the-book-of-enoch-r-h-charles - Fallen Angels

216 TJie Book of Enoch [Sect. IV
and all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air feared
him and made petition to him all the time. 38. And I saw
till all their generations were transformed, and they all became
white bulls ;
and the first among them became a lamb, and that
lamb became a great animal and had great black horns on
a chief as .Tudaa. It was very different,
however, in the following century,
when the fondest enthusiast could no
longer look to the Asmoneans, and the
helpless degradation of this dynasty
forced religious thinkers to give their
hopes and aspirations a different direc-
tion. Of these some returned to a
fresh study of the O.T. and revived
the hopes of the Messianic Son of David
as in the Pss. of Solomon (70-40 B. c.)
others fdlovved the bold and original
thinker who conceived the Messiah as
the supernatural Son of Man, who,
possessing divine attributes, should give
to every man his due and vindicate
the entire earth for the possession of the
righteous : so in the Pai'ables (94-
70 B. c). 38. All the members
of the kingdom are transformed : the
white bull (i, e. the Messiah) into a
gieat animal, and the sheep, beasts,
and birds into white bulls or oxen.
Thus mankind is restored to the
primitive righteousness of Eden, i. e.
Adam was symbolized by a white bull.
A lamb. The text is corrupt and
cannot be restored without the help of
Test. Jos. 19'"'. According to the
Ethiopia it runs ' the first became
among them (a-^^, aikn :
' among
them became' hcdlox lUjb) a word and
that word became a great animal '. The
term ' word ' (nagar = fiij/ia not X6yos)
here is manifestly corrupt. Dillmann
suggested that nagar (='word') is
here a rendering oi firjim, but that pijii
originally stood in the Greek version as
a transliteration of DN") = ' buflFalo '.
I adopted this suggestion in my first
edition, but cannot any longer accept it.
:
Tlie rio-ht reconstruction of the text
was made by Goldschniidt in 1892, but
I did not recognize its claims till I
had edited the Testaments XII Patri-
archs. Goldschmidt {Has Buck Henoch,
p. 91) suggested that nagar here ultimately
goes back to n ?p, which was a
corruption of TVtO = ' lamb ', Thus we
recover the text ' and the iirst became
among them a lamb, and the lamb
became a great animal and had great
black horns on its head '. This recon-
struction is supported by Test. Jos.
19'-". In 19=> * the three harts (= the
three tribes of Levi, Judah, and
Benjamin) become three lambs, and
next these three with the remaining
nine harts become twelve sheep. Again,
in another vision beginning with 19°,
the twelve tribes are symbolized by
twelve bulls, and in the third (?) tribe
(i. e. Levi) there arose a bull calf (pro-
bably Judas the Maccabee) who helped
the twelve bulls (19''). Next in the
midst of the horns of the tribe of Levi
the bull calf (probably John Hyrcanus)
became a lamb, and all the beasts and
the reptiles rushed against him and the
lamb overcame and destroyed them
(19*). Here we have a very close
parallel to the symbolism and trans-
formations in our text. ' The lamb '
(= a.nv6s) or rather the horned lamb is
clearly the head of the nation in the
Testaments, and, what is more, the
Messianic head. The same idea is, I
think, clearly to be inferred irom our
text, on which the Testaments in
this passage appear to be dependent.
Great black horns (o). /3 'great and
black horns '. I cannot understand the