Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

will perish and die. And . . . (9) . . . (10) who . . . allowed him to co[me] . . . (11) They will be . . .
[from] the earth as far as He[aven] . . . Lord of Lords . . . between . . . (12) on the earth among all
Mesh] . . . in Heaven. And . .. (13) then there will not . . . and gre[at] Knowledge . . . (14) and the
strong] will be bound . . .
19. Pseudo-Jubilees (4Q227)
The preserved portions of these two fragments appear to contain information about Enoch similar to
the Book of Jubilees 4:17-24. A good deal of the interest centering around Enoch, as we have noted,
was connected with his assumption alive into Heaven and the mysterious allusion in Genesis to
'walking with God'. This allowed him to be seen as a mystery figure conversant with 1. Heavenly
Knowledge - in particular 'Knowledge' of an esoteric kind, and 2. scientific knowledge of the kind
alluded to in this text - knowledge of the heavenly spheres and their courses. Since he had been there,
he could actually measure them.
Enoch also becomes one of the precursors of mystical Heavenly journeying or Heavenly Ascents.
What is interesting about this text is the reference to 'the Righteous' - the Zaddikim - seemingly twice,
just in the extant fragments (1. 1 and 2.6). This Heavenly journeying moves into early Christian
tradition, as it does into both Kabbalah and Islam. Not only is Enoch the Righteous a well-known
cognomen as are Noah the Righteous and James the Righteous- but 'the Righteous' would even seem
to be a name for the members of the Community represented by the literature at Qumran, a synonym
and linguistic variation of the Bnai-Zadok ('the sons of Zadok') as we have noted above.
The use of such terminology here in relation to the knowledge of the heavenly bodies and their
courses, as well as of the calendar, would appear to carry something of this connotation in Line 2.6,
i.e. the Community leadership has not and does not err in these matters. The use, too, of darcheizevam
('the paths of their hosts') in 2. 5 , meaning the fixed trajectories of the heavenly bodies is
interesting too, as a heavenly parallel to some of the more common, earthly adumbrations of this
terminology for the Community, such as the Darchei-Zedek, Darchei-Emet, Darchei-{c}Or ('the Ways
of Righteousness', 'Truth', 'Light'), etc.., as opposed to 'the Ways of Darkness', 'Evil', 'Lying',
'uncleanness', 'abomination', 'fornication' and the like. By implication, these too are fixed, at least in
their positive sense, by the Law.