev i<f>' iy/ao-). The power of God is with me, stronger
than the powers of evil (Matt xii 26-29, Lk xi 18-22). Which side
will you take ? (Matt xii 30, Lk xi 23). Blessed are they that hear
the word of God and also keep it : you hear the word now ; take care
that presently you do not lose it again, like a man who has been set
1 Compare the description of the demoniac in Mk ix 20.

THEORY OF AERIAL DEMONS 23
free from the dominion of the Evil One, but afterwards is taken
possession of once more. If you neglect to take my message to heart,
your last state will be worse than it was before you listened to it
(Matt xii 43-45, Lk xi 24-28)."
The Gospel Saying about the restless wandering spirit implies the
same view of aerial demons and their nature as is expressly set forth
in ' Enoch '. In fact the aim of the first section of Enoch (vi-xvi) is
to explain how the demons come to be in the air and why they attack
men. At the same time the evidence with regard to the Saying that
we have just considered is quite inadequate to prove a literary use of
our Book of Enoch. All that can strictly be concluded is that the
same doctrine forms the background in the Gospel and in Enoch.
The case is different with regard to the Judgement scene in Enoch
lxii and Matt xxv. Here I venture to think that the Similitudes of
Enoch are presupposed in the scene from Matthew, in the same way
as the Vision of Daniel is presupposed in all the passages that speak
about the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. And just
the same mistake is generally made by Christian commentators about
Matt xxv 31-46 as they make about the Saying concerning the aerial
demon, that is, an attempt is made to extract positive teaching out
of what is merely presupposed and assumed.
But first let us put the two passages together. The Similitudes of
Enoch contain the visions of the patriarch concerning the Son of Man.
There is not much doubt about the origin of the phrase in Enoch :
the name and the general conception is taken from Dan vii, though
what in Daniel had been little more than a symbol for the Jewish
Nation is in Enoch a personal heavenly being. In chap, xlvi the Son
of Man is with the Ancient of Days, Whose Head is white like wool,
i.e. with the Most High as described in Dan vii 9. Enoch is told
that the Son of Man is the one who hath righteousness, with whom
dwelleth righteousness, whom the Lord of Spirits hath chosen, whose
function is in God's good time to judge the kings and mighty ones
that now possess the earth. A vision of this Judgement is granted
to Enoch (chap, lxii) : " The Lord of Spirits seated the Elect One on
the throne of his glory and the spirit of righteousness was poured out
before him . . . And there will stand up in that day all the kings
and the mighty and the exalted and those who hold the earth, and
they will see and recognise him how he sits on the throne of his glory
and righteousness is judged before him and no lying word is spoken
before him, . . . and one portion of them will look on the other and
they will be terrified and their countenance will fall and pain will
seize them when they see that Son of Man sitting on the throne of

24 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
his glory, . . . and all the elect will stand before him on that day.
And all the kings and the mighty . . . will supplicate for mercy at his
hand. Nevertheless . . . the angels of punishment will take them in
charge to execute vengeance upon them, because they have oppressed
his children and his elect. And they will be a spectacle for the
righteous and for his elect, . . . and the righteous and elect will be
saved on that day . . . and the Lord of Spirits will abide over them
and with that Son of Man will they eat and lie down and rise up for
ever and ever." The kings and the mighty pray for a respite but
cannot obtain it, and they say : " Our souls are filled with the
mammon of unrighteousness, but this does not prevent us from
descending into the flame of the pain of Sheol " (lxiii 10).
Let me remind you of the words of the parallel passage in Matt xxv:
" When the Son of Man shall come in his glory and all the angels
with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory, and before him
shall be gathered all the nations, and he shall separate them as the
shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats, and he shall set the
sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then shall the
King say unto them on his right hand, ' Come ye blessed of my
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of
the world, for I was hungry and ye gave me meat, I was thirsty and
ye gave me drink, I was a stranger and ye took me in, naked and ye
clothed me, sick and ye visited me, in prison and ye came unto me '."
You know how it goes on : how the ' righteous ' declare that they do
not know when they had had the opportunity of succouring the Lord
of the Day of Judgement, and they are told that what they had done
to one of the least of His brethren they had done unto Him ; and then
how those on the left are sent away into the fire prepared for the
devil and his angels, because inasmuch as they had not done it unto
the least of the King's brethren they had not done it unto Him.
It is surely impossible not to recognise a real literary connexion
between these pictures of the Judgement. In both we read of ' the
Son of Man ' who ' sits on the throne of his glory ', in both the
- righteous ' get their vindication and reward, while the adversaries to
their surprise are banished to flame and torment. The one picture is
evidently an adaptation of the other, and the question arises which is
the pattern and which the copy. It is not a question of the compara
tive merits of the two pieces. The passage in the Gospel of Matthew
is magnificent as literature. The picture is sketched in very few
strokes, yet every one of them tells, the four-fold enumeration of the
works of mercy (shortened at each repetition) giving a kind of
rhythmical swing to the narration, that lifts it at once out of

ITS INFLUENCE ON THE GOSPEL 25
the sphere of material description into that of epic poetry. The
scene in Enoch, on the other hand, is confused and laboured, and it is
not enlivened by grace either of style or thought. It deals with the
most awful events that the human mind can contemplate in the spirit
of plain prose.
But when we pass from considerations of value to considerations of
priority there can be little doubt that Enoch is the original. It
is just one of those cases where S. Paul's canon applies : " howbeit
that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and after
ward that which is spiritual." The description of the Judgement
in Enoch is complete in itself; it is the imagined end of the kingdoms
of the world, whose rulers are judged for their failure to discover and
pay homage to the True God (lxiii 4, 7-9). In a word, they are con
demned for being Gentiles. This is a natural view for a Jewish Seer '
to take at a time when his people are still palpitating with the life
and death struggle against the powers of Hellenism. There is indeed
evidence that so summary an Assize was felt in some quarters
to be unjust, and in the Apocalypse of Baruch it is only those who I
have ruled over Israel, or have had dealings with them, that are given
up to the sword ; the nations which knew not Israel and have
not trodden down the seed of Jacob will be spared — they are needed,
because some out of every nation will be subjected to the Israelites
(Apoc. Bar. lxxii 4-6).
In the Gospel the Gentiles are judged by the kindness they have t
shewn to the persecuted brethren ofthe Son of Man. Obviously this
is a very imperfect test, inasmuch as the greater part of the Gentiles
would have had no dealings with them at all. It seems to me there
fore that we are really in the presence of a sort of Midrash, by which
I mean an application of the Judgement-scene in Enoch to enforce
a particular moral. We do Matt xxv 31 ff. an injustice if we treat
it as a description of the Day of Judgement given to an audience
who did not know beforehand what would happen there : on the
contrary, it assumes that the scene of Judgement as given in Enoch
is already familiar, and then goes on to tell the well-known tale
again — with a difference.
In any case I must regard the Similitudes of Enoch as having
consciously supplied the framework for the scene in Matthew. It is
because the Book of Enoch does thus stand behind the Gospels that
it is of such importance to the Christian student.
I must now say a few words about the transmission of the Book of
Enoch and even touch upon certain details of the text, because

26 TFIE BOOK OF ENOCH
what I have in mind is concerned with the important question of
the nationality of the writer. Apart from a few quotations our know
ledge of the text of Enoch comes from four sources.
1. The whole work is preserved in Ethiopic, forming an integral
part of the Old Testament as received by the Abyssinian Church.
This Ethiopic text is a fairly literal translation from the Greek,
made apparently in the 4th century, in the early days of Ethiopic
Christianity. There are many MSS of it extant, but they all
go back to the same translation, so that the value of the Ethiopic
text, where we can retranslate it with certainty back into Greek,
is that of a single ancient Greek MS.1
2. A vellum MS now at the Cairo Museum (formerly at Gizeh),
discovered in 1886 and probably of the 6th century, contains Enoch i
1-xxxii 6, i. e. about the first third of the whole.
3. A miscellaneous MS in the Vatican (Vat. Gr. 1809) contains
Enoch lxxxix 42-49 in Greek shorthand. This small fragment was
thus preserved as a reading exercise ; its importance consists in
the fact that such an excerpt must have been taken originally from
a continuous text, and lessens the probability that the Cairo text only
contained the First Part, without the Similitudes.
4. Georgius the Syncellus, a chronographical writer of the 8th
century, quotes Enoch vi 1-ix 4, viii 4-x 14, xv 8-xvi 1.
These last, the extracts from the Syncellus, were for a long time the
only portions of the Book of Enoch known. It was natural therefore
that editors of the Ethiopic translation should have regarded the
passages where the Ethiopic differs from the Syncellus as due to the
nature of a translation or to the clumsiness of the translator. And
when the Cairo Greek MS turned up and was found in many places
to agree with the Ethiopic, Dr. Charles still holds to the general
superiority of the Syncellus extracts and has maintained that the
Ethiopic and the Cairo MS belong to a special recension or type of
text which is, according to him, often inferior to the extracts. I feel
bound therefore to give some reasons for regarding the Cairo MS as
better, and for treating the extracts given by the Syncellus as to
a certain degree sophisticated.
In the first place this is only what we might expect. The Cairo
MS was written by unintelligent mechanical scribes, men who may
leave out lines and make mistakes, but who do not seem to have made
intentional alterations. The chronographer, on the other hand, only
brings in his extracts to illustrate his work : he regards Enoch
1 The Ethiopic text has been admirably edited by R. H. Charles (Oxford, 1906),
who gives also the Greek Fragments in full.

TEXT AND TRANSMISSION 27
as ' Apocrypha ', not as sacred, and was under no obligation to refrain
from casual emendations. It is therefore not surprising to find that
in quoting Enoch vii 1 the Syncellus has interpolated his own chrono
logy into the text and in xvi 1 he has brought in a gloss about
the ' Nephilim ' ;J while in viii 4, where the true text has simply ' so the
cry of perishing mankind came up to heaven ', the Syncellus gives us
in two places two different versions of the cry.2
The Cairo MS is certainly not written with much intelligence.
The first scribe began in the middle of Enoch, at xix 3, in the middle
of a sentence. He went on then to xxi 9, where he breaks off
and begins at i 1, in the middle of a line, without any indication that
the text is disturbed. No doubt his exemplar had a leaf loose which
had been placed in front of the text, but it is odd to find the intelli
gence of the scribe so small as not to know where the book he
is copying begins. As we might expect after this, his standard
of accuracy is low ; he leaves out sentences here and there, often
making havoc of the sense. But at least he makes no intentional
changes, and where his text makes any sense at all it seems to me that
we do safest to follow it.3
After all, the Greek is itself a translation, not an original. This is
maintained by almost all those who have worked at Enoch, though
further proofs of acquaintance with Palestine are sometimes asked for
by Jewish scholars. What is chiefly in dispute is whether the work
was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. It might be thought
that such a question could be definitely settled at once, but unfortu
nately this is not the case, and most of the most convincing proofs
that the Greek text of Enoch is a translation from a Semitic language
fit equally well with a Hebrew or an Aramaic original. Thus in
Enoch x 17 the Greek has ra cra/3/3ara avroiv, where the context
shews that the original had 'their old age'. Assuming that this
original was in Aramaic, this implies that the translator had finn^E?
before him, but that he read it shabbatthon mPUjlSfc/') instead of
sebnthhon u\TM^^,{V\ But the letters of the corresponding Hebrew
word DJliB' could equally well be read either way.
My own opinion is that the original language of Enoch was
Aramaic, but that a few passages do seem to suggest a Hebrew origin,
yet not decisively. Certainly the question will never be settled by
arguments based on ingenious jingles or paronomasiae in conjecturally
1 See the Notes to Charles's edition, who recognises these additions as editorial
glosses by Syncellus.
2 Here Charles most incomprehensibly maintains that the Syncellus text is
original. But which text? s See further, Appendix I.

28 THE BOOK OF ENOCH

restored Semitic originals. We must be sure that the jingle was
in the original at all, before we can draw any safe arguments from it.
The nationality of the author of Enoch has to be inferred from
the knowledge of geography and topography which he displays.
What makes inference difficult is that he writes in the person
of a Patriarch who lived before the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, so
that he is debarred from using any names of cities or towns. In his
aerial journeys he visits the site of Jerusalem (xxvi f.) and looks down
into the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where the Judgement will take place,
but no name is mentioned, only that it is the centre of the earth.
That, however, was a belief which might have been held by a
Jew wherever he lived. The topography of the stream of Siloam and
the Mount of Olives is correct, but here again it might be said that
the author knew Jerusalem because he had attended the Feasts.
More striking is the fact that in Enoch x 4 f . the decree goes forth
that Azael (or Azazel — both forms occur) is to be cast " into the
desert which is in Dudael" (or Daduel), and to have rough and
jagged rocks placed upon him. This seems to indicate a knowledge
that the scape-goat 'for Azazel' in Lev xvi 10 was sent to die in
a hard and rough place called Beth Hadudo, i.e. it shews some
acquaintance with ritual as actually practised in the Holy Land.
But the place where the author of Enoch seems most at home is
the head-waters of the Jordan. Here, and here only, he breaks his
rule of naming no names. "When the fallen Sons of God entrust Enoch
with their petition he goes off and sits down at the Waters of Dan in
the land of Dan (xiii 7). This is a perfectly definite place, the most
northerly town in Israel, familiar to us in the phrase 'from Dan to
Beersheba '. Whether we identify it with the modern Banias or the
modern Tell-el-Kadi, it is equally a main source of the Jordan. The
author of Enoch, as you see, knows that there are ' waters ' there,
and he adds, quite correctly, that it is south-west of Mount Hermon,
the hill upon which the Watchers descended when they came to earth.
But this is not all. The Watchers seem to have haunted this region
as long as they could, for when Enoch awakes from his Visions and
goes to find them, they are sitting gathered together weeping in
Abelsiael,1 which is between Lebanon and Seniser.2 The last word is
evidently a scribe's corruption for Senir, the other name for Hermon
(Deut iii 9), or for a part of it (Cant iv 8) : the place was therefore
in the valley between the two great ranges of mountains. And here,
1 So the Ethiopic. The Cairo MS has ceNeBeAcaTA, which I suppose is miswritten
for tN *BeA c[i]*A[»].
2 Enoch xiii 9 : the Cairo MS has ccnichA.

