The majority of the fragments, those of Enastr* in their entirety and the
great majority of those of Enastr!, belong to an elaborately detailed and
monotonous calendar in which the phases of the moon, day by day, were
synchronized with the movements of the sun in the framework of a year of
364 days; the calendar also described the movements of the two heavenly
bodies from one ‘gate’ of the sky to another. This part of the work no longer
exists in the Ethiopic version.
This work, in which the essentially astronomical and calendrical content
was enriched by cosmographic information and moral considerations, seems
to me to be the oldest Jewish document attributed to Enoch. An indirect
allusion is already to be found in Gen. 5: 23, where the writer, having fixed
the age of the patriarch at 365 years, implies, in guarded terms, the existence
of astronomical works circulating under the name of Enoch. It is highly likely,
indeed, that the whole chronology of the Bible, in particular that of the Mosaic
Pentateuch, was elaborated by priestly redactors of the Persian era, taking
as their point of departure the calendar with fixed days and festivals com-
posed of 364 days.
The origination of this calendar may have been attributed by its anony-
mous inventor to Enoch, as the antediluvian sage par excellence. In the Persian
period this reckoning was of a strictly theoretical nature, suitable as a frame-
work for the distant events of sacred history and nothing more. It was only
the Essenes who introduced it effectively into their liturgical life, during the
second half of the second century, without, it would seem, taking account of
its inevitable discrepancy with the solar year of 365.4 days. It was precisely
through anxiety to find a more concrete reference to the year of 365 days,
employed widely in Persian and Hellenistic times, that the age of the patriarch
was corrected from 364 to 365 years in Gen. 5: 23.
The scientific part of the astronomical Enoch, i.e. the calendar which
occupied the major part of the Aramaic document, is mentioned explicitly
in Jub. 4: 17: ‘(Enoch) was the first among the children of men, born of the
earth, who had learned writing, science, and wisdom, and he described in a
book the signs of heaven according to the order of their months, that the
children of men might know the periods of the year according to the order of
all their particular months.” The first part of the following verse refers no
doubt to En. 80-2, which have an ethical and apocalyptic content: ‘He
was also the first to write ἃ testimony, and he gave this testimony to the
children of men from among the generations of the earth.” But the text of
verse 18b goes far beyond the content of our astronomical document: ‘he
had given notice of the weeks of years of the jubilees, made known the
reckoning of the years, placed in order the months, and proclaimed the
sabbaths of years, (all) that we [the angels] had taught him.” I see in this
a reference to various astronomical and calendrical texts, calculated on the
cycles of three, six, seven, and forty-nine years, copies of which exist among
the manuscripts of Cave 4 of Qumrân.
It is significant that the Jewish author of our astronomical treatise is not
explicit about the exact location of Paradise, his casualness in this respect
being quite the reverse of the interest shown by the author of the Book of
Watchers and by a later redactor (Greek Jewish or Christian ἢ Abyssinian ?)
of the same passage in En. 77: 3.
The cycle of the seven jubilees can be reduced to a table (Fig. 7). It can
easily be seen from this table that the computation is actually a cycle of six
jubilees, since the distribution of the triennial cycles in the seventh jubilee
exactly repeats that of the first. Whatever may have been the reason for the
invention of this cycle, it required no small amount of faith to attribute it,
or that of any other Qumrân calendar, to Enoch; for all these calculations
take account of twenty-four priestly families whose organization and intro-
duction to the service of the temple at Jerusalem date from the Persian era.
The Book of Enoch
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