THE BOOK OF GENESIS TELLS US PRECIOUS LITTLE ABOUT THE FIGURE of Enoch. In the course of presenting a genealogical list of those who lived before the Flood, it notes his Sethian ancestry via Jared (5:19) and his fathering of Methusaleh (5:21). We find only hints of his special status: the other men in the genealogy merely live, propagate, and die, but Genesis states twice that Enoch “walked with God” (5:22, 24). And rather than tell his death in straightforward terms, it recounts that “he was no more, for God took him” (5:24).

The brevity of the biblical comments stands in stark contrast with the wealth of traditions about Enoch in Judaism and Christianity. As early as the Second Temple period (536 bce to 70 ce), Enoch attracts intensive interest within Judaism. He becomes a scribe, sage, and even scientist. As visionary, he is taken up to heaven and travels with angels to the ends of earth. As witness and prophet, he exhorts against sin, predicts Israel's history, and even intercedes for wicked angels. Moreover, books begin to circulate under his name, purporting to record the visions and teachings that the antediluvian patriarch passed on to his progeny and bequeathed to the righteous of future generations.

The present study tells the story of one of the earliest and most influential of these books, namely, the Book of the Watchers.

THE COMPOSITE NATURE AND COMPLEX REDACTION-HISTORY OF THE Book of the Watchers point to its origins, not in the vision of a single author, but rather in the hands of a series of authors, redactors, and tradents. The previous chapter surveyed some of the scribal concerns that dominate this apocalypse: we noted its elevation of Enoch as a “scribe of righteousness” (1 En. 12:3–4; 15:1) and its self-consciousness about the power of writing, as well as its “scientific,” exegetical, and epistemological interests. Most scholars infer from these features that the apocalypse emerged from a scribal milieu. Important questions, however, remain unanswered: should we imagine these scribes as a closed group of apocalypticists, visionaries, or “Enochians,” who can be readily distinguished from other Jews? Or should we see their distinctive interests and concerns as part of a broader continuum of “normative” ideologies in the third century bce, reflecting ongoing discussions about knowledge, purity, and piety within a single scribal discourse? And, most importantly, what was their relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and to the tradents responsible for the continued transmission of the texts that would eventually form the Tanakh?

We lack the evidence to reconstruct Judaism in the third century bce with any degree of certainty. Consequently, scholarly answers to these questions have often been shaped by the reception-history of the Book of the Watchers.

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER EXPLORED THREE FACETS OF THE PROTO-orthodox Christian relationship with Judaism: continuities with pre-Rabbinic Judaism, parallels with the emergent Rabbinic movement, and efforts to delineate an identity distinct from “the Jews.” This, of course, forms only half of the story of the construction of a Christian collective identity in the second and third centuries. The other half – the Christian encounter with Greco-Roman culture – had no less of an impact on the interpretation of the Enochic myth of angelic descent and the continued transmission of the Book of the Watchers in Christian circles. It was due, in large part, to the challenge of Greco-Roman culture that proto-orthodox Christians made their most radical break with earlier Jewish interpretations of this apocalypse, namely, their appeal to the fallen angels and their teachings to explain the corruption of humankind.

In this chapter, we will begin with the earliest extant Christian example of this motif, as found in the writings of the second-century apologist Justin Martyr. Just as the Book of the Watchers uses the teachings of the Watchers to warn its readers against overzealous speculation into cosmological secrets (see Ch. 1), so Justin adapts the motif of illicit angelic instruction to transform the angelic descent myth into a pointed critique of his pagan contemporaries. Insofar as his account of angelic descent includes both the teachings of the Watchers and their sexual sins, Justin follows the Book of the Watchers more closely than earlier Jews and Christians.

This study has suggested that the Book of the Watchers originated in a setting of priestly scribalism. In the centuries following its composition and redaction, the apocalypse had a major impact on early Jewish and early Christian approaches to antediluvian history. Although early exegetes generally avoided its distinctive view of the fallen angels as corrupting teachers of humankind, the Enochic myth of angelic descent shaped the interpretation of Gen 6:1–4 among a range of pre-Rabbinic Jews, including members of the Jesus Movement. In the first centuries of the Common Era, Enochic texts continued to be popular among proto-orthodox Christians, and Enochic traditions were developed in new directions by Christian apologists and heresiologists. By contrast, their Rabbinic contemporaries abandoned the Enochic pseudepigrapha, replacing the traditional angelic interpretation of Gen 6:1–4 with new euhemeristic approaches and asserting that Enoch was a normal man who died a normal death. These efforts formed part of a broader attempt at self-definition over against non-Rabbinic Jews (including but not limited to Christ-believing Jews), and they proved largely successful in excluding the Book of the Watchers and the Enochic myth of angelic descent from Rabbinic Judaism during the Talmudic period (ca. 200–600 ce).

