The Use of Scripture In 1 Enoch 17–19

In an important monograph entitled Asking for a Meaning, Lars Hartman demonstrated that 1 Enoch 1–5 had “grow[n] out of a soil consisting of an interpreted Old Testament,”1 and he went on to show how the meaning of the text was bound up with recognition of it as interpretation of the biblical material on which it drew. What Lars Hartman showed in the case of 1 Enoch 1–5 is of course more generally true of the Book of Enoch, namely that in many respects it represents a form of interpretation, and my purpose in what follows is to see what light is cast on the meaning of another passage in the book, chapters 17–19, by its use of scripture. In chapters 17–19, as elsewhere throughout 1 Enoch, there are no explicit quotations from the Hebrew Bible, but it is not hard to recognise numerous allusions to passages in the Hebrew Bible and numerous parallel passages, and the commentaries are full of such references; the diffi culty is to know whether we have to do with a conscious allusion, unconscious use of parallel phraseology, or merely an interesting parallel.2 This problem is linked to the fact that it is hard to determine the extent to which we have exact quotation from the biblical text because for the most part we have to do only with a translation into Greek of the Aramaic original3 or (for some three of the fi ve sections of which the book was ultimately composed) with a daughter translation of the Greek, the Ethiopic version.4 Notwithstanding these