reeves enochic judaism

7/28/2019 Reeves Enochic Judaism

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Pierluigi Piovanellia group of former Millerites and Seventh-Day Adventists (for an ethnographicapproach, see Holden zooz). Or better, adopting a suggestion proposed by roe1Marcus (1996), I would resort to the Habad or Lubavitcher movement (forother cross-cultural comparisons, see Regev 2004). After all, who claimed that"[olur post-rabbinic world mirrors the pre-rabbinic world of antiquity"?

Complicating the Notionof an "Enochic Judaism"John C. Reeves

Gabriele Boccaccini's Beyond the Essene Hypothesis (Bocca ccini 1998) advancesa boldly provocative reconstruction of th e social and literary history of secondtemple Judaism. Fusing the purportedly historical testimonia to Jewish sectari-anism contained in c ontem porary apo logists like Josephus and Philo with thecontents of a num ber of th e legendary, programmatic, a nd exegetical texts re-covered from the caves at Qumran, Boccaccini posits the existence of a so-called Enochic Judaism out of which the Essene movement described inJosephus and Philo later emerged. This alleged Enochic strain of Judaism is sonamed because he closely identifies it with a distinctive religious ideology hediscerns undergirding the co ntents of w hat eventually is incorporated withinthe Ethiopic Book of Enoch or I Enoch, mo re primitive po rtions of which havebeen recovered in Aramaic from Qu mr an . He isolates what he considers to bethe defining contours of th is particular ideology: a mythopoeic interpretationof early huma n history, a theodicy at variance w ith what h e portrays as the n or-mative biblical one, a determ inistic unde rstand ing of the progression of histor-ical events, and a devotion to the antediluvian figu re of Enoch as the para-mount m edium of divine revelation.

Enochic Judaism, according to Boccaccini, competed alongside andagainst other varieties of second tem ple Juda ism such as Zadokite Judaism andSamaritanism fo r the allegiance of th e po pulace at large, and eventually gavebirth to wh at Boccaccini term s mainstream Essene Judaism, a social movementout of which and in reaction to which the peculiar sectarian community ofQumran em erged. Long-recognized discrepancies between the contents of theQumran texts and th e reports a bout th e Essenes found in Jewish and classical


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John C. Reevessources can be resolved by ascribing the descriptions found in the latter work;to the broader antecedent mainstream movement, whereas the Qumran evi-dence attests the existence of a sectarian rift within Essenism which attempts toharmonize the competing "Enochic" and "Zadokite" currents.

Such, in nuce, is the wide -ranging thesis of Boccaccini. There are many at-tractive features to his arguments, not least among which is his elegant solutionto the vexing problem, as Norman Golb (1995) put it, of who wrote the DeadSea Scrolls. Nevertheless, as I see it there are at least three major conceptual dif-ficulties with his broad thesis which will each require some extended rehearsalin the present context.

The first difficulty relates to the generation de novo of an Enochic Juda-ism (retrojecting Essenism) out of the exceedingly murky religio-historical sit-uation of the postexilic Achaemenid province of Yehud. A second problem ishis overly positivistic reading of Hellenistic an d Roman era Jewish Enochic lit-erature thro ugh the restrictive and distorting lens of one post-Christian expro-priation and arrangement of this material. The third and perhaps most impor-tant problem involves his uncritical acceptance of the category Essene as ameaningful label for actual religious behavior within the Judaism of the latesecond temple era.

a. Basing himself almost exclusively on the literary witnesses recoveredfrom Qumra n, Boccaccini confidently constructs an Enochic Judaism as a dis-tinct ideological movement which emerges within the second temple period ofJewish history. It arises in conscious opposi tion to what he labels Zadokite Ju-daism, another construction, which he defines as the religious program sanc-tioned by the priestly elite who controlled the Jerusalem temple cultus.EnochicJudaism thus forms a nonconformi st priestly trad ition (Boccaccini 1998,71) de-signed to subvert Zadokite textual and social hegemony.

Boccaccini holds that the library of texts recovered at Qumran can bemapped across these two polarities. Zadokite literature "includes most of theso-called biblical texts [excepting Esther and Daniel] and also apocryphal textssuch as the Epistle of Jeremiah, Tobit, and Sirach" (68). Enochic texts, on theothe r hand, are represented in the Qumranic library by the Aramaic fragmenof the Astronomical Book (1 En 72-82), the so-called Book of the Watchers (6-36), and the Aramaic Levi document.