Beginning in the third and fourth centuries, Christians in the Roman Empire began to adopt a similar stance. Concurrent with the formation of the biblical canon of Western Christian orthodoxy, church leaders followed their Rabbinic counterparts in rejecting both the Enochic books and the angelic reading of Gen 6:1–4, often with explicit reference to the precedent set by “the Jews.”

WITH OUR FINAL CHAPTER, WE RETURN TO CONSIDER THE JEWISH Nachleben of the Book of the Watchers. Here, we find ourselves on less solid ground. For the preceding inquiry into the Christian transmission of this apocalypse in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, our evidence included several primary witnesses to the text itself as well as secondary witnesses representing different geographical locales and varieties of Christianity. By contrast, we have much less data from which to reconstruct its reception-history in late antique and early medieval Judaism, and what data we do possess prove more difficult to interpret.

Apart from the Aramaic fragments from Qumran, the latest of which dates from the first century bce, no Jewish-transmitted copies of our apocalypse, or even excerpts, survive. Moreover, our extant Jewish literature from Late Antiquity contains no explicit statements about the “book(s) of Enoch” akin to the Christian evidence surveyed in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. In later medieval Jewish literature, we find a few references to Enoch's writings, consistent with the resurgence of interest in the figure of Enoch in post-Talmudic times. Even these, however, are opaque. The Zohar, for instance, speaks of a “Book of Enoch” on several occasions, but it is a book “preserved in heaven, which no eye can see” (I 37b).

In addition, questions of dating are complicated by the fact that few Jewish texts from this time are “authored” in the simple sense of the term.

BEFORE EXPLORING THE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRANSFORMAtions of the Enochic myth of angelic descent, we must first ask how the fallen angels and their teachings function within the Book of the Watchers itself. Our inquiry into the reception-history of this apocalypse necessitates a focus on the redacted form of the text, the form in which (most) Jews and Christians would encounter it. In light of its complex literary history, however, the contents of the apocalypse cannot be addressed apart from some discussion of the strands from which it has been woven.

As noted above, the Book of the Watchers appears to integrate at least five originally independent units into the larger narrative framework of an apocalypse. Some of these units are themselves composite, constructed from threads of even more ancient texts and/or traditions. In the apocalypse's present form, the combination and arrangement of these parts have resulted in the integration of traditions about two events with no connection in the book of Genesis: Enoch walking with God and being taken by Him (Gen 5:21–24) and the “sons of God” choosing wives from the “daughters of men” (Gen 6:1–4).

The first unit, 1 En. 1–5, establishes Enoch's status as a visionary with unique access to heavenly knowledge and records his exhortations about the value of cosmological phenomena as models for ethical behavior. The second, 1 En. 6–11, wholly concerns the fallen angels.

ABOVE, WE CONSIDERED TEXTS FROM THE FIRST AND EARLY SECOND century ce as part of our evidence for pre-Rabbinic Judaism, without distinguishing between authors who did and did not believe that Jesus was the messiah. This reflects the character of our evidence. References to the fallen angels in Second Temple Judaism and the NT literature follow the same basic pattern: early Enochic traditions about the Watchers' sexual sins and their punishment were widespread, but even texts that were clearly dependent on the Book of the Watchers consistently omitted reference to their transmission of corrupting teachings to humankind. The only exceptions that we found were two texts closely aligned with the Book of the Watchers: Jubilees and the Similitudes. By contrast, the relevant Christian sources all followed the majority of Jewish sources in their exegesis of Gen 6:1–4 and their use of this apocalypse.

This finding fits well with what we know about the Jewish origins of the Jesus Movement and early Christianity. In the century after the death of Jesus, this messianic movement became gradually displaced from its original Galilean and Jerusalemite contexts, but the beliefs and practices of the earliest Christians (whether ethnic Jews or Gentile converts) continued to be shaped by the diverse forms of Judaism that flourished both in Israel and in the Diaspora. In the NT and early Patristic literature, we can discern the first traces of a long process by which some Christians forged systems of belief and practice that distinguished them first from other Jewish groups and progressively from “Judaism” more broadly.

