Elena Dugan's thesis left Princeton's embargo this morning. The work is good and I don't need to change much in my anticipatory post.
Dugan questions that nagar, or any of the rest of Ethiopic Enoch, really is Aramaic in origin. It might have been logos read as qal but interpreted as rhema so translated nagar. Doesn't matter much.
Dugan's main failing is in her prolixity (which at least made her 380 pages skimmable in a day). For one example she does, in fact, look at the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah. I'd thought this would have been a waste of her time, given that it certainly postdates Barnabas, which is all she needs to stick a terminus upon the Apocalypse. Now it has become a waste of her readers' time. Sigh.
Of interest to philology is how we might better-interpret certain Ethiopic words in light of parallels in, particularly, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
Most interesting is how she takes Jubilees away, as a reader of the Dream Visions in any form. Jubilees 4 is another of those Ethiopic-only thingies. It turns out that the Dead Sea has a parallel to J4 which differs in (not) mentioning the Visions. Dugan is quick to say that she's not saying that this scrap is the original chapter, since swapped out. But she's also not saying she's denying it. We just don't know, is her point. So J4 is sus; it cannot be used as evidence.
The whole mess is a problem for dating Jubilees at all. Fortunately, we own hints elsewhere that it was probably composed after the Maccabean Revolt when life was lookin' up for the high priesthood and its legal department, so... 150s BC.
No comments:
Post a Comment