The book of Enoch : translated from Professor Dillmann's Ethiopic ...

General Introduction. 15
tion of the thought that the Messiah is to be a man in the
clouds (Daniel), and of the doctrine that he was to proceed
from the community. En. xc. $j, 38.
Drummond, The Jewish Messiah, 1877, pp. 17-73. Drummond
gives a concise and able review of the work of former
critics on Enoch. He rightly approves and further enforces
Hofmann's interpretation of the seventy shepherds as angels.
He agrees with the limits assigned by Tideman to the oldest
book in Enoch ;
but concludes, against Hilgenfeld and Tide-
man, that the Similitudes could not entirely be the work of a
Christian ; for if they were such, there would undoubtedly
have been some reference to the crucified and risen Christ such
as we find in Test. xii. Patriarch. Levi, 4.
The difficulties of
the case are met, he believes, by supposing that a Christian
Apocalypse has been worked into the tissue of an earlier
Jewish production, and that all the Messiah passages are due
to the former. His chief arguments are : (i) the title ' son of
a woman 3 could not have been applied by a pre-Christian Jew
to a supernatural Messiah ; (ii) a consistent text is possible by
an omission of the Messiah passages, a text also which answers
to the title placed at the beginning of each Similitude ; (iii)
the closing ch. lxxi confirms this view where in the descrip-
tion of a Theophany there is no mention of the Messiah and
the title f Son of Man' is applied to Enoch; (iv) the Book
of Jubilees though using Enoch extensively does not cite the
Messiah passages.
This theory is as untenable as that of Hilgenfeld and
Tideman. As for (i) the title in question is not found in the
oldest MS.; (ii) in itself will have no weight if we bear in
mind the want of logical sequence and the frequent re-
dundancy characteristic of Semitic writings generally and of
Jewish apocalypses in particular. Moreover in no instance
that I am aware of does any superscription in Enoch give
an exact account of the Chs. it introduces, (iii) This argument
not only fails to testify against the genuineness of the
Messiah passages but also furnishes one of the strongest