To delineate the interests and claims of each group, Boccaccini isolatesseries of characteristic elements or motifs which he argues can serve as marketo locate a particular text within an Enochic or Zadokite literary orbit. Accoing to Boccaccini, Zadokite Judaism operates within the confines o f an ordereuniverse which establishes clearly demarcated b oundar ies between binary cate-gories like good and evil, holy and ordinary, and pure and impure. disruptive^

Complicating the Notion of an "EnochicJudaism"or destructive forces can be controlled or deflected provided these boundariesremain inviolate. The maintenance of these boundaries, a nd indeed, of the verycosmos itself, is overseen by the Jerusalem priesthood and the rituals per-formed by them in the temple. By contrast, Enochic Judaism ho lds that presen texistence is characterized by cosmic disorder, a disru ption occasioned by super-natural forces and agencies acting in rebellion against the crea tor deity. Evil andimpuritylie largely outside human control,and the restoration o f aprimal ha r-mony must await divine intervention (Boccaccini 1998, 68-74).

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether his dualschematic ordering and conceptual appraisal actually do full justice to themultiple ideologies an d variegated contents o f the Qu mra n corpus, it shouldperhaps first be asked whether the physical evidence collected from a singlerural encampment in Judea can bear the rhetorical weight with whichBoccaccini invests it. Qumran affords us a snapshot view of at least one andperhaps several Jewish textual communities duri ng the late second temple pe-riod. Can we legitimately extrapolate from this limited perspective a wide-angle view that will shed light on the ideological curr ents c ours ing through allJewish textual communi ties for the entire second temple pe riod? Such a wide-angle view would also need to take into account the various regiona l centers ofintellectual culture and their relatively sparse testimonia to both literary andbehavioral trends and activities. Can we, for example, trace Enochic andlorZadokite trajectories or tensions among the literary products of AlexandrianJudaism? Or among those, assuming they can be securely identified, of Baby-lonian Judaism? Or perhaps, most importantly, amon g that corpus of largelyHebrew-language texts which constit ute what will eventually be labeled scrip-tural, namely, the Tanakh?

We must not forget that the second temple period during whichBoccaccini contextualizes his Enochic and Zadokite movements is also the erawhen Jewish scripturalism emerged as a vital social force. Those texts whicheventually became Tanakh were being promulgated, redacted, and shaped atthevery same time that Boccaccini claims the Enochic and Zadokite Tendenzenwere struggling for influence. Given the fairly rigid boundari es governing liter-acy in ancient Near Eastern societies, it is arguably the very same groups-Zadokites, Enochites, and th e like- hat were also involved in this author ialand editorial process.

Boccaccini is of course cognizant of this cultural development. As statedabove, he situates most biblical literature am ong the Zadokite camp. His classi-fication of biblical texts, however, betrays a kind of uncritical a ssnmpti on ab outthe age and authority of the Bible in the second temple world, an assumptionhe rightly criticizes in anothe r place (57). but which h e inexplicably reverts to


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John C. Reeveswhen isolating his Enochic and Zadokite Tudaisms. It is a slippage of the kindthat Robert Kraft has jocularly labeled the tyranny of canonical consciousness;namely, the common, almost unconscious, yet anachronistic and hence unwar-ranted retrojection of the later canonical conceptions formed within classicalJudaism and Christianity into the then inchoate literaryproductions of the sec-ond temple period.Boccaccini expends very little effort in trying to connect his allegedmovement with the onset of early Jewish scripturalism, a phenomenon whicharguably was inaugurated with the mission of Ezra and which eventuallyachieved dominance over all currents of Tudaism that flourished during the Ro-man period, both in Ereh Israel and in the Diaspora. The question which mustbe asked, it seems to me, is: How does an alleged Enochic Judaism relate to theconstruction and promulgation of the Pentateuch and other scriptural collec-tions? A simple polarity of Bible versus Enoch, which is what I read Boccaccinito be saying, brushes over some essential issues which need more careful studybefore being swept aside.

I must confess that despite both th e character and the work or content ofEnoch showing undeniable connections with Mesopotamian lore (Tansen 1939;Grelot 1958a; 1958b; VanderKam 1984; Reeves 19981, 1 am very sympathetic tothe general tenor, if not always the specific points, of the arguments advancedin the past by Tonathan Smith (1975), Margaret Barker (1980; 1987), and RobertMurray (1985).These points have been most recently revived and solidified bySeth Schwartz (2001). They situate the Enochic legends among the autoch-thonous mythical lore associated with the royal cultus of the first temple; inother words, the very social circles from which Boccaccini derives his Zadokitegroup, the supposed adversaries of Enoch.

