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

GABRIELE BOCCACCINI 57
eschatological gifts are related, the Son of Man strengthens the Enochic
stance against any form of inaugurated eschatology, while his
preexistence confirms God’s foresight and control over this world without
denying the freedom of angels and humans. The superhuman nature
of the Son of Man enables him to defeat the angelic forces responsible for
the origin and the spread of evil, a task that no human messiah (either
priestly or kingly) could ever accomplish. The superhuman nature of the
Son of Man also enables him to perform the judgment, a task that makes
fully consistent the Enochic concern that the merciful and just God cannot
be directly involved in any manifestation of evil, from its origin and
spread to its final destruction.
Similitudes is the mature product of an anti-Qumranic Enochic stream
that, drawing on the same ideological and literary background as the
Dead Sea Scrolls, has now reached ideological and literary autonomy.
While the redactional history of the Epistle of Enoch and the Testaments of the
Twelve Patriarchs is still closely interwoven with the sectarian literature of
Qumran, Similitudes is non-Qumranic more than anti-Qumranic. A gulf
now separates the two groups.
CONCLUSION
QUMRAN, A MARGINAL SCHISMATIC COMMUNITY
A single unbroken chain of related documents unites the earliest Enochic
literature to the sectarian literature of Qumran. The “Qumran chain”
unfolds, link by link, from the book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 6–36), the
Aramaic Levi (1Q21; 4Q213-214), and the Astronomical Book (4th–3rd cent.
B.C.E.; 1 Enoch 73–82); to Dream Visions (at the time of the Maccabean
Revolt; 1 Enoch 83–90); to Jubilees and the Temple Scroll (immediately afterward;
11Q19); to the proto-Epistle of Enoch (1 En. 91:1–94:5; 104:7–105:2)
and the Halakic Letter (mid-second century B.C.E.; 4QMMT [4Q394–399]);
and to the Damascus Document and the sectarian literature (from the second
half of the second century B.C.E. to the first century C.E.). By sharing
the same generative idea of the superhuman origin of evil, this chain of
documents gives evidence of the ideological continuity between the
ancient Enochic tradition and the community of Qumran.
By the time of the composition of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll, the
Qumran chain took in another chain of documents, that of Zadokite literature.
With the fall of the house of Zadok, many Enochians apparently