the-bible-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls

EPHRAIM ISAAC 373
and linked with the notion that Metatron is translated Enoch; as the
youngest of the angel-princes, he is known among them as “Youth”
(4:10). 46
(2) One of the reasons that J. T. Milik has advanced a very late date for 3
Enoch is the evidence of the incantation bowls which date from the seventh
or eighth century, or even from the ninth century C.E., where
Metatron is identified with Enoch (p. 128). But here Enoch is still a
purely human figure and there is no hint of the claim of 3 Enoch that he
was elevated to the rank of archangel.
(3) The name Metatron is to be derived from the Latin metator. 47 But this
loanword could hardly have entered Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic before
the fifth or sixth century C.E., for it was then that Latin borrowings,
especially of administrative and military terms, entered these languages en
bloc. 48
(4) 3 Enoch was influenced by the Arabic Hermetic tradition of the eighth to
tenth centuries C.E. The Arabic Hermeticists identified Hermes with
Enoch; the incantation bowls identify Hermes with Metatron. The author
or redactor of 3 Enoch, receiving both these traditions, deduced that
Enoch was the same as Metatron. 49
(5) “Cabbalistic theories, including the figure of Metatron-Enoch in his role
as lieutenant of God, do not appear in Western Europe until the twelfth
century (C.E.).” 50
Milik’s arguments do not stand up to close scrutiny. The second argument,
Milik’s dating of the incantation bowls, is open to question. Many
of the bowls cannot be dated with certainty, but those from Nippur
(among which are some of our most informative texts on Metatron) were
found in stratified deposits and have been dated archaeologically to the
seventh century C.E. at the very latest. Moreover, the fact that Enoch is not
identified with Metatron on the bowls proves little. It is unlikely that the
circles from which 3 Enoch emanated were the same as those that produced
the bowls. The failure of the magicians to equate Enoch and
Metatron does not prove that the merkabah mystics had not already made
this connection, either in Babylonia or in Palestine.
As for the third argument, Milik is rather overconfident about the derivation
of the angelic name Metatron from the Latin metator (see below).
His assertion that metator can hardly have entered Judeo-Aramaic or
Hebrew before the fifth or sixth century C.E. does not accord with the
46. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 66.
47. Ibid., 131.
48. Ibid., 133–34.
49. Ibid., 134.
50. Ibid.