THE JORDAN VALLEY AND ITS SOURCES

Scale of Miles

n 

20 30 40 50

30 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
as a matter of fact, quite close to the Waters of Dan, we find the
town Abel, called also Abel of Beth-Ma'acha to distinguish it from
other towns of the same name. The name really means ' meadow ' or
'lea', but it happens to be very much like a Hebrew and Aramaic
word which means ' mourning ' or ' weeping ', and so it seemed to be
an appropriate spot for the weeping Sons of God. In old times, as
we know, ' they were wont to ask in Abel ' (2 Sam xx 18) ; this seems
to refer to some ancient legend, and it is just possible that an early
form of the Enoch-Saga may have belonged to that region. In any
case it is the country round the sources of the Jordan that seems to
be most familiar to the author of our Book of Enoch.1
I have dwelt thus at length upon the personality of the author of
Enoch because of the importance of any evidence which tends to shew
that it is really a Palestinian book, one therefore which circulated
among Jews in Palestine. If moreover the author came from the
north, that helps to explain the influence the book had upon the
Religion that was cradled in Galilee. It is now time to consider
something of the general message of Enoch.
In the last Lecture I tried to make the Apocalyptic Hope clearer
by contrasting with it the religious ideal of the Rabbis by whom it
was rejected. As a contrast to ' Enoch ', if I may use this name for
the author or authors of the Book of Enoch, let me invite you to
glance at the imposing figure of the eclectic philosopher Posidonius.
In many ways there is a striking likeness between the two. To begin
with, they are almost contemporary and almost fellow-countrymen.
In the year 135 B.C., the year in which John Hyrcanus began his long
and prosperous reign, Posidonius was born at Apamea, a Syrian city
about a hundred miles north of the sources of the Jordan. He died
in 51 b. c. at the age of 84. Enoch and Posidonius have further this
in common, that it is only in recent times modern scholars have
recognised their importance as representative of the age in which
they lived. It is in the person of Posidonius, we are told, that the
heathen Philosopher became a Prophet of Religion 2 ; through Posi
donius, more than any other man, was effected that fusion of Oriental
religions and Greek speculation which gave birth to the Western
Mysteries of Isis and of Mithra, to the cult of the Sun and the
Planets that survives in our names for the days of the week, and,
more important than all, to the Natural Religion of cultivated men
under the Empire, to the creeds of Seneca, of Plutarch, of Marcus
1 For the reference in Enoch vi 6 to the same stretch of country, see Appendix I.
2 Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, p. 5.

ENOCH AND POSIDONIUS 31
Aurelius. Perhaps not all of this can be strictly substantiated. Still
it is fair to say that Posidonius was as truly a formative influence on
pagan culture as Enoch was on Christianity.
There are further resemblances between the two figures we are
contrasting. Both alike are interested in the Universe as a whole.
Posidonius really did travel in some of those remote regions of the
North and West which Enoch describes. He was interested in all
natural phenomena, but, as with Enoch, his special interest was in
the heavens, these heavens above us, in which the Sun and Moon
have their course. And below the Moon, in the sublunary sphere, to
Posidonius as to Enoch, the air was full of demons, beings whose
substance was lighter than flesh and blood, but yet too gross to
ascend into the empyrean.
We read Enoch to get the mental background of the apostles and
of the crowds that listened to our Lord, and when we find this back
ground strange and barbarous we must remember that the world as
imagined by the most cultivated and learned folk of that time was
also strange and different from what we have learned now to believe
about it. But there are greater differences between Posidonius and
Enoch than details of cosmology. They differed in their view of the
purpose of the world, and therefore they differed in the message they
had to deliver.
In an illuminating sketch of Posidonius, which some of you may
have been reading lately, Mr Edwyn Bevan has summed up the
philosopher's aim as an attempt "to make men at home in the
Universe " 1. This was not the aim of Enoch. The world which was
set forth in the philosophy of Posidonius had many features in
common with the world of Enoch, but Enoch's world was not an end
in itself. Enoch tells us of the world, to shew us that everything int
it is prepared for the inevitable Judgement of the Most High. Even \
the stars that failed to rise at their appointed times have a place of
punishment at the extremity of heaven and earth.2 The angels that
transgressed will be judged by God, so will the men who have followed
the teachings of these angels. The spirits of the dead wait in their
remote enclosures until the great Day, the Day which will witness the
transvaluation of all values, when the afflicted Saints are vindicated
and the Kings and the Mighty ones of the earth are brought low.
There is no great Day in the world of Posidonius. There is no
Hell either : " the only real hell was found here on this earth and the
1 E. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics (Oxford, 1913), p. 98. Most of what I have to say
about Posidonius is taken from this admirable book.
2 Enoch xviii 13 ff., xxi 6 : see the Note at the end of Appendix I, p. 70.

32 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
impure were ever drawn back into it anew." 1 The impure were tied
to their earthly body: the body, the tomb of the rational spirit
(soma — sema), — that was the underlying formula. And so the light
and purified souls of good men ascend to the heavens and, as
Mr Bevan puts it, following Seneca and Cicero, watch the stars go
round : felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.2 And when you
knew the causes of things, what did you see ? What was the world
in which you learned to be at home ? After all, it was a dull affair,
like a glass of muddy water, in which the only effective motion was
the slow settling down of the sediment towards the bottom.
This was the world that Israel refused to accept. The rarefied air
of the Stoic heaven was one in which the Jew did not easily breathe —
and small blame to him. He demanded an ultimate reward for his
labour, even at the price of punishment for his faults : otherwise the
/ world seemed to him meaningless. And so, when the Jew does con
template the world as a whole, as is done in Enoch, it is all placed
under the eye of God, who made it, and whose Judgement upon it
will give it its meaning. In construction, in its denizens, it is very
much like the world of Posidonius, but it does not exist for itself.
" Be hopeful," says Enoch to the righteous, " aforetime ye have been
i put to shame through evil and affliction, but now ye shall shine as the
lights of heaven. . . . Fear not, when ye see the sinners growing strong
and prospering in their ways : be not companions with them, but keep
afar from their violence ; for ye shall become companions of the hosts
of heaven." 3 Yes, but this glorious future does not come Kara (jyvo-iv,
according to Nature, according to the inevitable course of things we
see around us. It comes because the names of the righteous are
written in the presence of the glory of the Most High.4
In the last resort the difference between Posidonius and Enoch,
between late Hellenic Civilization and the Jews that refused to be
dominated by it, is symbolized in the sentence from 4 Ezra, which
f says directly and in so many words " The Most High hath not made
one world, but two ".5 This is the essential thing, the central doctrine
that animates all the Apocalypses. In one sense it is a confession
of failure, a confession that the Universe cannot be reduced to a
harmonious whole. Posidonius professed to do this, but he and his fol
lowers only achieved it by denying the existence of evil in the world.
I am not a philosopher and I do not believe that philosophy, or
indeed reflexion in general, is really creative. Instinct and conviction,
often inarticulate, are creative, and man uses his powers of thought
1 Bevan, p. 109. * pp. Ill, 112. = Enoch civ 2, 6.
4 Enoch civ 1. "4 Ezra vii 50.

MEANING OF HISTORY 33
and reflexion to justify the actions to which his instincts and con
victions have led him. So I do not imagine that either Enoch or (
Posidonius moved the minds of men, but they reflected them like \
a mirror. The Macedonian Empire had once for all put an end to
the old city-states of Greece and the wonderful progressive develop
ment of the human spirit that they had fostered. In Asia the con
quests of Alexander had acted as a solvent upon the old religions of
the East. East and West flowed together, under new political con
ditions. The result was a new semi-Greek semi-Oriental civilization,
which after a few generations became articulate and systematic in
Posidonius and his followers. This civilization was rejected by one
people, the Jews, who clung with passionate loyalty to the God of
their fathers. They believed Him to be the only true God, and con
sequently that in the end He would not desert them in their struggle
to maintain His worship and His sacred Law. It was the action
of the Jews that produced the Apocalyptists, just as the actions of
Alexander the Great were the real makers of Posidonius and his
philosophy. The promises and warnings in Enoch give articulate \
expression to the impulses that moved the Jews to die rather than let /
their ancestral Religion be assimilated to that of the Gentiles.
And those who cling to the belief that human history is not
altogether meaningless and that it marches, however slowly and
haltingly, to a definite goal ought to regard the ideas enshrined in
books like Enoch with sympathy. It is by this doctrine of a purpose
underlying history, and of an unerring Judgement to be pronounced
upon it somewhen, somewhere, that these books still strike a chord
in our hearts to-day. But their main value was as an encourage
ment for their contemporaries, to nerve the Jews to continue the
struggle for the national ideals, which their instincts had led them
to begin. Some of the Apocalypses, like Daniel, must have been '
first issued at moments of crisis ; others, like Enoch, may have seen
the light at calmer and more prosperous seasons, when the Apocalyptist i
could extend his outlook over the whole known Universe and consider
mankind in general. Such times were perhaps more dangerous for the
Jewish ideals than moments of open persecution ; at such times we
can see most clearly that the true antagonists are not King Antiochus
and the Maccabees but the 'scientific' and the 'religious' view ofthe
world and of human fate. Enoch has the faults of a pioneer. His
work is rough, he is unacquainted with the country, he often loses
his way. But his guiding star is a belief that the confused drama
of History is not without a purpose, and that in the end the Judge
of all the Earth can and will do right.

34

III. THE MINOR JEWISH APOCALYPSES.
An adequate treatment of the problems raised by the minor Jewish
Apocalypses would require a long course of Lectures, and I shall
not attempt to cover the ground in a single discourse. My aim
rather is to bring out certain points of interest from these writings,
which more or less illustrate what I have already said in the two
former lectures about the Apocalyptic Idea and the Book of Enoch.
The first work to claim our attention is the Testaments of the
Twelve Patriarchs. Perhaps the most remarkable and interesting
feature in this work is its title, or rather I should say, its general
scope and plan. The Testaments profess to be the last dying speeches
and admonitions of the ancestors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel,
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, &c, to their immediate descendants. Here at
once we have a problem. We ask 'for whom was the work intended ?'
What special interest have the sayings of Reuben or Naphtali for the
Jews of the Maccabean age ? We all know that the Ten Tribes had
gone into captivity centuries ago. What, then, was the point of
writing in the name of their eponymous ancestors ?
The answer to this question is found in the contents of the work,
which contains internal evidence of its original date. Much as
I differ from Dr. Charles's somewhat fanciful theories about the
MS transmission of the Testaments, I am glad to be in full agreement
/ with him in his general view of the work, which he places during the
i prosperous reign of John Hyrcanus, nephew of Judas Maccabaeus.
The insistence upon the future glories of Levi fit nothing in history
but the Asmonaean dynasty. To quote Dr. Charles himself (§ 14,
p. xiii) : " Reuben admonishes his sons 'To Levi draw near in lowli
ness of your heart, that ye may receive a blessing from his mouth, for
him hath the Lord chosen to reign before all the people' (R vi 10).
Here a High-priest who is also a king is referred to. Such a combina
tion of offices naturally makes us think of the Maccabean Priest-kings
ofthe second century b.c. The possibility of doubting this reference
is excluded by the words that immediately follow : * and ye shall do
qbeisance to his seed, for on your account it shall die in wars both seen
and unseen ; and among you it shall be king for ever.' Thus the High-
priest is not only a high-priest and civil ruler, but also a warrior.

TESTAMENTS OF THE XII PATRIARCHS 35
That the Maccabean high-priests are here designed cannot he reason
ably doubted." x
What I wish to bring out is that the political conditions of the
reign of John Hyrcanus give point to the choice of the Twelve
Patriarchs as the speakers in the book. The realm of John Hyrcanus
was extensive. For the first time since Solomon an Israelite monarch
was ruling over the whole of the Promised Land. But who were the
inhabitants of his dominions ? In Judaea, of course, and above all in
the district round Jerusalem, there were the Jews pur sang, the
unmixed descendants of the returned Exiles. But who were the
Samaritans that lived in Samaria ? Who were the inhabitants of the
region beyond Jordan ? And who, towards the end of the 2nd century
b. c, were the Galileans ?
The answer to these questions involves a good deal of ancient and
recent history and, as in most ethnological questions, it is fairly easy
to produce a plausible case for directly opposite conclusions. On the
one hand it may be urged that the inhabitants of Galilee and the
other outlying dominions of Hyrcanus were not Israelites at all. In
1 Mace v 23, 45 ff., we read how Judas Maccabaeus and his brother
Simon collected the loyal Israelites from Gilead, i. e. Peraea, and
from Galilee, and brought them with their wives and children to
Judaea. Thus, whatever may have been the state of things before
this, all the Holy Land was denuded of Israelites except Judaea itself.
A generation later the victorious Jews occupy the surrounding
territories. A great movement of religious proselytism is then set
on foot : the Samaritan Temple is burnt, and we read in Josephus
how the inhabitants of Idumaea and Ituraea were offered the alterna
tive of circumcision or exile. It was under such circumstances that
Galilee and Peraea became Jewish districts : the inhabitants were
more or less forcibly converted to Judaism, but they were pre
dominantly of Gentile blood.
On the other hand it is probable that the accounts of wholesale
depopulation which we read of in ancient history are never entirely
trustworthy. The people of south-eastern England are not as fair-
haired and blue-eyed as they ought to be, if the Keltic aborigines
had been really as completely exterminated, both men and womenj as
the Saxon Chronicle would have us imagine. And similarly we may
believe that the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities did not really
1 It should be added that all our extant texts of the Testaments, even the Armenian
version, contain Christian glosses and interpolations. See Journal of Theological
Studies x 135-141 (Oct., 1908), where the present writer stated his reasons at length
for rejecting Charles's textual theories.
d2

36 THE MINOR JEWISH APOCALYPSES
mean the entire removal of the population off the soil. The great
men were taken away, but the poor and landless, who were equally
Israelites, remained. Gentile immigrants were afterwards introduced,
and much mixture of race followed, but the main stock persisted.
There was much to be said for the view that if you wanted to find
the descendants of the Ten Tribes, you should look for them on the
spot, that Joseph was in Samaria, Naphtali in Galilee, Reuben and
Gad in Peraea. True, they have abandoned the practice of religion,
but that can be remedied : let them be circumcised and keep the
Law, and they will be as good Israelites as their fathers.
This last theory certainly represents the later policy of the Asmo-
naean princes, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the book
that so warmly glorifies the Asmonaeans, seems to me to try to put
that policy on a quasi-scientific and historical basis.1 I regard it as
originally addressed to these newly-made Israelites, calling them, in
the name of their ancestors, to rally round Levi in the person of the
priest-king, John Hyrcanus. These new subjects were not Jews, in
the narrower sense of 'men of the tribe of Judah', but they might
claim to be genuine representatives of the Ten Tribes.
And that is why there is so large a quantity of ethical instruction
in the Testaments. It is because the converts needed instruction in
Jewish morality as well as in Jewish patriotism and the Jewish Law.
It cannot be too often repeated that we wrong the Jews, if we think
of their great struggle against Hellenization as merely a blind pre
ference for their ancestral ceremonial. The Law of the Lord was
a canon of family and social life as well as a ritual system, and the
pious Martyrs whose steadfastness had consecrated the revolt against
Antiochus Epiphanes had laid down their lives for an ethical and
social ideal quite as much as for a food law. In the 2nd century b.c,
in Palestine, the two things, to us so different, were inseparable.
The hopeful anticipations with which the reign of John Hyrcanus
began had clouded over before his death. It soon became evident
that the Anointed of God could not be recognised in the later repre-
1 See especially Joseph xix 1 ff. in the Armenian recension. Joseph says : "I saw
twelve harts feeding, and nine were dispersed, but the three were preserved and the
next day they also were dispersed. And I saw that the three harts were becoming
three Iambs, and they cried unto the Lord and the Lord brought them into a well-
watered place. . . And there they cried unto the Lord until there the nine harts
were gathered unto them and they became as twelve sheep  And ye my
children, honour Levi and Judah for from them will arise the salvation of Israel."
Here evidently the Tribes of Northern Israel are regarded as being in the same
place as the "Jews ", i. e. in Palestine.