I agree with Boccaccini that the figure of Enoch and most Enochic litera-ture have deep roots in priestly t radit ions (Tub 4:25; 738.39; ZL: IO;f. Stone 1978,489-90; VanderKam 1984,185-86),but I suspect they are not as nonconformistas Boccaccini seems to think. I would add that the speculative cosmogonicaland cosmological wisdom characteristic of the earliest layers of our extantEnochic sources and which continue to resurface up to a millennium and a hlater in medieval Jewish, Chris tian, and Muslim texts,' should be associa ewith the intermediate redactional stages of the Pentateuchal source labeledmodern source-cri tics as the Priestly or P source. I suspect that Milik (1976,32) may be brilliantly prescient in his recognition that what we now know as1Enoch 6-11 is actually more primitive than and presupposed by Genesis 6:1-

I. For an initial cataloguing of these texts, see my The Recovery of the Enochic Libra(Reeves, focthcarning).

Complicating the Notion of an "Enochic Judaism"I would even be willing to endorse the Enochic passage as an integral compo-nent of an earlier rendition of the Priestly narrative of antediluvian events, andhence of the bibIical book of Genesis itself.

b. The book now referred to by scholars as I Enoch exists in this integralform only within the Ethiopic scriptural tradition. This is a circumstance whichhas gone largely unappreciated by most students of second temple and Romanera Tewish literature. Hence I will restate this propos ition in a more provocativeway: the work referenced by scholars as 1Enoch is not a lewish book; rather, thesurviving textual evidence indicates it is a Christian compilation. 1Enoch 1-108occurs as a textual unit only within the Ethiopic Christian biblical canon.Smaller consecutive portions of what eventually becomes I Enoch are extant inseveral Greek manuscripts, and isolated chapters o r citations occur amongGreek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac witnesses, but again only within what are bla-tantly Christian contexts, the longest of which do not seem to predate thefourth or fifth century C.E.

The 7 4 Greek fragments which purportedly stem from an early Greekrecension of the Epistle ( I Enoch 91-105) are, in the words of Michael A. Knibb,"too small for any certain identification to be possible" (Knibb 2001,401). TheAkhmim or Panopolis manuscript transmits a recognizable form of I Enoch I:I-3x6, and a duplicate version of 19:3-21:9, together with excerpts from the Gospeland Apocalypse of Peter. The Chester Beatt-Michigan papyrus gives us 97:6-107:3 (sans chap. 1051, together with Melito's Homily on the Passion. TheByzantine chronographer George Syncellus (Mosshammer igSq, 11.19; 24.10; 27.8;34.18) provides four separate quotations from works which he o r his source(s)termed "the first book of Enoch about the Watchers," "the word of Enoch," orsimply "Enoch's book." Most of these excerpts overlap with what eventually be-comes 1 Enoch (6:i-94; 8:4-10:14; i5:8-16:1), but one of them is apocryphal.

This latter circumstance is suggestive. When coupled with the similar ap-pearance of Enochic apocrypha at Qumran (Stuckenbruck ~o oo ,3 -7 ) nd thedozens of instances of putative Enochic citations or references to be foundwithin later Tewish, Christian, Gnostic, and Muslim works (e.g., Reeves 2003,44-52), it serves to remind us that producing books of Enoch was a cottage in-dustry in the Near East duri ng late antiquity and the medieval eras. Were we totake the words o f SLavonic Enoch seriously (io:2,5-7; Vaillant 1952), we couldread a different book of Enoch every day for almost an entire year!

It is undeniable that the bulk of the content of what eventually becomesI Enoch possesses a Tewish origin. The Aramaic (and arguably Hebrew)' frag-

2. Note 1Q19,whose true status as either translation of or source for its Aramaic parallelhas yet to be satisfactorily resolved.


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John C. Reevesments recovered from Qumran indicate this much, even though they do notcome anywhere close to mirroring the eventual contents of Ethiopic Enoch.Seven distinct manuscripts preserve various parts of I Enoch 1-36, 85-90, and91-107, and four additional manuscripts relate to 72-82. Multiple copies ofother allied compositions, such as the Book of Giants, are also attested (Reeves1992; Stuckenbruck 1997; zooo; Puech zoo]), a nd it is unclear how they mightfactor into the creation of an ancient Enochic library.

It seems likely that Enochic apocrypha were a staple of pseudepigraphicforgery even at this early stage. Knihb estimates that perhaps just under one-fifth of the Ethiopic version is represented at Qumran, and then qualifies thisassessment by stating that "the Aramaic fragments which have survived are se-verely damaged; mostly we have to do with quite small pieces of text, and in nocase do we have anything approaching an entire column from one of the manu-scripts" (Knihh 1978,Z:IZ). This being the case, I think we need to be wary aboutideological reconstructions and especially codicological arrangements whichautomatically assume that one particular post-Christian editorial schemeshould govern ou r understanding of how physically isolated and scribally dis-tinct portions of the Enochic corpus relate to on e another.

