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