THE PSALMS OF SOLOMON 37
sentatives of the Maccabean dynasty. Judas Maccabaeus and his
brothers had risen to power as the leaders of the revolt against the
introduction of Gentile ways of life into Israel. They actually did
accomplish the restoration of the Temple worship at Jerusalem. But
by no possible means could the great-nephews of Judas be regarded
as the Messiah : they were worldly, tyrannical, weak. And in a
couple of generations the Holy City had been taken by Pompey, and
Herod — an Edomite — was on the throne, ruling over the Chosen
People. It is no wonder that in the later Apocalypses the Maccabean
princes, when they are noticed at all, are regarded as a mere incident
in Jewish history.1 With the rise of Herod to power, and the outward
triumph of mere state-craft and worldly diplomacy, the hopes andii
aspirations of religious Jews became more and more centred on a,j
wholly miraculous intervention of God for the Redemption of Israel.
Even the author of the Psalms of Solomon, a writer who hardly
belongs to the circle we are considering, gives up all hope of the
priest-kings. He is perhaps better acquainted with the Old Testa
ment than with the actual state of affairs in Jerusalem, but he knows
at least that nothing is to be expected from the Asmonaeans or the
priestly aristocracy, and he takes refuge in the hope that somehow or
other — how, he does not explain — a Prince of the House of David
will appear, raised up providentially by God, in accordance with His
promise recorded in Holy Writ.2 The Lord Himself is King over
Israel for ever and ever, but this Son of David may also be called
" Christ the Lord ".3 ' Happy they that shall be in those days, to see
the good things of Israel in the gathering of the Tribes, — may God
perform it ! ' 4 It is a last flicker of the old prophetic conception of
the Messiah as a victorious earthly ruler, a conception that does not
include the new Apocalyptic doctrine of the New World.
Very different from the Psalms of Solomon, and characteristically
Semitic, is the work known as the Assumption of Moses. There can
be little doubt that this is a Palestinian document and that it was
written a few years after the death of Herod the Great.5 I fear this
1 I mention here, by way of protest, the theory of Dr Charles, who regards " the
kings and the mighty and all who possess the earth " of Enoch lxii 6 (and elsewhere
in the Similitudes) as meant for the Maccabean princes : see his Note to Enoch
xxxviii 5. I think the author of the Similitudes of Enoch takes a more general view
of things, and that these kings and potentates represent the great Gentile Empires
and World-powers : compare Rev vi IS.
2 Ps. Sol. xvii 5, 23. s v. 36. * v. SO.
* The most probable date is a. d. 6, soon after the deposition of Archelaus. See

38 THE MINOR JEWISH APOCALYPSES
curious piece is not so well known as it deserves to be. No doubt
this is mainly because of the unsatisfactory state of the text. The
Assumption of Moses is extant only in a single very ancient Latin
MS, a palimpsest, and very hard to decipher. The Latin text of this
MS is itself full of all sorts of absurd blunders of transcription, and
the lost Greek, of which the Latin is a literal translation, must have
contained some serious errors, which often quite spoil the sense.
And then, as in the case of Enoch, the Greek was a translation from
a lost Semitic original, either Hebrew or Aramaic. It is no wonder
that the meaning of whole sentences is often quite obscure, and that
scholars differ seriously in their attempts to restore the original.
But the general interpretation and tendency of the work is clear
enough. The " Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs " were the last
dying-speeches of the ancestors of the Tribes, the " Assumption of
Moses " gives the last speech of Moses to Joshua before he is taken up
Mount Pisgah to disappear from mortal eyes. As in so many other
of the Apocalypses the matter takes the form of prophetical history
of Israel. No names are mentioned, of course,1 but the Captivity and
the Return are clearly indicated.2 Then follows, according to the
Apocalyptist, an evil time. Those who offer the sacrifices will not be
priests but " slaves, born of slaves " 3 : these are the Hellenizing priests,
such as that Menelaus of whom we read in 2 Maccabees. Then will
come a line of kings who will be called Priests of the Most High God,
i.e. the Maccabean princes, and after them "an insolent king not of
the race of the priests, a man bold and shameless, who will judge
them as they deserve, for 34 years " 4 : this is obviously Herod. Next
comes a reference to Varus, the Roman Governor of Syria, who sup
pressed a Jewish rebellion in 4 B.C., but here the history ends and the
Apocalyptist looks into the future. He sees luxury and oppression
on every side in high places and anticipates another visitation of
wrath, when the king of the kings of the earth will crucify the faithful
who confess circumcision and give their wives to the Gentiles and make
their children blaspheme.5 Then there will be a man of the tribe of
Levi, whose name will be Taxo, who will take his seven sons into the
wilderness to fast for three days and then die, rather than transgress
the commandments of the Lord of lords ; 6 thereupon the Kingdom
of God will appear and Israel will be avenged. For
the article called Moses, Assumption of, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible by the
present writer. i
1 See above, p. 19. 2. Ass. Moseos i-iv.
3 Ibid. v. * Ibid. vi.
6 Ibid, vii, viii. 6 Ibid. ix.

THE ASSUMPTION OF MOSES 39
"The Heavenly One will arise from His royal throne,
and come forth from His holy habitation,' with indignation
and wrath for His sons.
And earth will tremble to its utmost bounds,
and the high mountains be brought low and the forests fall,
The sun will not give light, and the horns of the moon will
become dark,
they will be broken and it all will be turned into blood,
and the circle of the stars will be shattered.
The seas will sink into the abyss,
the fountains of water will fail and the rivers will be afraid,
For the Most High will arise, the Eternal God alone,
He will come in glory to do vengeance on the Gentiles
and destroy all their idols.
Then happy wilt thou be, O Israel! ..."
And so in the end God's Chosen People will be exalted to heaven,
from whence they will look down in triumph upon all their enemies
below.1 This is the climax of Moses' prophecy to Joshua. The rest of the
book contains the installation of Joshua as Moses' successor, and the
lost conclusion probably was occupied with the dispute between
Michael and Satan over the body of Moses, referred to in the Epistle
of Jude. We must not linger here over the many minor problems
offered by the text.2 What we are now concerned with is the general
outlook on the future which the Assumption of Moses presents.
Like so many things that come down to us from the Jews, it is
a strange mixture of hope and despair, of prejudice and insight. The
writer has little knowledge of history or of the world beyond what
he has learnt from his Bible,3 and, like Tertullian after him, he tells
us that a prominent feature of the triumph of the Elect will be the
sight of their vanquished enemies. But that will be in the New Age,
when everything will have changed except the personalities of men.
1 Ass. Moseos x.
2 The name Tazxo or Taxo(c) is almost certainly derived from an artificial mis-
writing of Eleazar ("ITVPK = plD3D, taking the next letter in the Semitic Alphabet) :
see 2 Mace vi 18 ff., and also the art. on the Assumption in Hastings' D B iii 449
above referred to, where reasons are given for accepting the traditional order of the
chapters, as given in the Milan Palimpsest.
3 That the horns of the moon could be broken appears to have shocked scholars,
but Mohammed tells us that the Moon will be broken in sunder when the Hour
arrives (jd^\ (jA>\ icLJl OJjiJl Qoran liv 1). And those Manichees who
thought of the New Moon as a boat must have regarded the horns as really shaped
like the ends of a gondola. See also M. R. James, Apocrypha Anecdota II 167.

40 THE MINOR JEWISH APOCALYPSES
Meanwhile, in the Interim, while the sun and moon still continue,
what strikes us in the expectations of the writer of the Assumption
is the resemblance to Christian expectations as preserved in the
Synoptic Gospels. The Woes on the Pharisees and Sadducees, the
great Tribulation, the -neipacr\i6o- or trial which lies before the faithful,
the hopelessness of resisting evil, the abomination of desolation in
the holy place, the flight of the Saints into the wilderness,— all the
Eschatology of the Gospel except the Central Figure, — it is all
implied in the Assumption of Moses. And more than this : it is not
only in the mise-en-scene that we find the analogy. It is in the
sacred drama also. The voluntary death of the holy Taxo has
a redeeming value, for it hastens the End J ; it is effective, it acts
like the death of the son of the Lord of the Vineyard in the Parable
of the Wicked Husbandmen.
Thus by following the chronological order we arrive at the Apoca
lyptic idea as presented by the Gospels themselves. But before we
leave strictly Jewish ground, we must go forward and glance at
a couple of remarkable works, the two latest of the great Jewish
Apocalypses, both of them written after the Destruction of Jerusalem
by Titus.
The Apocalypse of Baruch and the book best known to English
readers as Second Esdras are so closely related in thought and
language that they have been conjectured to be the work of the
same author. Some scholars, on the other hand, split up each of
the two books into several documents, in which different tendencies
are detected. Speaking generally, it may be said that the division
of Apocalypses into their original conjectured constituents is an
extremely delicate task, for it assumes that these anticipations, these
dreams of the future, will be self-consistent. A certain degree of
consistency we must indeed expect. The work ofthe same man will,
to a certain extent, always breathe the same spirit. But his pictures
of the future will not always harmonize in detail. Moreover, I ven
ture to think that we must allow for the disturbing influence of real
Visions, i. e. pictures seen by the writer in dream or ecstasy. There
has probably been every grade of imaginative writing in this class
of literature. Some of the so-called Visions in the Apocalypse of
Baruch, like the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar in the canonical Daniel,
read like conscious inventions : every detail in them is completely
1 ' Hoc enim si faciemus et moriemur, sanguis noster uindicabiiur coram Domino.'
Et tunc parebit lltgnum Illius [ix 7, x 1).

THE END OF THE SERIES 41
and satisfactorily explained in the subjoined explanation. On the
other hand, it is surely impossible to read the first chapter of the
canonical Apocalypse of John and not feel that, whatever explanation
we may choose to make of the Vision, something like it was really
experienced by the Seer. And similarly it seems to me that some
of the difficulties and incoherencies of the Eagle- Vision in Second
Esdras may arise from honest reminiscence of a monstrous figure
seen by the writer in a vivid dream, itself partly suggested by-
Dan vii 19.
So far as the Apocalypse of Baruch is concerned, I really do not
see why it should be regarded as composite. Esdras, on the other
hand, as read in the English Bible, does require some stripping of
extraneous matter. Of the 16 chapters, the two first and two last
are only found in Latin, and have no claim to be part of the original
Apocalypse. The remainder, viz. iii-xiv of ' Second Esdras ', is what
we have to consider. It is no longer extant in Greek, but it survives
in Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic and Arabic translations. It
is on the composition of this work, which I shall call simply ' Ezra '.,
that scholars are divided.
Ezra starts off with a phrase that invites the application of the
critical knife, for the writer describes himself as ' I Salathiel who am
also Ezra '.* The natural inference, of course, is that the author has
adapted an older Salathiel-apocalypse for a new Ezra-apocalypse.
There is nothing improbable in this, for there can be little doubt
that most of the Apocalypses were largely based on previously
existing literary works. The mischief is, that acknowledging the
existence of separate ' sources ' in an ancient writer does not greatly
help us to reconstruct them. Biblical scholars have talked so long
about J and E and D and P for the Old Testament, and about Q
for the Gospels, that it is easy to delude oneself into the idea that
we are actually in possession of these venerable documents. But we
do not possess them, and we cannot reconstruct them with any
certainty, any more than we could reconstruct S. Mark's Gospel out
of S. Matthew and S. Luke, if S. Mark's Gospel was not already in
our hands to tell us how to do it. Therefore even if we assume that
our Ezra is based on a lost Apocalypse of Salathiel, we cannot tell
what that lost Apocalypse contained. We cannot tell how much or
how little of our extant Ezra is taken from the lost Salathiel, still
less can we tell what those parts of Salathiel were like which the
writer of Ezra rewrote or dropped altogether. All we can do is to
attempt to understand the extant work, to put ourselves into the
1 iii l.

42 THE MINOR JEWISH APOCALYPSES
attitude ofthe writer, whether we choose to call him an 'author1 or
a 'redactor'. He must have regarded his own work as a more or
less satisfactory unity. We can more or less hope to realize for
ourselves his point of view : the point of view of the lost sources
which he may have used must remain for us a matter of conjecture.
For these reasons I must continue to treat Ezra as a whole. It
may be that an earlier work, dating perhaps from just after the
Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, has been revised to fit the times
of Hadrian. But I cannot follow Kabisch and Mr Box in considering
the conjecturally restored earlier form.1
In any case, the main interest of Ezra and Baruch is the light that
these works throw upon the state of mind of the Jews after the
Destruction of Jerusalem, those who braced themselves to remain
loyal to the religion of their fathers, even after the downfall of the
system upon which it had seemed to be founded.
Of the two, Baruch is perhaps the more illuminating, just because
it is more commonplace. The writer has been utterly cast down by
the loss of Jerusalem, but he comes to believe that the Mighty One 2
will ultimately make the Israelites triumph in this world, and that
afterwards in the world to come the righteous will be abundantly
rewarded and the sinners tormented. His main interests are imme
diate and practical. He has a definite message for his fellow-country
men. Let those who are left in the Holy Land stay there,3 and let
one and all, especially the exiles, hold fast by the Law, though the
Temple be destroyed. ' Zion hath been taken from us, and we have
nothing now save the Mighty One and His Law,4 but ' if ye have
respect unto the Law and are intent upon wisdom, the lamp will not
fail and the shepherd will not depart and the fountain will not run
dry '.5 This is the last message of the great series of Jewish Apoca
lypses. As Daniel shews us what was the spirit that nerved the
pious Hasidim to resist Antiochus, so Baruch lets us see in what
frame of mind it was possible for the Rabbis under Johanan ben
Zakkai and his successors to sit down and adapt the religion and
the hopes of Israel to the times of the long dominion of the Gentiles.
The interest of Ezra is somewhat different, and lies in the per
sonality of the writer. The fate anticipated for Israel in Ezra is not
very unlike that in Baruch, but it affects the seers differently. The
1 Especially in rejecting iv 52-v 13 a, vi 11-29, vii 26-44, viii 63-ix 12, from the
' Salathiel-apocalypse '.
2 This is the usual title of God in Baruch. 'lax»poa actually occurs in the small
surviving fragment of the Greek : it implies El in the original Semitic.
3 Baruch lxxvii 6. * lxjixv 3. 5 lxxvii 16.

