Inside the Dead Sea Scrolls: Enoch, Jubilees, and Second Temple Judaism w/ Dr. James VanderKam

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today our guest is Dr. James VanderKam. Dr. VanderKam, thank you for your time today.

Dr. James VanderKam: You're welcome.

Johnny Ova: Let's jump right in. Dr. VanderKam, I want you to take us back to 1947. What did those shepherds find in that cave, and why did it shake the world of biblical scholarship?

Dr. James VanderKam: As nearly as we can tell from what those shepherds reported and what people have found out, these Bedouin shepherds, in an area not too far from Bethlehem, were tending their flocks and came across a cave. There's the famous story of a shepherd boy throwing a rock into the cave and hearing it hit something that broke. After a couple of days they went back in, checked, and found the first scrolls there. This was just one cave, of course. They took out seven scrolls from that cave at the beginning, and this was the first of the many discoveries of Dead Sea Scrolls. News of it came out late in 1947, when those texts came into the hands of experts in Jerusalem, who made the information known in late 1947 and early 1948. That set off all the publicity about these famous discoveries.

Johnny Ova: Among the scrolls, you said there were seven in that one cave, and I know they expanded and found more. But 11 copies of 1 Enoch showed up. That's more than most books of the Hebrew Bible. What does this tell us? Why was Enoch so prevalent there?

Dr. James VanderKam: What was found in Cave 4, the fourth of the caves, found in 1952, were, as you said, 11 copies of Enoch. What you have to be aware of is that the book we know as 1 Enoch is divided into several booklets. Among the fragmentary remains of scrolls found in Cave 4, seven contain material from the Book of the Watchers, which is the first part of 1 Enoch, the Book of Dreams, another section, and the Epistle of Enoch. Four other copies are of the Astronomical Book of Enoch. So four copies of the Astronomical Book, and seven copies that had some or several of these other booklets.

Johnny Ova: For listeners who don't know, what is actually in Enoch? What does it describe, and when was it written? I know there's a lot of debate on that.

Dr. James VanderKam: As I mentioned, there are at least five booklets in what we call 1 Enoch. They were all written at different times by different authors and eventually brought together into this 108-chapter book. The first part is probably the best known. After an introduction about God's judgment at the end of time, there is the story about angels who were looking down from heaven on the earth, saw women and were quite attracted to them. So they decided to come down from heaven. They married women and had children with them, and these children turned out to be giants. The angels are said to have taught the women various secrets they should not have taught them, about herbs and ways of producing makeup and weapons and all sorts of things. The giants, the children of these marriages, are said to have committed all sorts of violent deeds on the earth, and eventually this is what led God to send the flood.

Dr. James VanderKam: The angels who had come down to earth asked Enoch to intercede with God on their behalf. God rejected the proposal and said, look, you angels should be interceding for people, not people interceding for angels. Then Enoch is taken on a tour of the universe by some good angels. A second part of the book of Enoch is the Book of Parables, or Similitudes. This one has been of interest to New Testament scholars because it talks about a special figure, one of whose titles is the Son of Man, and naturally that's used for Jesus in the Gospels. It's really quite interesting to compare what this part of Enoch says with what's in the New Testament. Then there's the Astronomical Book of Enoch, beginning in chapter 72. I think most people wouldn't be interested in it. It tells you about the regular motions of the sun, the moon and the stars. Then there's the Book of Dreams, two dream visions Enoch had. These are apocalyptic visions. The better known one is called the Animal Apocalypse, in which human beings are symbolized as animals. Enoch sees this vision, which tells Israel's history up to the final judgment and beyond. And finally, the Letter of Enoch at the end of the book is mostly about teaching the ways of righteousness.

Johnny Ova: Great overview. We'll go into some of those in more depth. I know you also wrote the definitive commentary on the Book of Jubilees, another book found at Qumran. How does Jubilees connect to the Enoch literature?

