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

484 THE APOCRYPHA AND PSEUDEPIGRAPHA
the Enochic Pentateuch, perhaps an erudite scribe of the ascriptorium living
about the year 100 B.C.E., added chapters 106–7, which resume the
beginning of the Book of Noah, the pseudepigraphical sequel to Enoch’s
antediluvian wisdom. 60
It hardly needs to be said that much of this reconstruction is tenuous
and in need of more documentation, as the critics have insisted. An important
point is whether 4QEnGiants a is part of the same manuscript as
4QEn c . The hands look very similar, but this may entail only that the same
scribe wrote them, not that they were part of the same literary collection.
It is quite likely that the Book of Parables was not copied and read at
Qumran, but there is no documentation for Milik’s claim that the Book of
Giants was part of an Enochic tetralogy and that it followed the BW in it.
It seems safer to say that there were five Enochic compositions that
were known and copied at Qumran. Smaller booklets may well have
been copied on one scroll, but that they were in some sense considered a
Pentateuch seems to go beyond the evidence. It also seems implausible to
think that an editor added chaps. 106–7 to make this supposed Enochic
Pentateuch resemble the Mosaic Pentateuch. The books of Enoch are
characterized by their almost total lack of interest in the Mosaic law. Why
then would someone wish to mold the Enochic collection into one that
looked like Moses’ Pentateuch? And do 1 Enoch 106–7 really remind one
in any but the remotest sense of Deuteronomy 34?
Milik wrote about his book that its principal purpose was to “present,
in transcription (with restorations), and with translation and notes, all the
fragments identified among the manuscripts of Cave 4 as forming parts
of different Books of Enoch.” 61 In light of his claim for completeness it is surprising
that he did not in fact present all the identified fragments. The
most obvious exception is one of the most interesting copies—4QEnastr a —
which is supposed to be the oldest manuscript of Enoch. He admits in
the section introductory to the copies of the AB that he offers them “in a
preliminary form, less complete than the edition of 4QEn a (= 4Q201) to
4QEn g (= 4Q203)” and that the fragment and line numbers are provisional.
62 Emanuel Tov’s list of the Qumran manuscripts and the
photographs on which they can be found noted that there were three
photographs for 4Q208 and 4Q209: the final photos are 43.210 and
43.211, while an earlier one is 41.399. None of these three was included
60. Ibid., 183–84.
61. Ibid., 3.
62. Ibid., 273.