THE MESSAGES OF BARUCH AND EZRA 4: J
author of Ezra is not really a pessimist, in the sense of believing that
evil is ultimately victorious in this world. The last act in the
world-drama, according to him, is the glorious 400 years' reign of
Messiah : then comes the other world of full retribution.1 The
scheme satisfies the Most High, Who says 'Let the multitude perish
which was born in vain '. 2 The really interesting thing is that it
does not satisfy Ezra. ' This is my first and last saying ', says he,
' that it had been better that the earth had not given Adam, or else
when it had given him to have restrained him from sinning.' 3 ' We
are tormented, because we perish and know it. Let the race of men
lament and the beasts of the field be glad, for it is better with them
than with us ; for they look not for judgement, neither do they know
of torments or of salvation promised unto them after death.4 There
is nothing of this arraignment of Providence in Baruch : indeed, there
is very little like it either in Jewish or in Christian literature, till we
come to modern times.
1 Ezra vii 28-33 : " My Son the Messiah (sic) shall be revealed . . . and shall
rejoice them that remain 400 years. And after these years My Son the Messiah
shall die and all that have the breath of life, and the world shall be turned into the
ancient silence seven days, like as in the first beginning, so that no man is left. And
after seven days . . . the earth will give up those that sleep in it . . . and the Most
High will be revealed upon thethrone of judgement." The Messiah is not killed by
enemies or disease ; he just ceases (like the electric light when the switch is turned
off) at the height of his triumphal career, and no one outlives him. Thus this world
ends with the discomfiture of the ungodly, and the next world of individual retribu
tion follows at once.
A somewhat similar idea underlies the conception of the End sketched in 1 Cor xv
24, 26, 28, where death is destroyed as the last enemy. S. Paul, however, has a
special ' mystery ' for his initiates, by which the necessity of death for the surviving
Christians is avoided. The Christian Messiah, of course, will not have to die, for
His death is past and He is always living in the New Age ; S. Paul further instructs
the Corinthians that the surviving Christians will be transubstantiated instead of
dying and rising again (1 Cor xv 51).
2 Ezra ix 22. 3 vii 46 [116]. * vii 64 ff.

44

IV. EARLY CHRISTIAN APOCALYPTIC
WRITING.
Christian Apocalypses may be conveniently grouped in three main
classes. First come those which do not differ in their general scope
and tendency from the Jewish Apocalypses which we have been con
sidering. I do not mean that it is impossible to tell whether it is
a Christian or a Jew who is speaking. What I mean is that the
general subject-matter is the same and the object of expectation is
the same. When we hear from the Gospel the Discourse on the
Mount of Olives,1 or read the final chapter of the Didache, we are
wholly within the region of Jewish apocalyptic thought. The subject
is the near-approaching End of all things in this world, when the
Elect of God spoken of by Daniel and by Enoch will come with the
clouds of heaven. The Christians know Who the Messiah will be, but
that is the only difference.
To Christian converts trained in Jewish thought and literature this
was a natural way, in fact the natural way, to ' assert eternal Provi
dence', but it was very far from being the natural way for the
converts from the heathen world. Moreover, as the years went by
and the End was not yet, the fact of dead individual Christians
awaiting the End demanded ever more pressing recognition. The
Gentile converts had joined the Church without having clear expecta
tions of a common general catastrophe which was at the same time
a vindication of right and truth and a punishment of wrong and
error, but many of them did believe that the man of insight and
virtue would gain a happy immortality when he was freed at death
from the burden of the flesh. In direct accordance with these ideas
there sprang up at least as early as the end of the first Christian
century a new apocalyptic, dealing not with the Last Judgement, but
with the fate of individual souls and individual courses of conduct.
So far as we know, this second series of Christian Apocalypses begins
with the Apocalypse of Peter, happily rediscovered about a quarter
of a century ago. The Apocalypse of Peter, in its original form, was
condemned as heretical, but it survived in countless imitations and
adaptations, and at last was set forth on the grandest scale in Dante's
1 Mk xiii and parallels.

THE ASCENSION OF ISAIAH 45
Divine Comedy. The general scheme is of the very simplest ; the
dead souls are taken one by one to the place they deserve and an
attempt is made, more or less, to ' make the punishment fit the crime \
As I pointed out at the very beginning of these Lectures, this is
a fundamentally different idea from that of the Last Judgement and
of the genuine Jewish Apocalypses, which are animated by the idea
of the impending catastrophe that is going to usher in a New Age for
all the world.
But besides the Jewish Apocalypse and the Pagan Apocalypse there
is a third form of Christian Apocalypse, worth some attention, not
so much for its intrinsic value as for the way in which it illustrates
the profound difference which really, though to some extent uncon
sciously, separated the Christian view of history from the Jewish.
The ancient Christian work called the Ascension of Isaiah is the best
illustration of this third type of Apocalypse, which while Jewish in
form is essentially Christian in its outlook.
The Ascension of Isaiah in its general plan recalls the Book of
Daniel. Of the eleven chapters into which the book is now divided,
chaps, vi-xi give the vision of Isaiah when he was transported into
the seventh heaven and witnessed the Descent ofthe Beloved (i.e. the
Heavenly Christ, the Son of God), through the seven heavens down
to earth, followed by His victorious return. The earlier chapters,
which also contain the account of a vision, give a historical setting
to the vision at the end. They tell us how Isaiah saw the vision in
the days of Hezekiah and how he was sawn in sunder with a wooden
saw by Manasseh, Hezekiah's wicked son, who was instigated to do
the deed by Beliar, i.e. the evil spirit who dwells in man and the
adversary of everything to do with Christ.1
I sometimes fancy that the spirit of Beliar must be dwelling in
some of my friends when they use the wooden saw to dissect the
Ascension of Isaiah. Notwithstanding their efforts it continues to
the end to speak with a Christian voice, just as Isaiah did.2 I shall
venture here to treat it as a unity and as the work of a Christian
throughout. Of course, I do not mean to deny that some details in
the fanciful story of Isaiah's martyrdom may have been ultimately
derived from Jewish sources. But that is a very different thing from
regarding the narrative portions of the Ascension of Isaiah as a
Jewish document which can be detached from the rest of the work
and represented as an independent whole. On the contrary, I regard
it as an integral part of the Ascension, constructed from the writer's
1 S. Paul uses the name Beliar in a similar way, 2 Cor vi IS.
s See Asc. Isai. v 14 f.

46 EARLY CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSES
knowledge of the early imperfect Greek translation of the Books of
Kings, supplemented here and there by stray fragments of Jewish
lore.1 The interest ofthe Ascension of Isaiah lies in its early date. In the
earlier apocalyptic section we find that Beliar is expected to " descend
from his firmament in the likeness of a man, a lawless king, the slayer
of his mother ".2 This is obviously a reference to Nero. It is true
that the Antichrist here announced is Beliar in the likeness of Nero,
hot Nero himself. But it appears that Nero is the only persecuting
Emperor known to the apocalyptist, and in any case I do not believe
that the Nero-myth was a creative force after the first third of the
2nd century. Descriptions of Antichrist modelled on the belief in
Nero redivivus persisted for centuries, but I do not imagine that they
were newly made after about 130 or 140 a. d.
This would give the early part of the 2nd century as the date of
the Nero passage in the Ascension of Isaiah, and it stems to me that
the rest of the work cannot be later. The only exception is xi 2-22
of the Ethiopic text, a passage which excites suspicion by naming
Joseph and Mary, against the usual rule that apocalyptic prophecies
are silent about names. At this point a Slavonic and a Latin text of
the Ascension are extant, and they omit most of the passage,3 so that
we may safely conclude either that the Ethiopic is,, here interpolated,
or that the original form of the passage was quite different.
' With all respect to the great scholars who have worked at the
Ascension of Isaiah, I cannot but think that the author of the work
is more skilful than they take him to be, and^that the unsatisfactory
impression which it makes as a whole is due more to the' nature ofthe
task which the writer set before him than to the manner in which he
has carried it out. It is the old mistake, which has spoilt so many
clever works of art, the mistake of trying to do two things at once,
of trying to serve two masters.
In this case the two masters are the Last Judgement and the
Incarnation. The emotional effect of apocalyptic writing, as exhibited in the
great series which extends from the Book of Daniel to the Apocalypse
of Baruch, is that everything is subordinated to the announcement
1 See Appendix II.
, 2 Asc. Isai. iv 2. The Greek contains the rare word firjTpaXwaa -. where else in
Christian literature does it occur ? The writer of the Ascension uses one or two words
not very common in ecclesiastical Greek, such as e(a<pUrcu, ' to desert or neglect.'
And has not the epithet of Beliar, which the Ethiopic version renders Matanbuchus
(ii 4) or Mechembechus (v 3), something to do with metempsychosis 'i See further, p. 74v
3 Including all mention of Joseph and Mary.

THE ASCENSION OF ISAIAH 47
of the End. Everything leads up to the Judgement and to the New
Age that follows it. It is because the End is so often forgotten in
the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs that parts of them are so
wearisome to read. But in the Ascension of Isaiah the idea that the
End is the chief thing in history is crossed by the new Christian idea
that it is the Incarnation of the Messiah, an event now passed, which
is the chief thing in history. This new Christian idea, that began
with S. Paul and attained more and more fixity and definiteness as
time went on, is really fatal to great apocalyptic writing. The
Incarnation, the career of Jesus Christ, may be the most important
fact in all history past or future ; but if so, an Apocalypse is not the
proper literary form in which to set it forth. When the older
Apocalyptists, as in the Book of Enoch or the Assumption of Moses,
sketch the past history of Israel, it always leads up to the future
history as anticipated by the Seer.
The work of the Apocalyptists belongs to the sphere of Hope : the
vision of Isaiah, when stripped of its apocalyptic machinery, belongs
to the sphere of ' the Faith ' in its technical theological sense. It is
really a piece of * dogmatics ', an essay in Christology. But when we
once recognise this, I think we ought to admire the skill with which
the writer of the Ascension of Isaiah has poured his new wine into the
old bottles. It is an Apocalypse, so he must tell us about the End :
on the other hand, his real interest is in his theological doctrine about
the Descent of the Christ through the seven heavens, how it came
about that He was not observed, and how He victoriously ascended
and sat down on the right hand of the Great Glory. So our Apoca
lyptist contrives to bring in the part about the End in a kind of
parenthesis : Isaiah is arrested by Manasseh at the instigation of
Beliar, "for Beliar was in great wrath against Isaiah . . . because
through him the going forth of the Beloved had been made known,
and His transformation . . . and that He should be crucified . . . and
afterwards His disciples will forsake the teaching," 1 . . . and so it
drops into oratio recta and direct prediction. At the end of the pre
dictions the writer resumes his story by saying " On account of these
visions, therefore, Beliar was wroth with Isaiah, and he dwelt in the
heart of Manasseh, and he sawed Isaiah in sunder with a wooden
saw ".2 Then follows the story of the actual martyrdom.
This ingenious anticipation of the Vision of Isaiah leaves the
writer free to leave out all about the End, when he comes to the
Vision itself, which concludes impressively with the Heavenly Session
of the victorious Christ. I cannot help feeling that it is very cleverly
1 Asc. Isai. iii 13 ff. s Ibid. v 1.

48 EARLY CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSES
done. Of course there are inconsistencies, which learned persons
detect, who read the book as it was never intended to be read. But
on the whole the Ascension of Isaiah gives me the impression of a
literary unity, and the inconsistencies seem to me to be due rather to
the divided aim of the author than to the mechanical combination of
separable documents.
The Apocalypses have surely had rather hard measure dealt out to
them during the last fifty years. They were written for a very different
kind of public from the learned persons who study them now so con
scientiously. Now they are hardly read save by trained scholars, men
trained in the use of ancient historical documents, who moreover have
no illusions as to the historical value of the ' revelations ' which the
Apocalypses profess to contain. They study them to learn the ideas
and prejudices, the hopes and fears, of their writers. It is all done by
the most scientific methods, and the chief danger now is that too strict
a standard of consistency and rationality may be exacted from writers
to whom consistency and rationality were quite secondary considera
tions. Consistency and rationality belong to the past, and to the
course of events in this world : the Apocalyptist's part is to stimulate
his comrades by sketches of the future. And a future in which every
thing is consistent and in which, nevertheless, universal justice is done
is a Vision which the heart of man has not conceived.
Think for a moment of some patent inconsistencies to be found in
the Apocalypse of S. John. In what state does the Seer see the souls
of them who had been slain for the word of God ? Are they not
underneath the Altar, crying out ' How long, O Lord ? ' And they
are told to rest yet a little longer, till the number of the martyrs is
made up.1 They also, like the Lamb that had been slain, are a
sacrifice, and they are impatient for the long-delayed consummation.
But then who are the great multitude that no man could number,
who come from the great tribulation and have made their robes white
in the blood of the Lamb, who for that very reason are now before the
throne of God ? 2 Are these better off than the Martyrs ? Both visions
belong to this time, the time before the End. And again, how does
the picture of the impatient Martyrs harmonize with ' Blessed are the
dead which die in the Lord from henceforth, for they rest ' ? 3
These inconsistencies are in a sense real, and I am quite ready to
1 Rev vi 9-11 : that this is no isolated figure, taken mechanically from earlier
documents, appears from xvi 7, where the Altar voices the ultimate satisfaction of
the slain souls.
2 Rev vii 9-17. 3 Rev xiv 13.

