The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

JAMES C. VANDERKAM 483
is, he considers 4QEnGiants a (4Q203) to belong to the same manuscript.
55 It is a pity that the transition from one booklet to another is
found on none of the surviving scraps, with the result that there is a
lower degree of certainty about whether more than one composition
appeared in the same copy. 4QEn c , with the comparative evidence from
other copies that preserve portions of the BW, allowed him to draw up a
codicological table for 4QEn c in which he assigned fragments to columns
within the scroll (the data permit this only for the BW). On his view, fourteen
columns, from the first preserved words in the third copy (in 1.9) to
the last ones (in 36.4), would have been required for the text of the BW.
It is interesting that frag. n, a piece with parts of two columns, preserves
in its second column some words from 36.4, the last verse of the BW, but
not from the end of the verse. It seems that the bottom margin is visible
on the photograph (pl. 13), so that the last lines of the verse would have
figured on the next column—Milik’s fourteenth column. “If the original
text of the Book of Dreams and the Epistle of Enoch did not much
exceed the length of the text translated into Greek and into Ethiopic,” he
concludes, “the approximate length of the scroll of 4QEn c was probably
4 2 m.” 56 It seems that this total does not include the Book of Giants, which
he thinks came immediately after the BW on the manuscript. 57 He
believes the third copy was made from an older one, dating from the latesecond
century and that therefore at that time an Enochic tetralogy was
already in existence. 58 The AB circulated separately in that this long work
was copied on a separate scroll; how long it was has become apparent
only with publication of the Cave 4 manuscripts which show that the
beginning, only summarized in the Ethiopic, was much longer, and the
end as well was fuller in the Aramaic than in the Ethiopic. In addition,
the middle parts also appear to have been more developed. 59
I conclude that about the year 100 B.C.E. there existed an Enochic
Pentateuch in two volumes, the first containing the Astronomical Book,
and the second consisting of four other pseudepigraphical works. The compiler
of this Pentateuch was quite conscious of its analogy with the Mosaic
Pentateuch. The book of Deuteronomy, a sort of Testament of Moses (imitated
in some degree by the author of the Epistle of Enoch), ends with a
historical section describing the death of the Lawgiver and mentioning his
inspired successor, Joshua (Deut 34:9). In the same manner the compiler of
55. Ibid., 178.
56. Ibid., 182. His “codicological table” is on the same page.
57. See ibid., 183.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 7–8.