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Re: orion relevance of Enoch?



Donald.Goodell@ascend.com wrote:
> 
> The words in parentheses are missing from 4Q201 and 4Q204 in the Aramaic:
> which suggests the words in parentheses were added as a "patch" ---an
> observation made even more convincing by the poor logic of the final result
> : a more logical fit for this "pious marginalia" would be as follows:
> 
> "Behold, he shall arrive with Millions of his Holy Ones to execute
> Judgement upon all. He shall destroy the Wicked Ones and censure all flesh
> on account of the sinful and wicked deeds committed against him. (But to
> the Righteous, he shall grant Peace; he shall preserve the Elect and Mercy
> shall be shewn unto them; They shall all [belong to God] and shall prosper
> and be Blessed and the Light of God shall shine upon them)"
> 
> The poor placement of these parenthetical sentences reveals itself as an
> ("patch") addition to the flow of the Aramaic Qumran tradition.

It seems to me that the kind of analysis displayed here is more
appropriate for an article than an email message, where a more complex
purpose can be pursued (does the Orion web site premit posting lengthier
material to which our attention can be directed?).  A number of issues
emerge for me that would require a more nuanced discussion.  For
example, does the absence of a passage from the Aramaic *necessarily*
imply that it is an addition in the Greek?  Is the technique a
characteristic of the Aramaic or the Greek, and if it appears at more
than one layer of the text, does that force a different evaluation of
the material?  Are there alternative explanations?  With regard to the
last question, I'm becoming somewhat resistant to literary-critical
theories that depend upon the scholar's notion of what is coherent or
appropriate.  One example would be the thories about sources in 1 Enoch
6-11 that are dependent in part on the differences in the lists of
angels in chapters 6 and 8.  In the Aramaic version, the list in chapter
8 seems to me to have names drawn from chapter 6, suggesting that the
difference in the lists that has driven previous analysis is the
consequence of corruption in the process of translation and
transmission.

I'm not trying to can the discussion, but rather to suggest that more
analysis is needed, and that when it is done, there may be a better way
of presenting it than trying to fit it into email messages.

David Suter
Saint Martin's College

-- 
David W. Suter, Ph.D.
Professor of Religious Studies
Saint Martin's College, Lacey, WA 98503
dsuter@stmartin.edu
For private reply, e-mail to "David W. Suter" <dsuter@stmartin.edu>
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