THEIR INHERENT INCONSISTENCY 49
believe that the ultimate cause of them is a mingling of different and
inconsistent sources. There is the authentic Jewish source which
defers the Judgement and the great Adjustment of all things to the
fast-approaching End ; there is the Pagan sentiment that the Adjust
ment, if it take place at all, must take place at once after the death
of each individual ; and there is the specifically Christian belief that
somehow the Coming of Jesus Christ has made all the difference, and
that the New Age must date from His Passion and Resurrection, even
if that be patently not the Harvest but merely an early Paschal sheaf
of firstfruits.
But these three distinct ideas exist simultaneously in the mind of
the Christian Apocalyptist. It is not a question of the fitting together
of documents, of scissors and paste, but of the alternate emergence of
independent convictions into consciousness and expression. In moments
of crisis and emotion these convictions sometimes attain an artistic
unity, held together by a feeling of passionate and unshaken loyalty
to God and His Christ, but they do not attain, and cannot attain, to
logical consistency.
After all, a logical Apocalypse would most likely be a dull Apoca
lypse. And unless the point of view which I have put before you in
these Lectures is altogether mistaken, the impulse which produced the
great Apocalypses was not a logical theory, but a passionate conviction,
roused to utterance by the events of Jewish history. The doctrine of
the Apocalypses is the doctrine of the approaching Judgement, and
the doctrine ofthe approaching Judgement was in essence an expression
of the Jews' unquenchable conviction that God would not altogether
allow His Chosen People to perish in their struggle with the Civiliza
tion of the heathen world.
The Apocalyptic literature is thus the product of one particular set
of historical conditions. In accordance with this, real historical events
which can be identified are often referred to or indicated, and such
indications where they are certain are most valuable for giving us the
date of particular passages or even of whole works. But it is possible
to press some of the details too closely, to look for references to con
temporary history in passages where the Apocalyptist's points of view
were more vague and general, or more frankly supernatural. I do not
think we find the squabbles of Jewish factions reflected in the Judge
ment-scene of the Similitudes of Enoch ; I do not think there is any
prophecy of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus in the Discourse on the
Mount of Olives as given in S. Mark. It is true that the apocalyptic
Hope was evoked by the pressure of contemporary struggles and took
its classical shape from books that directly reflect those struggles. But

50 EARLY CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSES
when the political crisis had passed, the Hope remained. The actual
resistance, active and passive, of the Jewish nation to the Hellenizing
efforts of Antiochus revealed both to Jews and to Gentiles that in
Judaism there was an element incompatible with the rest of the then
civilized world : some New Thing, some New state of things, must
come to pass, if Israel was to rest satisfied.
The new state of things did come to pass, different as it was from
what the apocalyptist Seers had looked for, and two distinct Societies
grew up, each claiming to be the true Israel to whom the promises had
been given. Of these, it was the new congregation ofthe Gentiles, and
not Israel after the flesh, which continued to cherish the Apocalypses,
until the day came that their message was obviously antiquated and
they were laid aside and forgotten. Now that some of the spirit of
life has come again into the scattered bones of this literature, and
they have come up out of their graves and have been brought into
their own land again, we moderns, both of the Church and of the
Synagogue, may be grateful to the Early Christians for preserving
them.

APPENDICES

e2

APPENDIX I.
ON THE GREEK TEXT OF ENOCH,
The primary object of this Note is to give some justification for
the general approval of the text of the Gizeh MS (G), now at Cairo,
as compared with the Ethiopic (E) and the extracts in Georgius the
Syncellus (S), expressed in Lecture II, pp. 26, 27.
1. The Descent ofthe Angels (Enoch vi 1-6).
I give a translation of the text of G, with the variants of E and S.
1. And it came to pass when the sons of men were multiplied, in those
days there were born daughters beautiful and fair. 2. And the Angels,
sons of Heaven, saw them and desired them, and said to one another
'Come, let us choose for ourselves wives from men and beget for
ourselves children '. 3. And Semiazas said to them, he who was their
leader, 'I fear lest ye will not be willing to do this deed and I shall be
alone guilty of a great sin \ 4. So they all answered him ' We will
swear all of us with an oath and bind one another with a curse not to
frustrate this plan until we accomplish it and do this deed '. 5. Then
they all sware together and bound each other with a curse in it.
6  1 in those days] om. S born] + to them ES and fair] om. S 2 init. And
the Watchers desired them and went astray after them and said S Come] om. S
men] + of the earth S and beget . . . children] om. S 3 he who was] om. S
4 So (ovv)] And ES answered him] + and said S (and some mss E) and do this
deed] om. S : for until . . . deed E has ' and we will do for this plan the deed '
6. See below.
It will be seen that in vi 1-5 the variants are trifling, but the
Syncellus habitually abridges redundant expressions, while in ver. 2
he frankly paraphrases. This is exactly what one expects in a man
quoting a work which he does not regard as textually authoritative,
and it should make us very wary of regarding variations attested by
the Syncellus alone as resting on anything else than his own free
alterations. For ver. 6 we are most unluckily deprived of G, the scribe's pen
having wandered from kcu (WOe/ncrncray aAA?j\oixr ev auras to the corre
sponding words in ver. 6. S has
rjoav Se ovtoi oicikootioi ol KaTaftavTto- «j raur fip.epato- 'lapeb el(r
rriv Kopv<pr)v tov 'Epp.ovielp. opovo- Kai eKakeo-av to opoo- 'Epjuu/a,
koOotl &p.oo-av km avidfpaTKxav az\\ri/\ovo- iv aira.

54 ON THE TEXT OF ENOCH
The literal translation of E is
And they in all were two hundred, and they came down upon
Ardis which is the top of Mount Armen, and they called the
mountain Armen, because they sware in it and bound each other
with a curse.
Dr Charles accepts S as substantially genuine and regards E as
corrupt. He further accepts Flale'vi's conjecture that there was in the
original text not only a play upon the name of Hermon, but also
upon the name of Jared. Jared ("H.J) seems to mean ' Descent ',
from the Hebrew word for ' to descend ' : the word does not occur in
Aramaic, so that on this view the passage was originally written in
Hebrew. Our first business is to retranslate the Ethiopic into the under
lying Greek. This is fairly easy. Armen is the standing equivalent
for ' Hermon ' (or ' Hermonim '). For the decisive clause we thus get
ot Kareflrjo-av eniApieiCKopy't'HN roS 'E. opovcr.
A glance at S shews us that the -is of Ardis is the preposition da,
required before txopvcpriv. We have therefore erriApa corresponding
to ev rater r)p.ipaicr 'ldpeb in S. I venture to suggest that these four
words are nothing more than an ingenious paraphrase made by the
Syncellus himself.
That it is wrong I judge for the following reasons : (1) the
Ethiopic has nothing corresponding to ev rata rjp.epaio- except the
preposition eiu. It is most unlikely, even if grammatically just
possible, that the original Greek translation of Enoch would have
expressed ' in Jared's time ' by em 'IdpeS (or efa 'Iap[e]8), without any
note of office or qualification. (2) The proper place for specifying
the time of the descent of the Sons of God is not here but in vi 1.
In that verse it is vaguely described as ' in those days ' by G and E,
but this note of time is left out by S, obviously because in ver. 6 he
was going to date it precisely. (3) The argument that there is
in Enoch a play upon the name ' Jared ' and the verb ' to descend ' is
a modern conjecture : the play upon the 'curse' (herm) and the name
' Hermon ', on the other hand, is definitely pointed out in the text
itself. Further, I think we can guess that the actual source from whence
the Syncellus derived his conjecture was the Book of Jubilees, a work
elsewhere expressly quoted by him. In Jub. iv 15 the birth of Jared
is mentioned : " and he [Mahaleel] called his name Jared ; for in his
days the angels of the Lord descended on the earth, those named
the Watchers." Here no doubt we have a Hebrew original and

THE SYNCELLUS TEXT SOPHISTICATED 55
a play on the words yarSdu and YdrSd. ' But it has nothing to do
with the Book of Enoch, and when in Jub. v the actual story of the
descent of the Angels is told, perhaps from the passage in Enoch, the
name of Jared is never mentioned.1
But what, then, are we to make of eniApi in Enoch vi 6, if it
has nothing to do with the Patriarch Jared ? I venture to suggest
that the original Greek translation had eniAp<\, i.e. iiri apa, and
that apa was supposed by the translator to be the name of the summit
of Hermon. The original Aramaic would be
po-im K-iito pW? snaS inroi
' And they came down below to the top of Mount Hermon.' JH&$ ?,
also written Vi?, means ' lower '. In Targ Jn to Gen xl 23 JJlTi is
used for ' belonging to here below ' (cPici-bas), but what is meant in
Enoch may be ' on Hermon, below the clouds and the snow-line '. If
this conjecture be adopted, and it involves only reading h for <\ in
the Greek text implied by the Ethiopic, we get a text free from
every difficulty. But it definitely implies an Aramaic basis, not
a Hebrew one.
This is probably the most convenient point to record my opinion
that the mention of the three diverse races of monsters in Syncellus's
paraphrase of Enoch vii, viz. Giants, Naphilim and Elioud,2 does
not go back to the true text of Enoch, but is derived directly from
Jubilees vii 22. If the Naphilim are anywhere mentioned in Enoch,
it is in xv 11, where G (and E) have Ne4>eAa,c : so Bouriant and
Flemming.

2. The Prologue to Enoch.
The Prologue to the Book of Enoch, i. e. Enoch i-v, seems to me
to deserve a special study, especially with regard to the style of the
author and the methods of the translator of the Ethiopic version.
Except for some Patristic quotations in i 9 the only extant authorities
here are the Cairo MS (G) and the Ethiopic (E). I give a literal
translation of each in parallel columns. Words and sentences found
only in G but not in E (and vice versa) are printed in italics.
1 The Appendix On the Birth of Noah, which is added to the Ethiopic text of
Enoch (chap, cvi-cviii), also states that the Angels transgressed in the days of Jared
(spelt Iydret). But this Appendix has no real literary connexion with the genuine
Enoch, which ends with the ' Amen ' of cv 2.
2 Here again we have a confusion of d and a, for the Ethiopic of Jub. vii 22 has
Elyo, probably corresponding to eAioya.

56 TRANSLATION OF THE PROLOGUE
Enoch — Greek
I 1 The word of the blessing of Enoch, how he blessed elect righteous men,
who will be there in the day of distress for taking away all the
adversaries and righteous men shall be saved,.
~ And he took up his parable and said .
Enoch, a righteous man is he,
a vision from God for him was opened fhavingt,
the vision of the Holy One and of heaven He shewed me,
and holy apologues ' I myself heard,
and as I heard from them all things and I myself knew
as I looked.
And not for the present genei-ation did I consider,
but for one far distant do I speak ;
3 and concerning the elect I now say it,
and concerning them have I taken up my parable.
And my Holy One, the Great One, will come forth from His habitation,
4 and the God of eternity upon the earth will tread on Mount Sinai,
and will appear from His encampment,
and will appear in the power of His might from the heaven of
heavens.
5 And all will fear, and the Watchers will tbelievet,
and -fthey will singf secret things in all the ends of the [earth],
and all the ends of the earth will be shaken,
and trembling and great fear will take hold of them unto the
uttermost parts of the earth.
6 And high mountains will shake and fall and dissolve,
and high hills will be laid low, that mountains should waste away,
and they will melt like wax in front of the fire in flame.
7 And the earth will be torn into pieces by a rent,
and all things that are on the earth will be destroyed.
And there will be a judgement on all things and
8 with the righteous He will make peace,
and upon the elect there will be protection and peace,
and upon them shall be mercy,
and they will all belong to God and He will give them prosperity,2
and He will bless them all and protect them all and help us,
and light will shine for them,
and He will make peace upon them.
g For He comes with His ten thousands and His holy ones
to do judgement on all,
and will destroy all the ungodly,
1 Read dnoAor<ON not ApoAofcON : the MS might be either.
'' prosperity ( = euoSiW)] good-pleasure G (ddodiav) : so Charles.

TO THE BOOK OF ENOCH 57
Enoch — Ethiopic
I 1 The word of the blessing of Enoch, how he blessed elect and
righteous men who will be there in the day of distress for the
taking away of all the adversaries and ungodly.
2 And he answered further and said :
Enoch, a righteous man,
who from the Lord while his eyes were open, and he was seeing
the vision of the Holy One in heaven which the angels shewed me,
and I heard from them all things, and I myself understood
what I was seeing.
And not for this generation,
but for one far distant that will come,
3 concerning the elect I said it,
and I answered concerning them a parable.
The Holy and Great One will come forth from His habitation,
4, the God of eternity, and from thence he will tread upon Mount Sinai,
and will appear in His encampment,
and will appear in the power of His might from heaven.
5 And all will fear, and the Watchers will quake,

and fear and great trembling- will take hold of them unto the
uttermost parts of the earth.
6 And high mountains will tremble,
and high hills will be laid low,
and they will melt like wax from the flame.
7 And the earth will be rent,
and all things that are on the earth will be destroyed.
And there will be a judgement on all things and on all the righteous ;
8 with the righteous He will make peace,
and He will protect the elect,
and there shall be mercy upon them,
and they will all belong to God and they will prosper,1
and they will be blessed,
and God's light will shine for them.
9 And lo, He came with ten thousands of holy Ones,
to do judgement on them,
and to destroy the ungodly,
1 Comp. Jubilees xxvii 16 and the Hebrew hislih.

58 TRANSLATION OF TFIE PROLOGUE
Enoch — Greek
and will convict all flesh about all their works of ungodliness
which they have ungodly done,
and of all the stubborn words they have spoken,
and about all the things that ungodly sinners have uttered
against Him.
II 1 Observe all the things in heaven, how they do not change
their ways,
and the luminaries in heaven, how they all rise and set,
each one ordered in its appointed time,
and in their feasts they appear,
and they do not transgress their own order.
2 See the earth and consider about the things that come to pass in it
from the beginning to the end,
[things which] are corruptible,
how they change not, no, nothing upon earth,
but all things appear to you as works of God.
3 See the summer and the winter ;

III examine and see all the trees,
how

(IV)

1 the leaves are green in them, covering the trees,
and all their fruit is for honour and glory.
Consider and know about all His works,
and perceive that a Living God has made them thus,
and He lives for ever and ever.
2 And all His works that He has done for ever from year to year
all come to pass thus,
and all things that the works accomplish for Him,
and they do not change their works,
but as it were by command all things come to pass.
3 See how the sea and the rivers similarly accomplish their task,
and they change not their works from His word?.

TO THE BOOK OF ENOCH 59
Enoch — Ethiopic
and to convict all flesh about all that they have done
and fpreparedt 1 the ungodly and sinners
against Him.
II 1 Observe all the things in heaven, how they do not change
their ways,
the luminaries in heaven, how they all rise and set,
each one ordered in its time,
and they do not transgress their order.
2 See the earth and consider about the things that are done in it
from the beginning to the end,
how there changes not
any work of God as it appears.
3 See the summer and the winter,
how all the earth is filed with water,
and clouds and dew and rain rest upon it.
[II Observe and see all the trees,
how they appear to be withered and all their leaves to befallen,
except Iff trees which do not let them fall but keep some
ofthe old until the new comes, for two or three years.
IV jlnrf again, observe the days of summer, how the sun has
been over it in its beginning, and ye seek shade and
shelter because of the heat of the sun and the earth also
burns with the warmth of the glow, and ye cannot tread the
earth or a rock because of the heat.
V 1 Observe how the trees with greenness of leaves cover themselves
and bear fruit.
And consider about all
and perceive that fye have madef all of them
Who lives for ever
2 And His works before Him each year
that shall be
and all His works serve Him
and change not,
but as God commanded so all things come to pass.
S See how the seas and the rivers similarly accomplish
their work.
1 prepared] apparently altered from ' ungodly done ' by the change of ona letter
so Charles.