Dr. James VanderKam: I think Jubilees was written a little later than some of the Enoch booklets. Jubilees is really a retelling of the material in the book of Genesis and the first half of Exodus. Anyone who knows those books would read Jubilees and find much of it very familiar. It takes the history from creation all the way to Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the law from the Lord, and according to Jubilees, Moses is the one receiving the revelation of the book. When it gets to the time of Enoch before the flood, Jubilees has a much longer section about Enoch than Genesis does. Genesis gives just a few verses to Enoch, chapter 5, verses 18 to 24. Enoch is described somewhat unusually there. He didn't live nearly as long as the other patriarchs before the flood, like Methuselah, who lived more than 900 years. Enoch lives only 365 years. It says twice in the Enoch section that he walked with, and our translations usually say, God. This was often understood in antiquity to mean he spent time with the angels. And at the end, God took him. It does not say he died. So naturally people were interested in this enigmatic, unusual figure, and stories developed around him.

Dr. James VanderKam: Some of these we find in the book of Jubilees, which has Enoch spending a lot of time with angels who reveal all sorts of things to him, about astronomy, but also about the future history of the world, especially the history of Israel. So it's an apocalyptic kind of vision of what is going to happen. Then, according to Jubilees, when God takes him, he places him in the Garden of Eden, where Enoch continues to record human history. So it's a book that takes up Enoch. And when it gets to the flood section, it develops this story about the angels who sinned, who lusted after women and had gigantic children, and it tells that story in its own way.

Johnny Ova: Enoch is fascinating, which is why I had to have you on. It's just a controversial book. It seems the Qumran community quoted 1 Enoch the same way they quoted Scripture. Were they treating it as Scripture?

Dr. James VanderKam: I think they regarded it as an authority. As I'm sure you know, we don't have any evidence that in this pre-Christian time there was an agreed list of books Jewish people would call the Bible. There probably were differences of opinion about what made up the most authoritative literature among Jewish people. Some people obviously thought very highly of these Enoch compositions, and the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls were one such Jewish group. As you mentioned, 11 copies of a work is an unusually high number among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So it was obviously a matter of some interest, and we have reason to think it was studied. One way the Astronomical Book of Enoch was very important to the Dead Sea Scrolls community is its calendar. Those chapters defend a 364-day year. Jubilees does this as well, incidentally, and apparently took it from the book of Enoch. That is the calendar we find used in quite a number of texts at Qumran. There is a whole series of calendar texts, again really boring for most people, but they show how these people correlated the movements of the sun and the moon and dated festivals. So that is one way the Enoch literature was important. The story about the sinful angels and the final judgment were also important topics.

Johnny Ova: We spoke before about the Watchers, the angels descending, taking human wives, producing giants and teaching forbidden knowledge. How central was this narrative to Second Temple Judaism? Was it a core narrative of their belief?

Dr. James VanderKam: It's hard to say whether it was a core narrative. About the best we can do is say we have it attested in several texts. We have the Enoch literature. We have a work found at Qumran, the Genesis Apocryphon, which also deals with this material. And Jubilees is another. So at least among this group of Jewish people, whom many of us think were Essenes, this was a key topic they elaborated and drew important consequences from. How widely that was the case, we really don't know. Did other segments of Jewish society, Pharisees, Sadducees, feel the same way about it? I doubt they did. But at least we know of one group that put a high premium on it.

Johnny Ova: I'm so curious, because we know the people in the first century, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, Second Temple Judaism, knew about Enoch. I guess we can never find out how many really believed this is exactly what happened, versus seeing it as a known but highly debated book. So my question would be: Jesus and the apostles lived in a world saturated with this thought. Does it change how we read the New Testament at all?

Dr. James VanderKam: I think we have to say that some New Testament writers were influenced by this Enoch material, and they're quite explicit about it. One reason is that early Christianity certainly had an apocalyptic side. There's talk about final judgment in the New Testament, and the Enoch literature fits firmly into that. A good part of the Enoch literature is apocalyptic in character. Christianity was tapping into this tradition in Judaism, with the important teaching that God really does take sin seriously and is going to do something about it at the end of time. So this kind of approach that we find in some of the Enoch literature would have resonated with early Christians, and obviously some of them read it.

