Sunday, December 5, 2021

When voodoo grows up

Yesterday evening I mooted, impressionistically, a question. I didn't answer it, and didn't quite pose it well (I've rewritten it this morning) but I might be stumbling upon a larger question, which I can illustrate here.

As of maybe a quarter-century ago, we owned enough Dead Sea Scrolls and enough knowledge about them that Gabriele Boccaccini felt safe to sketch out a mental corpus: "Enochian Judaism". Genesis has a genealogic bent and among the heroes in its line of pre-Abrahamic "patriarchs" was one Enoch. וַיִּתְהַלֵּ֨ךְ חֲנ֜וֹךְ אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֗ים; he walked with the elohim. Then (no ha-!) some elohim took him.

Around that, accumulated the "Enochian" literature. The earliest known exemplars of Enochism are the Book of Watchers and the Astronomical Visions, followed by the Dream Visions which are clearly from the Maccabean civil strife. Almost none of this is Biblical save the language and the proper-names. Indeed, the Dream Visions goes so far that Boccaccini argued it outright rejected Torah. I don't know exactly where this debate stands today; I suspect he's been accused of Speculation and/or Overstating The Case, but I don't think the case has been refuted, nor even decisively rebutted. Michael Wise's The First Messiah didn't cite voodoo but it did cite the Cargo Cult, which Mark Durie cites now. DUGAN 4/9/23: Dream Visions 90 and Jubilees 4 are not in Qumran and may have approached Barnabas, and us, differently from how they reached the Maccabeans - if at all.

If Boccaccini was right, on the Watchers anyway: "Enochian Judaism" was no Judaism. It was a voodoo. Its antecedents should be sought among Babylonian astrologers and Persian apocalypticists, and all their demonologists. 1 Enoch happened to be written in Hebrew, but anybody can write in Hebrew. (Okay okay - I can't, but I'm not as smart as Saint Jerome was.)

As to what happened next: the Enochians decided, for whatever reason, they would appeal to Judaism. The Dream Visions are all about recent Jewish events. Next on deck was Jubilees alias the Lesser Genesis although, this isn't nearly as easy to date as is the DV [UPDATE 4/9/23: Sigh]. This flat rewrites Genesis and early Exodus to fit the Enoch / DV worldview.

More recently, another literature around Isaac/Levi has been identified, including a testament? of Qahat/Amram and our own dear Tobit. Boccaccini writing in the later 1990s didn't have the benefit of the last few decades, but could tell that Aramaic Levi used the Enochian calendar and, in turn, was cited by Jubilees. At the same time, Boccaccini did not so suggest DV-contemporary Daniel. Daniel borrowed Enochian tropes whilst firmly endorsing the Torah and several Psalms and Prophets, I think including Ezekiel. Why not Aramaic Levi as well? ANSWER 12/9: Because Aramaic Levi had a different theory of sacrifice.

To sum up, the Watchers and the Astronomy were still in the voodoo stage [UPDATE 2021 and PseudoLevi too]. This voodoo became popular enough with the Jews - many fresh home from Babylon, or still living there - that Jews of the Torah needed to react to it. In fact, this may have been an impetus to edit the Torah as we have it; for an orthodox prequel to the "Deuteronomic History" which probably already existed, alongside orthodox Prophets like Hosea, Isaiah 1-39, and "Greek Jeremiah". The hardline of Judaism rejected Enochism entire. Some literate Jews made peace with parts of the lore, looking here at Daniel mainly, but I think also Aramaic Levi; anyway, none of these secondary texts made it to full canon, although Daniel was a candidate for awhile, as reflected in Christianity.

Christianity, then, is no voodoo itself; but it does accept more of that Enochian hoodoo that some Jew do too well. One more likely reason why Christianity kept getting nagged from the fringes about not being Jewish enough.

As we come to sura 7 in Islam, this smells like Arab Jubilees.

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