60 TRANSLATION OF THE PROLOGUE
Enoch — Greek
4 But ye, ye have not continued nor done according to His
commandments,
but have turned away and uttered great and stubborn words
with your unclean mouth against His majesty ;
because ye have uttered (thus) in your lies,
O hard of heart, there will be no peace for you !
5 Therefore your days ye shall curse,
and the years of your life shall be destroyed,
and the years of your destruction shall be multiplied with
an eternal curse,
and there will not be for you mercy and peace I
6 Then will your names be for an eternal curse to all the righteous,
and by you shall curse all they that curse,
and all the sinners and ungodly shall swear by you.
And all the innocent1 will rejoice, and there will be for them
forgiveness of sins and every mercy and peace and gentleness.
there will be for them salvation, good light,
and they will inherit the earth ;
and for all you sinners there will come no salvation,
but on all of you there will lodge 2 a curse.
7 And for the elect there will be light and joy and peace,
and they will inherit the earth,
but for you ungodly there will be a curse
8 Then will be given to the elect light and grace,
and they will inherit the earth ;
then will be given to all the elect wisdom,
and they will all live,
and they will not sin any more,
neither by ignorance 3 nor by presumption,
and there will be light in an enlightened man
and in an intelligent man understanding,
9 and they will incur no guilt,
neither will they sin all the days of their life,
nor will they die by the anger of wrath,
but the number of the days of their life they will fulfil,
and their life will be lengthened in peace,
and the years of their joy will be multiplied
in gladness and peace eternal
in all the days of their life.
1 Read avapApT-qroi (with Swete)] G appears to have amapth|toi but the letters th
are very faint, like some others at the end of lines on this page.
- Read naraXvau uarapa (so Radermacher and Charles)] kataAycin katapan G.
3 kataAhBeian G: see the Note below.

TO THE BOOK OF ENOCH 61
Enoch — Ethiopic
4 But ye, ye have not continued nor done the Lord's
commandments,
but have transgressed and uttered great and stubborn words
with your unclean mouth against His majesty;
O hard of heart, there will be no peace for you !
5 And therefore your days ye shall curse,
and the years of your life shall ye destroy,
and it shall be multiplied with
an eternal curse,
and there will not be for you mercy ! [righteous,
6 And in those days ye will give your name for an eternal curse to all the
and you they shall curse
the sinners talways to you together witht the sinners.

7 And for the elect there will be light and joy and peace.
and they will inherit the earth,
but for you ungodly there will be a curse.
8 And then will be given to the elect
wisdom,
and they will all live,
and they will not sin any more,
neither by ungodliness nor by presumption,
but they in whom is wisdom will humbly worship,
9 and they will not sin any more,
neither will they be condemned all the days of their life,
nor will they die by anger nor by wrath,
but the number of the days of their life they will fulfil,
and their life will be lengthened in peace,
and the years of their joy will be multiplied
in gladness and in peace eternal
in all the days of their life.

>,

62 COMPARISON OF THE TEXT
Before considering the above passage in detail some general remarks
upon method may not be out of place. I have printed the Prologue
in full in an intentionally quite literal English rendering, in order
that my readers may gather some idea of the general condition of the
extant Greek text of Enoch and of the Ethiopic version of the Greek.
It is evident at the first glance that neither the Cairo text nor
the Ethiopic has any pretensions to literary excellence. This was not
so evident in the passage from Enoch vi, a piece of plain prose. The
Prologue is more ambitious and more poetical in style and demanded
greater skill in the translator.
It is, of course, highly probable that the original Aramaic or
Hebrew text was a better composition than the Greek translation : it
may not have had the literary merits of Amos or Isaiah, but it
was probably idiomatic and forcible. The analogy of Amos and
Isaiah, in fact, shews us what our position is ; it is as if we had
to understand and reconstruct the Prophets from the Septuagint
alone. But after all it is not quite certain that the original author
of the Prologue was a great stylist. In Dr Hort's words (Introd.
to N. T., § 27) : ' There is much literature, ancient no less than
modern, in which it is needful to remember that authors are not
always grammatical, or clear, or consistent, or felicitous ; so that not
seldom an ordinary reader finds it easy to replace a feeble or half-
appropriate word or phrase by an effective substitute ; and thus the
best words to express an author's meaning need not in all cases
be those which he actually employed.' The passage now before
us seems to me to fall under this condemnation, at least so far as
'vain repetitions' are concerned. Here, as elsewhere in Enoch,
especially xciv-civ (a section that seems to me certainly written
by the writer of the Prologue), the author thinks he will be heard for
his much speaking. Such passages read like a shorthand report of an
extempore sermon ; the same thing is said over and over again without
real difference of meaning.
The critical emendation of the text of such works is a very delicate
matter, if the aim be to reproduce the original, because the more
forcible reading is not always the more ancient. The main rule
is that in rhetorical passages like this no wholly new idea is only
expressed once ; what cannot be paralleled either in the immediate
context or elsewhere in the book is likely to be an interpolation, while
on the other hand genuine clauses which only repeat what has been
said before with slight verbal changes are liable to be dropped as
superfluous, especially by impatient translators.
To come now to details, I wish to give some reason for suggesting

IN THE GREEK AND THE ETHIOPIC 63
that in the Prologue to Enoch the plus of the Greek is mostly genuine,
but the plus ofthe Ethiopic is mostly interpolation. This is exactly
the opposite of what Dr Charles and most other scholars think, so
that some further explanation is needed.
The plus of the Ethiopic is practically confined to a single passage
containing the description of summer and winter (ii 3— v l).1
Dr Charles says that G, which only has ' See the summer and
the winter ; examine and see all the trees, how the leaves are green in
them covering the trees, and all their fruit is for honour and glory ',
has lost the rest through homoeoteleuton. But a glance at the
passages as I have printed them above will shew that this cannot be
the explanation. It will not explain the absence of ii 3 h °. Further,
there is in the Ethiopic text of this passage a scientific clearness and
absence of rhetoric which seems to me not to accord with the rest.
The sinners are bidden to consider the regularity of summer and
winter : why should they turn aside to consider the (exceptional)
phenomena of evergreen trees ? And this in a Prologue ! More
probably G has preserved the original text, and the additions in E are
a botanical gloss by a learned editor. As Charles points out, fourteen
evergreen trees were reckoned by the Greeks (Geoponica xi 1), which
seems to indicate that the gloss did not originate in the Ethiopic.
In i 7 the words ' on all the righteous ', found in E but not in G,
seem to me genuine. They might easily be omitted by a careless
scribe, and they make good sense, for the 'judgement7 is as much
the vindication of the righteous as the punishment of the sinners.
The plus of the Greek is no doubt mostly needless repetition or
(as in i 5b) corrupt ; yet, as we are not dealing with an original
but a translation, it seems to me somewhat difficult to dismiss
these additions as scribal blunders. The five extra clauses of G, for
instance, in v 6 look very like an alternative (and more paraphrastic)
translation of the three clauses of v 7, but to say this raises more
difficulties than it solves. In codices of the Septuagint ' doublets '
are often found side by side ; but for that there is a historical
cause, viz. the influence of Origen's Hexapla. In the case of Enoch
we have no Origen and no Hexapla, and to assume the existence of
variant independent readings of the original Semitic text, whether
in G or E or the Syncellus, as Dr Charles sometimes does,2 is
to assume the existence of doors of access to Semitic literature on
1 It must be remembered that the chapters were made by Dillmann before G was
discovered. 2 See e. g. Charles's notes to the Greek text on Enoch i 6°, 7\ 9°P ; v 6, 8, vi 4»,
x 7, xiii 1, xvii 7, xxv 6, xxvii 2.

64 ON THE TEXT OF ENOCH
the part of Greek-speaking Christians, for which we have no warrant
in general history. And if it be replied, that not Christians but
Greek-speaking Jews were the correctors, then we should have to
assume the preservation in Christian circles of more than one line of
Enoch-codices, — in this case, the Cairo text which has the doublets
and the Ethiopic text which has escaped them.
If v 6b be regarded as a doublet to v 7 I can only suppose that v 6b
is the rough original and v 7 a literary improvement of it, the rough
original having somehow in G escaped deletion. But if so, G must
be regarded as preserving traces of an older form of text, of which E is
a literary revision.
The moral I draw is that the transmitted text of Enoch is too bad
to be thoroughly emended. Methodical exegesis of such a text is like
art-criticism on the Monna Lisa based upon reproductions in the half
penny press. Such reproductions are quite good so far as they go — in
some ways they give a truer impression than a carefully 'faked'
engraving, but they cannot be used for minute details, and the more
you look at them under the microscope the greater is the chance of
misinterpretation. The following Notes, the result of ' microscopical ' study of the
Prologue, are offered as suggestions, with a full acknowledgement of
the small degree of certainty attainable.
i 2 is very confused, but rrjv opacriv roC ay'wv surely goes with
ebet£iv juoi. The preceding words hnbxoon I cannot translate,
and opaaio aveioyA^n is, so far as I can make out, a unique com
bination : ' Visions ' are not ' opened ', but ' seen '. In the next
clause we ought perhaps to read curb \6ya>v, not a-noAywv, as
' apologues ' seem hardly ever to be mentioned in Jewish or
Christian literature.
There is also a difficulty as to where Enoch's own words are supposed
to begin, whether at 'EkgJx, or at 'avdpuz-noo-, or at tj\v opao-iv. The
analogies of Balaam and of Job, who also ' take up their parable ',
help us very little to emend the text of G. It seems to me that if
Enoch begins in the 3rd person, then his words must begin with his
own name.
i 5. The plus of G is here so odd that it must be genuine, but
both irto-Tevo-ovo-iv and kaiacoocin seem to be corrupt. The
curo'KpiKpa must be ' hiding-places ' : cf. Enoch c 4
" The angels shall descend into the secret places
" And gather together into one place all those who brought
down sin,

NOTES ON THE PROLOGUE 65
"And the Most High will arise on that Day of judgement
" To execute great judgement amongst sinners.''
ii 2 do-Lv (jzOaprd. Swete prefixes too-, or we might read a daiv
4>dapTa.. The sense must surely have been 'though they be
corruptible (yet do they not change) '.
v8oi nar akwdeiav otire Kara vireprj(pavLav. So G. Charles reads
xar acrifieiav with E, but this makes no contrast to VTrepri<pavtav.
Surely we must read <ar ayvoiav.
The phrase ov Kara .... otire Kara vittp-nfyaviav almost necessarily
suggests the contrast of sins of presumption with those of accident, as
in Ps xix (xviii) 13, 14, where both ayvoia and viieprjcpavla occur together
in Aquila's version : see also Lev xxii 14 (Heb. and LXX). The
Aramaic phrase is 1}*lJi {Ol 17£J>S tib (la bshalu wla bizdanu).
Between katapnoian and kataAh9€ian there is not much difference
(r = A, n = h, o = 0, i = ei).

3. Enoch and the Valleys of the Dead (chap, xxii).1
'And from thence I journeyed to another place, and he shewed me
towards the West another great and high mountain of hard rock,
2 and there were four places in it, hollow, deep, and very smooth, three
of them dark, and one light with a fountain of water in the midst of
it.2 And I said ' How smooth these hollows are, and deep and dark
to look at ! ' 3 Then answered Raphael, the one of the holy angels
that was with me, and said to me 'These hollow places are for
gathering together the spirits of the souls 3 of the dead. For this
very purpose have they been assigned,4 that here should be gathered
together all the souls of men, i and these places for containing them,
they have been made 6 until the day of their judgement and until the
1 See Lecture II, p. 20.
2 Punctuate thus, i. e. GKOTetvoi, teat efcr tyozruvbo Kal 1x77777 vdaroa avcL niaov avrov.
3 Throughout Enoch the ' soul ' ('pvxv) is the total personality, with a ' spirit '
(771'eJ/ja) belonging to it : see especially Enoch xvi 1, and J T S viii 445.
4 assigned] kicpieijaav G = Aram. "|nnnN or Heb. "JDrU : see Dan ix 24 LXX.
6 h-iro'rqaav G, also E. Charles emends to iirornBrjaav, and this no doubt gives the
required sense, but possibly the preceding words are a nominativus pendens, and
iiroi-qaav may be the 3rd pers. plur. taken impersonally, as so often in Aramaic, also
Lk xii 20 (ahovaiv). F

66 ON THE TEXT OF ENOCH
appointed time and season, when the great judgement shall be upon
them.' 5 1 noticed [the spirit] ' of a dead man petitioning, and its voice
even to heaven was going forth and petitioning, 6 and I asked Raphael,
the angel that was with me and said to him ' This spirit petitioning,
whose is it, that its voice so goes forth and petitions even unto
heaven ? ' 7 And he answered me, saying ' This spirit is what came
out from Abel, whom Cain his brother slew, and Abel is petitioning
about him, until his seed be destroyed from off the earth, and from
the seed of men his seed shall vanish '.
8 Then I asked about all the hollows, why they were separated one
from the other ? 9 And he answered me, saying ' These three were
made that the spirits of the dead should be separated, and this one 2
was separated for the spirits of the just, where the fountain of water
is shining. 10 And this one (of the three) 2 was created [for the
spirits] of the sinners when they die and are buried in the earth, and
no judgement has befallen them in their life. n Here their spirits are
separated for this great torment until the great day of the judgement,
of the scourgings, and of the torments of the accursed for ever ; the
requital 3 of the spirits shall bind them there for ever. 12 And this
one 2 was separated for the spirits of those that are petitioning, who
make disclosures about their destruction when they have been slain
in the days of the sinners. 13 And this 2 was created for the spirits of
the men who will not be pious nor ungodly sinners,4 and yet with the
lawless will be partakers ; but these spirits, because those who suffer
here are less punished than the others, will not be sentenced in the
day of judgement, nor will they be raised from thence.'
14 Then I blessed the Lord of Glory, and said ' Blessed be Thou,
O Lord of righteousness, who art Lord of eternity ! '

In v. 5 G has Te6iap.ai avdpdzitovo- vtKpovcr IvTvyxavovToa- (sic), E has
'I saw the spirits of men who were dead and their voice went
forth. . . .' Lods and Charles, seeing that in the next verse only one
petitioning spirit is referred to, suggest that the original Greek was
re0eap,ai ¦nvtvp.a avdpunrov veKpov evTvyavovroa.
It may be further remarked that according to Enoch lxxxi 6 the
whole book is supposed to be written in the year preceding Enoch's
1 For the text, see below.
z this one (ovroa)] ovraza GE, in all four places.
3 read r) avra-ndfioaia for 77^ avr.
' See note below for the text.