The surviving Aramaic fragments provide meager evidence for the primi-tive joining of one Enochic subdivision to another, namely, the placement ofI Enoch 1-5 prior to 6-36 or the Book of Watchers (Milik 197 6 ,4Q ~n~ii lines1-2 or pl. VI).' There is even less compelling evidence for the linkage of theNoah birth story (1 Enoch 106-107) to the final lines of the so-called Epistle(91-105) in 4Qzo4 (4QEnCar) 5 i fragment a (Milik 1976, pl. XIV; Tov 1993a,PAM 43.202). Further assumptions or pronouncements about the placement ofthe other Enoch subdivisions (e.g., Similitudes, 1 Enoch 37-71) or even apocry-pha (e.g., Book of Giants) are completely speculative.

Ideological reconstructions such as those advanced by Boccaccini need toacknowledge the complicated shape of the reception history of Enochic litera-ture when formulating their hypotheses about its intellectual background andinterests. For example, it is only within this external context that one can speakintelligibly of an alleged Enochic pentateuch which was supposedly designed tosubvert its Mosaic rival. Crucial components like the Similitudes (i .e., 37-71) arenowhere attested in second temple literature and should probably be banishedhenceforth from such discussions.

c. A final soft point in Boccaccini's construction of an Enochic Tudaism

3. Note, however, that line 1canrains only the bottom stroke(s) of one or two letters (readby Milik and those following him as 'Dl[']), which is hardly enough to guarantee that this lineindeed concluded with what corresponds in later versions to I En i!~ - "

Complicating the Notion of an "Enochic Judaism"involves his uncrit ical embrace of the existence of a sect called Essenes amongthe expressions of Tudaism during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. He assignswritings purportedly advocating the ideology of the Enochic party, in effectpractically all of the nonbiblical writings recovered from the caves at Qumran,to the mysterious Tewish sect termed Essenes, discussed by Philo, Tosephus, andother pagan and Christian authori ties (Adam and Burchard 1972). The categoryEssene, invariably conflated with its presumed historical referent, forms a cru-cial component of Boccaccini's a rgument. A close analysis of the most impor-tant Greek and Latin sources describing this group constitutes the first majorsection of his book (Boccaccini 1998,zi-49). He repeatedly invokes these testi-monies as touchstones for assessing the alleged Enochic andlor Essenic propen-sities of various apocryphal and pseudepigraphic works. On the basis of thesereports, together with a selective utilization of information gleaned from theDead Sea Scrolls, he confidently delineates the historical and ideological vicissi-tudes of a religious trajectory within second temple Tudaism, which he termsmainstream Essenism. Mainstream Essenism, according to Boccaccini, was thecultural locus for the expression of Enochic Tudaism.

Since the initial decade of the scholarly study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ithas been largely accepted as a scholarly axiom t ha t these recovered writings areto he associated in some fashion with the Essenes. The so-called Essene Hy-pothesis, signaled in Boccaccini's title, holds that the community apparentlyresident at Qumran and presumably responsible for generating and depositingthe scrolls found near that site, should be identified with the Tewish sect of theEssenes mentioned in the Greek and Latin sources. Boccaccini endorses thissuggested correlation as compelling and conclusive (165). A number of com-parative studies of the Qumran teas alongside the classical reports aboutEssenes have isolated some admittedly intriguing correspondences between thetwo groups of texts, but they have also identified a number of important differ-ences. There is no need to list those items here, since the standard discussions ofthe Qumran site and its associated scrolls treat this topic in some detail.

Accordingly, mos t scholars who accept this correla tion have devised inge-nious ways to argue an Essene identity for the Qumran sect despite these dis-crepancies, and Boccaccini is no exception. For him the Qumran writingsshould be associated with an internal schism within mainstream Essenismwhich led to the establishment of a dissident outpost of Essene sectaries in thedesert of Judea. Tosephus and Philo do not speak of the desert site at Qumr anbecause they are providing a generic portrait of mainstream Essenism. Con-versely, Qumran does not correspond in all particulars with the descriptionssupplied in the Greek and Latin sources because i ts library allegedly attests to asmall and ultimately ineffectual splinter movement within mainstream


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John C. ReevesEssenism, a f sure effected by the so-called Teacher of Righteousness and hissmall band of followers.