Johnny Ova: I guess it goes against some of the thinking in mainstream evangelical Christianity today, that the Bible always was, always is, always will be. I think that's a big misconception, as if the apostles were walking around with their King James Version in their hands. It seems that depending on the sect or group of Judaism, and eventually Christianity, you associated with, you viewed these things very differently.

Dr. James VanderKam: Right.

Johnny Ova: So when Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, as we mentioned before, do you think he's pulling from a familiar place in the literature of Enoch?

Dr. James VanderKam: He could be, and some people have argued this. As I mentioned, it's primarily the Parables or Similitudes of Enoch, chapters 37 to 71 of 1 Enoch, that are interesting here. It depends partly on when you date those chapters, and there's quite a debate about that. I think the most likely time it was written is late in the first century BC, but others have argued it's later than that. There are at least really interesting parallels between the Son of Man as pictured in Enoch and the way the term Son of Man is used in some passages in the Gospels, the Son of Man returning on the clouds of heaven at the time of the end.

Dr. James VanderKam: I think it's probably a fairly common view that Son of Man talks about Jesus' more earthly, human side. But that really doesn't seem to be what the term meant in first-century Judaism, if we look at this part of Enoch, because the character called Son of Man in those chapters is clearly a heavenly figure, supernatural. He's also called Messiah and Chosen One. He is the one coming at the end to judge, to set things straight, to deliver the righteous and punish the wicked. So there are really interesting similarities. It's quite possible that writers like the writer of the Gospel of Matthew had access to this part of the Enoch literature and applied it to Jesus in their account. I can't prove it, but it could be.

Johnny Ova: Right. We weren't there. We weren't eyewitnesses. Now, Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly and treats it as prophetic. I think Christians are very surprised by how many non-canonical books are quoted inside the Scriptures themselves, and Jude specifically quotes Enoch. What do we do with something like that?

Dr. James VanderKam: You could get bent out of shape about it, but I think you look at it historically, it's more interesting than that, and more understandable. Jude is a good example of what fascinated some early Christians about the Enoch stories. He really emphasizes two things. In that famous quote you're referring to, in Jude 15, there's a citation from 1 Enoch 1:9 about God coming at the end and judging the wicked for their evil deeds. The writer of Jude felt this was worth quoting, and he says Enoch prophesied, Enoch the seventh from Adam. He's telling you exactly who he has in mind: Enoch the seventh from Adam, not any other Enoch, and that he prophesied. Then he quotes these words from 1 Enoch 1:9 about the final judgment, about God taking people's sins seriously. So he tells his audience, that's what God is going to do, and he's done it in the past, as Jude shows by citing some examples. Earlier, in verse 6, Jude also refers to the story of the angels being imprisoned, God punishing the angels for what they had done, as an example from earlier times of God judging the wicked. So he certainly knows that story, in addition to quoting 1 Enoch 1:9. I think those two themes, final judgment and the punishment of the angels, continue in Christian literature for a while.

Johnny Ova: Even early church fathers like Tertullian and Irenaeus cited Enoch as authoritative. Do you think a lot of the early church fathers engaged with the book that way?

Dr. James VanderKam: Yes. I once did a survey of the early Christian texts that refer to Enoch, and I'm not the only one who has done this, but it's really quite surprising. Over a fairly large geographical area, and for a couple of centuries, you can cite fairly prominent early Christians who refer to it. You mentioned Tertullian, and he's a great example. I'm really intrigued by Tertullian, who's writing around the year 200. He obviously knows the Enoch literature and appeals to it. We know Tertullian as not exactly an early feminist, and one of the reasons he refers to the Book of Enoch is that story about the angels who sinned with women and taught them illicit things, among them how to make cosmetics and beautify themselves. Tertullian cites this against the practice of women at the time spending so much time getting themselves beautified. So you can cite Enoch as an authority.