THE VALLEYS OF THE DEAD 67
translation. If we take the Masoretic chronology (as is suitable for
a Palestinian book) this year is 986 a.m. But Enoch's journeys and
visions fall before that time ; in fact, xxxii 6 assumes that the aged
Adam and Eve are still alive. This explains how it is that the hollow
gorges are all empty, except for the Trrevp-a of Abel : at the time when
Enoch saw them only Abel is dead of all the human race. Had the
LXX chronology been followed, Enoch must have seen the -nve.vp.ara. of
Adam and Seth, if not others. Thus a consideration of this chapter
makes it clear that Enoch is Palestinian.
V. 13a runs in G izat ovroza fKriady tout irvaipznaiv razv avOpaz-nozv oaoi ovic eaovrai offioi
aAA afzaprozXoi, otxoi aaefieur, Kat fzcra rttzv avofzazv eaovrat ^toxol.
Variants of E coovrai] ' were ' E oaioi ( = T'Dn)] * righteous ' E oao
aaepe ia] ' who are complete in transgression ' E avo/zav] ' transgressors ' E
It is evident that E only represents the same text as G, and failed
to make anv sense ol it. oo-ot acreftdo- reads like mere ' translation
Greek', as if the original translator was uncertain of the meaning
But the general sense ,of the whole passage, together with the clear
words ovk. . . . oaioL and (in 13b) ov Tip.(opr]d-qo-ovTaL iv ijp-epa rrja KpiVeuxr,
makes it evident that these 'spirits' are some intermediate class between
the pious and the wicked. I venture to suggest that the original to
which otjk — aAA' corresponds was not N7tf— k? but k?A fcO, i. e.
neither — nor. The Greek of Enoch according to this ought to have
run oo-oi otjk eaovrai ocrioi oibi apapruXol avefldo; the following Kat
having the Semitic sense of ' but '. apLaproiXol do-e/3eio- is a combination
assured for the Greek Enoch by i 9, but I do not know exactly what
Semitic formula is intended.
With regard to the general picture sketched in Enoch xxii the
most noticeable thing is the separate place assigned to the ' spirits '
of the slain, especially when unburied. This is altogether in accor
dance with ancient, as distinct from modem thought. With us
moderns the seemly disposal of dead bodies is mainly a matter of
sentiment and hygiene ; with the ancients, on the other hand, spilt
blood and corpses not properly interred with due rites remained both
a source of discomfort to the dead and an active pollution to the land
in which they lay. Of the righteous, speaking generally, it was
believed that ' their bodies are buried in peace ' -,1 but in Abel's case,
though he may have been ' righteous ', his spirit cannot rest with the
righteous because he has been slain. In the Christian Apocalypse of
John the ' souls ' of those slain for the word of God, though they are
kept underneath the heavenly Altar, yet cannot rest.
1 Cf. also Isaiah liii 9.
F2

68 ON THE TEXT OF ENOCH
4. Miscellaneous Coiyectures and Notes to Enoch.
Enoch x 4 Ariaov rbv 'A£dr)A ¦noalv koX \epo-iv, Ka) /3d\e avrbv ela- to
o-koVoo-. These words are so like Matt xxii 13, that it is not
unreasonable to suggest that they may have been the actual model
for the form of words in the Gospel. If this be granted, it almost
inevitably decides the text of Matt xxii 13 in favour of that attested
by NB and Westcott and Hort against that of D latt and v. Soden,
in which latter there is no mention of ' binding ' (see Evangelion
da-Mepharreshe ii 170).
Enoch x 7 that all the sons of men may not perish iv re pvo-rnpm o\a>
w iiraTagav ot iyprjyopoi. This is nonsense, though G and E agree
word for word. The Syncellus by substituting elnov for iirdragav
tries to make a sort of sense, but it is most improbable that if
' said ' was the original it should have been corrupted in any lan
guage into ' smitten '. I venture to suggest that the text of G is
correct, and that iv tQ p.wTr\pi<i> stands for T*Q in the Syriac sense
of 'after the manner of (e.g. Carm. Nis. xxix 22). The original
Aramaic of this sentence, then, will be
and the meaning of the whole passage will be
' that the sons of men may not perish after the manner of all those
whom the Watchers smote, when they taught their sons (the unlaw
ful arts) and all the earth was made a desert with the works of
Azael's teaching '.
The ' and ' before ebei£av, here translated ' when ', carries on the
construction as in Apoc i 1 koi io"r\p.avev, and Apoc vii 14 koi
enkvvav.
Enoch xii 4 to aylacrpa rrjoz ardcrecocr toC al&voo: Charles translates
this ' the holy eternal place ' in apposition to ' the high heaven '.
But o-Ta.ai.o- can hardly be a ' place ', except in the sense of ' an
appointed place ' for some one to stand in. The context says that
the Watchers left high heaven, to ayiao-pa rfjo- ardo-ecoo- roC alQvoir.
Put back into Aramaic all is clear, oramcr is D'*p, i. e. covenant,
as in the Targums to Gen ix 16 : the Watchers left the sanctuary
ofthe eternal covenant, and were defiled with women. The Watchers
were like the Bnai Kyamti in the early Syriac-speaking Church,
and they left their Kyamti, their ' status ', as Professor Wensinck
would translate it. But their * status ', as also always with the
Bnai Kyama, implied abstinence from marriage.

MISCELLANEOUS CONJECTURES 69
Enoch xiv 11, 12 And its roof (al o-rdyat, of the House of God in
heaven) was like the path of the stars and lightnings  and
ovpavbo- avrwv vbcop 12 koI -nvp <p\eyop.evov kvkAm t&v roiyjav. The
mention of ' water ' comes in very oddly here : possibly the Aramaic
corresponding to vbazp Kal may have been 7 {MD*1, i.e. 'like to',
pGT being plural to agree with pfTfitJ'. The passage would then
mean ' the ceiling thereof was like to flaming fire round about the
walls '.
Enoch xx (The List of the Great Angels). It would add a little to
the order and form of ' Enoch ' to treat this chapter as a sort of
Note or Heading, like Isaiah xxx 6a. It merely serves to introduce
the names and functions of the several Angels mentioned in the
course of Enoch's journeys.
Enoch xxvii 2 in the day of judgement .... here shall the ungodly
(01 d<re/3«ro-) bless the Lord of Glory. For ao-efieicr E reads ' merci
ful ' or 'gentle', — a mere guess. Dr Charles also does not accept
do-e/Jeio-, and emends it into evo-efieicr. But the following verse shews
that the ungodly are intended : ' in the days of their judgement they
shall bless Him, in mercy, as He has allotted to them ', i. e. the
ungodly will as a favour be allowed to bless God. Compare Enoch
lxiii, in which the mighty and the kings in their punishment say
' We have now learnt that we should glorify and bless the Lord of
kings '.
Possibly in the original ev eAe'et stood for something meaning
a cry for mercy.
Enoch xxix 2 1602; Kpt'o-ecoo- bevbpa. Charles, following Beer and
Praetorius, emends ' trees of judgement (N3T1) ' into ' trees of smell
(XI"V"VT)'. But this does not account for the abnormal order.
Read, therefore, {Hi ('there') instead of JH"I, so that the clause
runs ' I saw there trees blowing spices '.
Enoch Ixix 9, 10. It is perhaps worth notice that what is here
blamed is not writing in itself, but written contracts. What the
evil Penemue taught mankind was the Art of legal documents,
secured with curses, &c, or binding formulae, whereby a man's
mere word became of no account : cf. Matt v 37. Books in them
selves, especially the 'Books of Enoch' (cf. civ 12), are good and
a joy to the righteous.

70 ON THE TEXT OF ENOCH
Enoch cii 2, 3. Dr Charles regards the beginning of cii 3 as corrupt
and says ' I cannot emend '. But is anything more needed than to
transfer the first line of cii 3 to the preceding verse ? The passage
then runs
' 2 And all the luminaries shall be affrighted with great fear,
and all the earth shall be affrighted and tremble and be alarmed,
and all the [holy] angels shall execute their commands.
'3 And [men] shall seek to hide themselves from the Great
Glory, and the children of earth shall tremble and quake ; And
ye sinners shall be cursed for ever '.

5. On the Astronomical teaching of Enoch.
As remarked on p. 21 the Third Book of Enoch (lxxii-lxxxii) is
almost wholly astronomical. It teaches that the heavenly bodies
complete the year in 364 days (Ixxiv 12), according to Enoch, and
great stress is laid upon the perfection of this arrangement, whereby
the year is exactly 52 weeks long. This has seemed a difficulty, for
two reasons. On the one hand we have to exiplain why the author or
editor of our Enoch thought it appropriate to insert a scientific
treatise in his work. In chapters lxxii-lxxix, to quote Dr. Charles,
"the author's interest is scientific," and " through all these chapters
there is not a single ethical reference ' (Introd., p. 169). " But," he
goes on to say, " in Ixxx 2-8 the interest is ethical and nothing else,
and though it recognizes an order of nature, this order is more con
spicuous in its breach than in its observance." On the other hand it
is a little disconcerting to find a writer like the author of lxxii-lxxix,
who is so much interested in the Sun and Moon and the exact times
and manner of their rising and setting, who yet can assert that the
astronomical year is only 364 days long. And this as late as the
1st century b. c. !
It seems to me that a fresh view is possible and that our author
was really a better practical astronomer than his modern critics
imagine. I think he was quite aware that in the wicked days of the
Seleucids the solstices and midsummer only came round after 365 or
even 366 days.
This I take to be the meaning of chapter lxxx. In the days of
the sinners, says Enoch, many bad things will happen. Amongst
others ' the moon shall alter her orbit and not appear in her time,

THE ASTRONOMICAL SECTION 71
.... and many chiefs of the stars shall transgress the order, and
these shall alter their orbits and tasks and not appear at the seasons
prescribed to them ' (vv. 4, 5). It is true that Enoch lxxx 2 says that
' the years shall be shortened ', but what this means is clear from ver. 3,
where it says that ' the fruits of the earth shall be backward and will
not grow in their time'. This happens, of course, when the official
Kalendar Year is too short : what Enoch had observed was that
according to the reckoning of 364 days in the year, which he believed
to have been divinely ordained, the harvest would come too late. The
times were, literally, out of joint owing to the misconduct of men and
angels. This being the case, we see why Raguel takes vengeance
upon the luminaries (exSiKwV, both in xx 4 and xxiii 4). The Laws
of Heaven are indeed inflexible, but Sun and Moon have a certain
degree of freedom, which they, like men, have misused. This also was
the teaching of Bardaisan (De Fato, § 10 : see Early Eastern Chris
tianity, p. 168). The interest of lxxii-lxxviii is therefore not purely
scientific, but is ethical, like the rest of the whole work. It describes
the ideal arrangement of the heavenly bodies, but Enoch indicates
that they, like men, are transgressors and must come to judgement.

72

APPENDIX II.
ON THE MARTYRDOM OF ISAIAH.
The pseudo-historical introduction to the Visions in the Ascension
of Isaiah, commonly supposed to be a Jewish Legend, has been
treated in the body of this work as a Greek Christian romance,
especially composed so as to put the Visions in a historical setting.1
In itself this theory needs less defence than one which should regard
the fantastic tale as Jewish and of independent origin, and I shall
not attempt a formal demonstration. The object of this Note is
mainly explanatory, to point out one or two expressions in the story
which seem to me to spring from dependence upon the Greek Bible
rather than from Semitic lore.
The Ascension of Isaiah is preserved in a very ancient MS of the
original Greek (G), in a very ancient Latin translation (L), and in an
Ethiopic version (E). A different Latin version and a Slavonic version
of the latter part of the work do not call here for special mention.
It should be remembered that the text of the Books of Kings
(3 and 4 Regn), as they stand in the great uncials A and B, are
a late revision greatly influenced by Origen. Where extant, the Old
Latin gives an earlier type of text than either A or B or the so-called
' Lucian '.
Asc. Is. ii 5 ' Sadduc ' is the reading of G, changed by the editors into
' Zadok ', who remark " The spelling caAAoyk is not found in the
LXX, where the normal form is SoS&jk " (Amherst Papyri, p. 17).
But in Ezekiel the Greek Bible has SabbovK, and in the Historical
Books this form is usual in Lucian, including 4 Regn xv 33, where
the Latins have ' Saddoc ¦ ( Vind.) and ' Sadduc ' (Lucca). And in
the genealogy ot Ezra, both according to the Greek of 1 Ezra viii 2
and 2 Ezra vii 2, the name of Solomon's high Priest is 2d88o?jKoo-
or 2abbovK, not SaS^K. It looks very much as if in New Testament
times there was no difference between ' Zadokites ' and ' Sadducees ':
possibly p1*lX (Zadok, Saddle) is a later and artificial form.2
1 See above, p. 45 ff.
2 The oldest testimony to 'Zadok' is Josephus's 'S.a.Sazicoa. Josephus was a
Pharisee.

THE ASCENSION OF ISAIAH 73
Asc. Is. ii 9 icacoycp (also iacoyB, iv 1), the son of Isaiah. This
is, of course, the person called in Isai vii 3 Shear-jashub, but the
LXX speaks of him as 6 KaTaXei<pdi;o- 'lacrovfi. The Targum, on
the other hand, has ' a remainder that have not sinned and that
have repented from sin, thy disciple7 (sic). In picking out the
last two syllables of Shear-jashub as alone representing a personal
name, the Ascension thus goes with the Greek Bible against
Jewish lore.
Asc. Is. ii 12 the 400 prophets tijo- BdaA. In treating Baal as
feminine the Ascension follows a method which no doubt was
originally Jewish (vSJi = UK'S), but which now only survives in
Greek, e.g. Soph i 4; 4 Regn i 2 A, 6 AB, 16 AB ; xxi 3. In
a great many places in our present text of the Greek Bible ' Baal '
has become masculine again (as of course it ought to be), probably
through the influence of Origen ; but that this is not original is
suggested by S. Paul's quotation of 3 Regn xix 18 which has
tji BdaA, while A and B have re BdaA.
Asc. Is. ii 16 'OxofetW /3ao-lXea Top.6ppazv. By the context, this is
Ahaziah, king of Samaria. " Probably fllttfe? was misread H'l&l?,"
says Dr Charles ! But the genitive of ' Gomorrha ' in Greek is
Top.6ppa-o- (e.g. Asc. iii 10). More probably therefore roMoppcoN
is a miswriting of coMopcoN, the alternative Greek name for
Samaria (Isai vii 9, also 3 Regn xvi 24 Lucian, and 2 Ezra xiv 2).
Asc. Is. iii 2 oprj Mrfiuzv. Thither was Israel carried captive, according
to 4 Regn xvii 6, xviii 11, in the Greek : the Masoretic text has
' cities ', not ' mountains '.
Asc. Is. iii 5 t&v -rraibozv 'EfeKiou. The Greek ofthe Historical Books
tends to distinguish (in the plural) between the 8o5Aoi who are
bondmen or else worshippers of a God, and the ¦n-aiSeo- who are
officials of a king, both classes being represented by the same
Hebrew. The italbeo- of King Hezekiah, for instance, are mentioned
in 4 Regn xix 5, so that here also the Ascension of Isaiah conforms
to the phraseology of the Greek Bible.
Asc. Is. iii 6. Isaiah is accused of prophesying that Jerusalem and
Judah shall go into captivity iv yaXedypa (sic) koI iv -nibaio- (iii 6).
This word yaXedypa is from the nature of the case not of very
common occurrence, as it seems to mean a sort of trap. But it
comes in Ezek xix 9, where Jehoiachin being taken captive to
Babylon is compared to a lion brought home alive in a trap or cage.
Here again the choice of words in the Ascension is derived from the
Greek Bible.