This book is a revision of my dissertation, which was written in the Department of Religion at Princeton University under the supervision of Martha Himmelfarb, Peter Schäfer, and John G. Gager. I cannot imagine a more stimulating intellectual environment in which to study, nor kinder people with whom to work. I offer them my warmest thanks for their support and inspiration, academic and otherwise. The dissertation and book also benefited much from feedback from, and conversations with, Adam H. Becker, Ra'anan Boustan, Peter Brown, Patricia Crone, Fritz Graf, Elaine Pagels, John C. Reeves, and Burt Visotzky. For their comments and advice, I am grateful to Kirsti Copeland, David Frankfurter, Paula Fredriksen, Bob Kraft, Eileen Schuller, Michael E. Stone, and Peter Widdicombe. Funding for the dissertation on which this book is based was provided by the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Earlier versions of several chapters were presented at the Center's Religion and Culture workshop as well as at the conference In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Imagined Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions and in the Early Jewish–Christian Relations and Pseudepigrapha sections of the Society of Biblical Literature's annual meetings. Extended versions of some of the arguments in Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 7 have been published in different forms in earlier articles: “From Asael and Šemiḥazah to Uzzah, Azzah, and Azael: 3 Enoch 5 (§§7–8) and the Jewish Reception-History of 1 Enoch” (Jewish Studies Quarterly 8 [2001]: 1–32); “The Textual Identity, Literary History, and Social Setting of 1 Enoch: Reflections on George Nickelsburg's Commentary on 1 Enoch 1–36; 81–108.”

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER CAUTIONED AGAINST THE ASSUMPTION THAT the authors and audience of the Book of the Watchers should be sought only on the margins of mainstream Judaism. There, we considered the reinterpretation of Enochic myth of angelic descent in three works, each of which exhibits a close connection with the Book of the Watchers; ben Sira reflects the same milieu of Judaean priestly scribalism, while the Book of Dreams and Epistle of Enoch self-consciously operate within the Enochic literary tradition. In these cases, it is not difficult to explain how these authors gained access to our text, nor why they might choose to use and rework it. Towards mapping the early Jewish reception-history of this book, the present chapter will chart the scope of this apocalypse's influence among other pre-Rabbinic Jews and measures the scale of its impact in different groups and locales.

Here too, questions about the status of the Book of the Watchers are important to investigate; for, as we shall see, the classical Rabbinic literature contains no reference to Enochic texts and few traces of Enochic traditions. As with so much of the Jewish literature composed during the Second Temple period, the Book of the Watchers would be preserved primarily in Christian circles. There are a range of possible explanations for this situation. At one extreme is the possibility that early Sages rejected this book despite its popularity in Second Temple Judaism; at the other is the possibility that some Christians adopted a book that most Jews never valued to begin with.

IF WE CONCLUDED OUR INQUIRY HERE, WE MIGHT IMAGINE THAT THE Nachleben of the Book of the Watchers provides a parade example for the “Parting of the Ways” between Judaism and Christianity. In the pre-Rabbinic period, the Book of the Watchers and the Enochic myth of angelic descent influenced many Jews, informing the exegesis of Gen 6:1–4 and shaping the religious landscape from which the Jesus Movement emerged. It is only after the Bar Kokhba Revolt that conflicting approaches arose among learned Jews and Christians. These reflect the parallel efforts at self-definition by the Rabbinic movement and proto-orthodox Christianity, and they led these groups in opposite directions. Early Sages seem to have abandoned the Enochic literature and mounted an offensive to invalidate its connections with the interpretation of Genesis. At the same time, proto-orthodox Christians embraced the very elements of the apocalyptic heritage of Second Temple Judaism that these Jews rejected.

Furthermore, proto-orthodox Christians redeployed early Enochic traditions for distinctively Christian aims. Consistent with the general consensus among pre-Rabbinic Jews, they read Gen 5:21–24 as signaling Enoch's escape from death. They, however, used this exegesis to claim Enoch as a pre-Christian Christian whose righteousness in God's eyes demonstrates to the possibility of salvation apart from Torah-observance. Likewise, they followed the precedents in Second Temple Judaism for interpreting Gen 6:1–4 through the traditions about the fallen angels in the Book of the Watchers, but they simultaneously developed new approaches to the Enochic myth of angelic descent, which addressed the ambivalent relationship between an increasingly gentile church and its pagan past.