Dr. James VanderKam: But what intrigues me most about Tertullian is that he comes up with an argument that Enoch really was telling all this from before the flood, that the book of Enoch is authentic, authoritative literature. People could say, that's nonsense, this book would not have survived the flood. And Tertullian said, yes, it would. He says that in those early times the book would be passed on from generation to generation, so after Enoch it would have been given to Noah, Noah would have taken it with him on the ark, and so it survived the flood. That's how Enoch's writing from before the flood continues to exist. It's authentic. He is really about the only one I've come across who makes that kind of argument, to defend that this is really the man from before the flood who wrote this.

Johnny Ova: Because it's a very small percentage of people who believe Enoch actually wrote this book. It's pretty well agreed that Enoch is not the author, and there are many authors, like you said.

Dr. James VanderKam: That's right. As nearly as we can tell, the earliest Enoch literature comes from maybe the late 200s or early 100s BC. So it certainly doesn't go back before the flood.

Johnny Ova: This book was everywhere in ancient Judaism and early Christianity, like we've been discussing, and then it just seems to have vanished. What happened?

Dr. James VanderKam: I don't know about vanished. We do know the earliest Enoch texts were written in Aramaic. Possibly the Book of Parables was in Hebrew, but we don't know. We don't have any Semitic copy of that book. We do know the Enoch literature was translated into Greek, and we have fragmentary copies of Greek translations, of the Book of the Watchers or the Book of Dreams and so on. So we have a fairly extensive amount of evidence for this Greek translation, and it has been published and translated. Copies were found in Egypt, so it apparently interested people there. We also know that later it was passed down to Christian chronographers in Byzantine times, who wrote up some of this material as well. At some point it was translated into the classical language of Ethiopia, Ge'ez, in the early Christian days there. That is the only form in which we have the Book of Enoch completely preserved, this Ethiopic translation from the Greek of the Aramaic originals. So we can say the Book of Enoch was not of great interest after a time in Western or Eastern Christianity, but in Ethiopia it became part of the Bible, part of the Old Testament, and affected the formulation of doctrine. People wrote commentaries on it over the centuries.

Johnny Ova: How accurate is the Ethiopian copy compared to what you found at Qumran?

Dr. James VanderKam: In general it's quite accurate. Certainly not exactly the same, depending on which part of the book you're talking about. In the Book of the Watchers, it's a decently close reflection of what we find in the Aramaic fragments. In the astronomical chapters it's a little different. It seems the Ethiopic translation gives us an abbreviation of what was once a much longer text, probably for understandable reasons. Not that many people care to have long, long astronomical explanations, and certainly not to have them read in church.

Johnny Ova: When I said vanished, I meant that it seemed to be part of their everyday faith experience, and especially here in the US, Enoch is almost a taboo book. It's not in the canon, it's not in the Scripture we read. Did we lose anything by Enoch not being canonical? What would have changed if it had been included?

Dr. James VanderKam: Let's look first at what you mentioned about it disappearing. It's true that after the first couple of centuries we do not find many positive uses of the Enoch literature in early Christian texts. Already by the third century or so, some people are raising questions about the core story in the Enoch literature, the angels who descended from heaven and married women. A different interpretation won the day. That story is based on Genesis 6:1 to 4, the sons of God who married the daughters of men. It's a very strange passage that still puzzles commentators today, and it's placed right before the flood account, which naturally raises curiosity. What is it telling us about the flood? One interpretation was that the sons of God were the descendants of Seth, the good people, and the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain, the bad people. Under this interpretation, that section of Genesis is talking about righteous people mixing with unrighteous people, and these marriages producing all sorts of problems, which were then followed by the flood. That interpretation became the more widely accepted one in early Christianity.