74 ON THE MARTYRDOM OF ISAIAH
Asc. Is. iii 15 rou dyyeXov ttJo- 'ExKAjjo-tacr rijor iv ovpavu>. Here the
Ethiopic is said to have " the angel of the Christian Church which
is in the heavens ''. It may be worth while to point out that this
gross contravention of the rule not prematurely to name names
in prophecy is only the result of awkward translation. The regular
rendering of exKAijcrta in Ethiopic (e.g. Acts viii 1) is "House
of Christians " ; here the Ethiopic has " the angel of the House-of-
Christians ", but this simply corresponds word for word to rou
dyyeXov ttjo 'EKKXrjo-lao:
Asc. Is. ii 4 ' Beliar whose name is Matanbuchus \ v 3 'in MZchem-
bechus V So the Ethiopic : most unfortunately neither the Greek
nor the Latin is extant at either place. In the Ascension of Isaiah
Beliar is "the angel of lawlessness, the ruler of this world", the
great opponent of the Christ and the true doctrine about the
Christ. But he does not appear in a separate visible form. He
sits upon Manasse (i 9),2 in the heart of Manasse and his princes
(iii 11, v 1). The story of the actual Martyrdom runs thus:
Beliar was wrath with Isaiah and sat in the heart of Manasse, 2 and
while Isaiah was being sawn asunder Balchira (the false prophet)
stood accusing him, 3 and Balchira by [or, in] Mechembechus stood
(pi.) mocking, 4and Beliar said to Isaiah 'Say, the ways of Balchira
are good . . . 8 and I will turn the heart of Manasse ' 
16 These things did Beliar to Isaiah by the hand of Balchira and
by the hand of Manasse.3
It is clear from this that Beliar is speaking out of the mouth
of Balchira. But just before he was 'in the heart of Manasse'.
Beliar therefore goes from one to the other. Is not this metem
psychosis ? It seems to me that ba-mechembechus in v 3 stands for
Sid pLeTep^v^do-ecoo- and that in ii 4 Matanbuchus stands for p.erep-
¦tyvyoa, or some such form.
1 See above, p. 46, note. " i. e. M. is ' devil-ridden ', as in the Syriac phrase.
3 v 1-15, compressed.

75

APPENDIX III.
ON SOME OTHER KINDS OF APOCALYPSES.
In the three Schweich Lectures it was impossible to pass in review
all Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. In the first place I have said
very little directly about the New Testament, because I considered
that the matter in itself is familiar, and its discussion, to be profitable,
would need extended treatment. Mk xiii, or 1 Cor xv, alone would
require a whole Lecture. But besides the New Testament there are
other well-known works which I have passed over. This has not been
from considerations of space, but because I venture to think they
belong to an essentially different order of thought and represent a
different movement from that which produced the Jewish Apocalypses
and gave birth to the Christian Church. Two of these call for
special mention.
The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (called also 2 Enoch), preserved
only in Slavonic and edited by Dr Charles in 1896, is a work com
posed in Greek, apparently in Egypt. It teaches that there are seven
heavens, that the year is 365^ days long (i. e. the Julian reckoning),
and that this world will last 7000 years. There is nothing about
a Messiah, Christian or Jewish. It is evident that, even if we allow
for a millennial reign on earth at the end of this state of things,
the author does not expect it to begin for some 800 years. In other
words, the practical outlook of the Slavonic Enoch upon the world is
utterly different from that of the Jewish Apocalypses considered in
this volume and from that of the New Testament. In these the
End of all things is at hand, in the Slavonic Enoch the world is com
paratively stable and the End is far off".
When we ask what the date of the Slavonic Enoch is, or what kind
of person compiled it, no very certain answer can be given. Dr
Charles (Introd. § 5) has collected together a number of parallels
with early Christian literature, comprising e.g. the passages which
assume the existence of seven heavens, or the derivation of the name
Adam from the initial letters of the four quarters of the world
'AivutoA?', Avatcr, " ' Apuroa, Meo-?jp./3pia. But in no instance is the

76 OTHER KINDS OF APOCALYPSES
literary connexion assured. It appears to me that this is one of the
many cases in which we ought to take account of the choice of
pseudonym. The only passage which has been held to prove a date
before 70 a. d. is lix 2, in which the offering of clean beasts as a sacri
fice is mentioned, and * sacrifices could only be offered in Jerusalem '
(Charles, on 2 Enoch li 4). But the whole book is supposed to be
written before the Flood, long before the promulgation ofthe Mosaic
Law. Enoch's ' sons ' are all mankind, and the book actually closes
with an account of Methusalem's sacrifice to the Lord on the occasion
of his father Enoch's translation (lxviii 5, 6). I do not know that
a Christian romance of Enoch need differ very much from a Jewish
romance of Enoch. And further, the whole question of the channels
by which rare and curious literature found their way into Slavonic
requires fresh and independent investigation.1
The Apocalypses of Elias and Sophonias and the other works
edited by Steindorff in T. u. U. (N.F.) ii 3a in 1899 are most curious
documents. The MSS from which they are edited are very ancient
(4th or 5th cent.), though unfortunately they are mere fragments,
like most early Coptic MSS. For our present purpose, the special
interest of the Apocalypse of Elias is that it is generally supposed to
be Jewish, or at least that its subject-matter is derived directly from
Jewish legends. I have come to doubt this, and to think that the
Jewish colouring of parts of the book is to be explained by the same
rule as I have used to explain the universalism of Enoch, viz. that if
a work professes to be the work of a Jewish Prophet it was not con
sidered appropriate that it should be too explicitly Christian,
especially in the naming of names. It may7 be noticed here that the
story of Susanna is mentioned (p. 151), and the name Shadrach appears
in the form Searak 2 (ibid.). Further, the true Messiah will be distin
guished by the sign ofthe Cross (p. 161), while Antichrist, for all his
miraculous powers, will be unable to raise the dead or have power over
life (\j/vxv)- I cannot help thinking that S. Cyril of Jerusalem knew
of this book, or something very like it, and that it forms the back
ground of the picture of Antichrist at Jerusalem, given by Cyril in
Catechesis xv 14, 15, notwithstanding his express profession of relying
on no ' apocryphal ' document.
1 I wonder that in the new edition of 2 Enoch (Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha ii
p. 437) no notice is taken of M. R. James's discovery that in xv 1 ' every bird ' should
be ' every cock ', and that what the cock says at cockcrow is given in xv 2" = see
Apocrypha Anecdota II, p. lxv.
2 i. e. ceApAK for ce£.pAK (or ce&pax).

OTHER KINDS OF APOCALYPSES 77
Further investigation may possibly reveal a genuine Jewish element
in these Egyptian works, but it seems to me that they owe a great
deal more to native ideas of appropriate punishment meted out to
individual evildoers as they arrive after death in Hell. Coptic writers
freely borrow their vocabulary from Greek, but they always use the
vernacular for Amente, where all the souls of the dead are collected
from the Flood to the present day (p. 152).

INDEX

Genesis page
ix 16 (Targ.) 68
xv IS 12 n.
xl 23 (Targ.) 65
Leviticus xvi 10 28
xxii 14 65
Deuteronomy iii 9 28
2 Samuel xx 18 80
1 13) Kings
xvi 24, xix 18 73
2 (4) Kings
i 2, 6, 16 73
xv 33 72
xvii 6, xviii 11 73
xix 5 73
Ezra (see belovf)
Joe Author of 19
Psalms xix (xviii) 13, 14 (Aq) 65
Canticles iv8 28
Isaiah vii 3, 9 (Lxx) 73
xxx 6a 69
Ezekiel xix 9 (Lxx) 73
xxix 15 7 n.
Daniel Book of
6,11,23,33,42,45,46
iv!7 7
vii 9 23
vii 19 41
ix 24 (Lxx) 65 n.
xi 30 19 n.
S. Matthew
v37 69
xii 7 i. , , 8
xii 26-30 22
xii 43-45 21 f.
xxii 13 68
xxv 31-46 23-25
S. Mark
ix20 22 n.
xiii 40, 44, 49
S. Luke
xi 18-23 ' 22
xi 24-28 21 f.
xii 20 65 n.

Romans

PAGE

xii

73

1 Corinthians

xv 24 ff.

43 n.

xv 46

25

xv 51

43 n.

2 Corinthians

vi 15

45 n.

2 Timothy

iii 16

10

1 Peter

iii 19
10
Jude
9
39
13-15
10, 17
Revelation
il
68
i 9-11
6
vi 9-11
48, 67
vi 15
37 n.
vii 9-17
48
vii 14
68
xiv 13
48
xvi 7
48 n.
1 Ezra ( = First Esdras)
viii 2 72
2 Ezra ( = Ezra-Nehemiah)
vii 2 72
xiv 2 73
4 Ezra ( = Second Esdras)
Author of 19, 41 f.
vii 26-44 42 n., 43 n.
vii 50 32
vii 64 f., 116 43
ix 22 43
xif. 41
1 Maccabees v23, 45 ff. 35
2 Maccabees vi, vii 16, 39 n.
Baruch (Apocalypse of)
Not composite 41
Ixxii 4-6 25
lxxvii 6, 16 42
lxxxv 3 8, 15, 42
Enoch page
(Book of)
Author and tendency
10 r., 17 ff., 28 ff.
Contents 20
MSS and Versions : —
Cairo (Gizeh) MS
26 f., 58 f., 62f.,68
Ethiopic Version
26,54,55n.,62f.,08
Syncellus Quotations
26, 53 f., 68
Vatican Fragment 26
Originally in Aramaic
or Hebrew 27, 68, 69
Uses Heb. text (not Lxx) 67
(In the following list * dis
tinguishes passages ex
plained or emended.)
i-v 56-61
*i 2 64
*i 5 64
*i 7 63
i 9 17, 67
*ii 2 65
*ii 3-V 1 63
*v6 63 f.
*v8 65
vi 1-6 53 ff.
*vi6 54 f.
vii 1 (Sync.) 27
vii 2 (Sync.) 55
viii 4 27
x 4 28, 68
*x7 68
x 17 27
"xii 14 68
"xiii 7, 9 28 f.
"xiv 11, 12 6i>
xv, xvi 22
xv 11 55
xvi 1 27, 65
*xviii 13 ff., xxi 6 31 n.
xx 69
xxii 1-14 65 f.
*xxiil3 <i0n., 67
*xxiii 4 71
xxvi f. 28
"xxvii 2 69
*xxix 2 69
xxxii 6 67
xxxviii 5 37 n .
xlvi 23
lxii-lxiiilO 28f.,49
?lxii 6 87n.,49
80

INDEX

PAGE
lxix9, 10 69
lxxii Ixxxii 21, 70 f.
''lxx v 12, lxxx 2 70
lxxxi 6 66
lxxxiii 1, lxxxv 2 18 n.
xciv civ 62
e4 64
*cii 2, 3 70
civ 1, 2, 6 32
civ 12 69
cv 2, cvi-cviii 55 n

Isaiah

(Ascension of)

Tendency of

45 ff.
i9
74
ii 4
74
ii 5
72
ii 9
73
ii 12
78
ii 16
73
iii 2
78
iii 5
78
iii 6
73
iii 13 ff.
47
iii 15
74
iv2
46
vl
47,74
v3
74
7 14
45
xi 2-22
46
Jubilees
ivl5
54
vii 22
55
xxvii 16
57 n.
Moses
(Assumption of)
19,
37-40
SOLOMON
(Psalms of)
xvii
37
XII Pathtatichs
Eeu vi 10 34
Jos xix Iff. 36 n.
Tendency of 15, 34 f., 47
Abpl Betli-Ma'acha SO
Abolh. Pirkl 8n., 9
a. d. 70, Effects of
4, 8ff., 13 40 ff., 76
Aliiha 9, 12 n., 21
Amente 77
Antiochus Epipbanes
6, 33, 36, 42, 50
Apamea 30
Aquila 65
Asmoneans.see Maccabees
Azael (Azazel) 20, 28, 68
PAGE
j Baal (fern.) 73
Bacher, W. 8 n.
Bardaisan 71
Barnabas, Ep. of 10
Beliar 45f.,74
Bereshith rabba 44 12 n.
Bevan, Edwyn 7, 30 f.
Box, G. H. 42
Canon, Jewish 9. 11, 15
Charles, R. H. 26f.,34,
35 n., 37n.,54, 63,
65 f., 69 f., 73, 75
Civilization, 4, 6, 20, 32, 49
Cosmos, the 7, 21, 31 f.
Cyril (of Jerus.) 76
Dan, Maters of 28
Dante 2, 44 f.
Demons 22 f., 31
Didache 44
Doublets (in Enoch) 63
Eliou(d) 55
Enoch (Slavonic) 75 f.
Ephraim Syrus
Carm. Nis. xxix 22 68
Esdras, see 4 Ezra
Ev. da-Mezpharreshe 68
Galilee 30, 35
Geoponica xi 1 63
Gospels, Synoptic 21 ff., 40
Hadrian 8, 42
Hadudo, Beth 28
Hermon 28 f., 54
Herod 11, 37 f.
Hort 62, 68
Hyrcanus, John 30, 35 f.
Incarnation, the 47
Inconsistencies 48 f.
James, M. R. 39 n.
76 n.
Jamnia 8
n., 11
Jannaeus
11
Jared
53 ff.
Jerome, Be V. IU.
17
Johanan b. Zakkai
8n., 10, 12,
15, 42
Jordan, Sources of
28 f.
Josephus 11, 35
72 n.
Joshua b. Hanania
8n.
Journ. ofTheol. Studies
viii 445
65 n.
x 135
35
xiii 374
19
PAGE
Judaism and Hellen
ism 4,6, 8, 25,30 f.. 50
Judgement, Last 2f., 13,
23 ff., 31 f., 43,49, 71
Kingdom of God
7, 12 f., 15, 22,
Kipling 20 n.
Kyama, Bnai 68
Maccabees 16, 35, 37 f.
Martyrs, Maccabean 6f., 36. 42
Mead, G. R. S. 18 n,
Messinh 37, 43
see also Son of Man
Metempsychosis 46 n., 74
Naphilim 27, 55
Nero redivivus 46
Peter, Apocalypse of 44
Philo " 5
Pistis Sophia 354 18 n.
Posidonius 80 ff.
Pseudonymity 5f., 19,76
Qoran liv 1
39 n.
Rabbinic Religion 8, 14, 30
Reitzenstein 30 n.
Salathiel 41
Simon tbe Just 8n.
Son of Man 20, 23 f.
Sophonias, Ap. of 76
Sources, lost,
reconstruction of 41,62
Spirit 22, 65 n.
Stars 3, 30 f., 70 f.
Stoics 3, 30 f.,
Syncellus, see Enoch
Syncretism 3, 80
Taxo (Eleazar) 39n..40
Tertullian 10, 18, 39
Vergil, Gear, ii 490 32
Visions 40 f.
Wellhausen 9
Wensinck, A. J. 68
Year, length of 70 f., 75
Zadok, Sadduk 72
Date I«eu««k

3 9002