Dr. James VanderKam: I think Saint Augustine is an important figure in this regard. He thought it was more likely that the passage in Genesis was about the Sethites and the Cainites. He pointed out that righteous people are sometimes called angels in the Bible, and he gave a couple of places where this happens. He also said that in Genesis 6:3, where God says, my spirit will not remain on man forever, for his days will be 120 years, the term man refers to the giants mentioned elsewhere, or to the sons of God mentioned earlier. Sometimes they're called men, sometimes they're called angels, so obviously the Enoch story isn't correct. He also said the passage in Genesis 6:4 presupposes that there were giants before the sons of God and the daughters of men married. And another of his arguments was, come on, angels don't do this sort of thing. Angels don't have bodies. They're not physical in that sense. So that didn't make sense to him either.

Dr. James VanderKam: Now to your other question: suppose these Enoch texts had been accepted in the Christian church and become part of the Bible. What did we lose? I think what we would have lost would be some important perspective on interpreting the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament. We lose that by not considering this material, and we would have lost it had we not known about the Enoch literature. We lose the fact that other Jewish people were using a title like Son of Man in this exalted sense, as in the New Testament. Other Jewish people were talking about how sinful humanity was, and against the argument that God doesn't do anything about it anyway, so why not have a good time, they insisted there was going to be a judgment. That taps into this kind of theology in early Judaism. Obviously we can live without it, but I think it would enrich our reading of the New Testament. People who don't know about this might find it quite interesting to see that Jewish people were entertaining these kinds of thoughts and trying to explain what they saw in their world and their concern about wickedness, at the same time as early Christians were.

Johnny Ova: Now, you actually handled the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, correct? Or inspected them?

Dr. James VanderKam: Yes, the ones I was assigned to publish, the fragments of the Book of Jubilees among the scrolls. I went to Jerusalem, to the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, where they were kept at the time, and actually worked physically with the fragments. I have to say it was quite an experience to see them. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I was by myself in the room working with them, so I did actually touch one. You shouldn't do that with antiquities. This was in 1990, when I first went and used them. At that time the little fragments found especially in Cave 4 at Qumran were kept in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum, in a room that really wasn't all that well taken care of. A lot of effort has been put in since then to take better care of the scrolls and preserve them, but this was before that big effort. So I got away with something I wouldn't get away with these days, actually touching them.

Johnny Ova: That's amazing. What an experience.

Dr. James VanderKam: It really was an awesome experience. Just being there with them and touching them was quite something. I had a couple of reactions. One was that I understood better why it was taking people a long time to publish and translate these scrolls, because they're very, very difficult to read. When you're looking at the fragment itself, it's often easier to read the infrared photographs that were taken of them very early on. So I felt sympathy for the people before me who had worked with them. Another thing that really struck me, working with those fragments and at other times dealing with these texts, is what an incredibly long history there is of studying such material, scriptural material and texts like Enoch that some thought were scriptural, and how important they have been to a lot of people for many centuries now. And what a privilege it is to continue in that tradition and to be studying this material better to understand the Bible.

Johnny Ova: Truly incredible. Dr. VanderKam, I can't thank you enough for your time today. Last question: any final thoughts about Jubilees or Enoch that you really want Christians, or anybody, to understand about these texts? And if somebody wanted to engage with them, how would they get started?

Dr. James VanderKam: These texts have been translated plenty of times in modern times. I've translated the Book of Jubilees, and that translation is available in paperback from Fortress Press. With George Nickelsburg, I've translated the Book of Enoch, also in paperback from Fortress Press. So they're quite accessible, and they're available in other places as well. I think if people just picked them up and started reading, they might say, what's going on here? This is weird, I don't get this. So it's useful to have some introductory material, some guidance for what you're reading. There are plenty of good introductions to the Dead Sea Scrolls and to early Jewish literature available. In a selfish way, I could point to my own introductions to the scrolls and to early Judaism. I think some introduction or guidance like that would help people get an idea of what's going on.

Johnny Ova: Which we will link. Dr. VanderKam, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it, and I know people are really going to be blessed listening to this.

Dr. James VanderKam: Well, thank you. I've enjoyed our discussion.