Leaving aside for the mo men t the writings from Qum ran a nd their pos-ited affinities with one o r mo re of the religious groups supp osed ly operative insecond temple Judaism, I think a pertine nt question worth posing is whether infact there was any such thing as an Essene sect. I wan t to be perfectly clear, andhence I will proceeddeliberately. I a m n ot questioning the no tion of the Greco-Latin semantic m arker "Essene," on e which w hen wielded by writers likeJosephus, Phi lo, or Pliny served to invoke a v ery specific network of ideas andcultural competencies within the minds of a discerning imperial readership.That notion or category is undeniably present and meaningful when readwithin its proper ethnographic context. I am much less confident, however,abou t whether the label Essene corresponded in point of fact to an actual party,group, or move men t within second temple Jewish society. There are several fac-tors here which pro mpt m y skepticism.

I. There is not a single extant Palestinian or Syro-Mesopotamian Jewishwriting authored in either Hebrew or Aramaic during the A chaemenid, Helle-nistic, Roman, Byzantine, or Sassanian periods which mentions an Essene sect,categorizes a tradition or practice as Essene, or employs the label Essene in arecognizable way.

2. A superficial perusal of the table of conte nts of a compreh ensive collec-tion of the classical (i.e., Greek and L atin) description s of the Jew ish sect of theEssenes can leave an unwary reader with the mistaken impression that the pri-mary sources for a scholastic reconstruction of Essene ideology are manifoIdan d grounded o n a n extensive series of em pirical observations and experiences.In actual fact, though, it is extremely improba ble that any of the extan t tradentswho speak of a Jewish sect of Essenes, including o ur earliest autho rities, Philoan d Josephus, write on t he basis of such knowledge.

3. Finally, and more speculatively, I would like to suggest that modernscholars have been unduly credulous about the actual existence of a JewishEssene sect. Since tbe era of Hecataeus an d H erodotus, a popu lar Tendenz inclassical ethno graph y was the d escription of a nu mber of elite or secretivecastes of religious andlor intellectual functionaries supposedly flourishingamong various barbarian peoples who inhabited the fringes of the Greco-Roman oikoumenk

Prominent examples of such castes would be the Druid s of Gaul and an-cient Celtic society, he magi of Persia, the Chaldeans of Me sopotamia, and theso-called naked philosophers, o r gyn ~noso phists, f India. At times they dweUinterspersed among their respective ethnoi; but sometimes they exist in segre-gated isolation from their respective societies, and there are occasionally in-

Complic ating the Notion of an "Enochic Judaism"stances of groups who can be fo und in the far reaches of the inhabited worldwhere they constitute utopian conventicIes (Mendels 1979). Regardless of theiralleged physical location within or a par t from their societies, Greek and Latinaccounts about these group s exhibit a general family resemblance: mem bers ofthese groups typically experience a marvelous longevity of life, they are dedi-cated to lives of piety and holine ss, they are cul tural repositories of priestly andphilosophical wisdom, and they are a dep t in a num ber of useful arts, crafts, andtechnologies, amo ng which the o racular sciences are prominently n umbered.The Essenes and Philo's Thera peuta e ar e clearly markete d by their publicists asthe Jewish representatives of this ethnological trope.

Students of early Christian an d m edieval Muslim heresiography and his-toriography are thoroughly familiar wit h this Iiterary tactic. Th e prem odernhistorians of these religions will sometimes fabricate artificial sects in order toprovide a comm unal framework for certain disreputable ideas or practices, orinvent fictive heresiarchs so as to assign blame for critical disputes and sc hisms.One thinks of shadowy groups or figures like the Simonians, the Sethians,Dustai, and Ebionites. The Qur ' i n i c SZbi'lin ( Q 2:62; 5:69; 2x17) can be fitwithin this scheme. Medieval Muslim heresiography con structs the Barahima, asect which supporedly denied the val idi ty of prophecy, and the JewishMaghariyya, "so called," Qir qisi ni says, "because th eir writings were foun d in acave" (1939-43, vol. 1, 12.1; W assers trom 1998, 127-54; Reeves 1999, 161-62).

Utopian currents are visible as well in these later literatures. The wickedNimrod becomes adept in and an a postle of magical mysteries after his three-year sojourn on the eastern shore of Okea nos amon g the people of Yonton, thefourth so no f Noah (Ri 1987,208-17; Ge ro 1980,321-30). According to the herm itZosimus, the prophet Jeremiah's Rechabites are able to maintain their strictregimen in the guise of Christian mo nks living in a blessed land located at theends of the earth (Charlesworth 1982).One wonders, then, how much credence should be granted such analo-gous testimonia abou t the formal existence of a pietist elite within second tem-ple Jewry. I would counsel, very little. To be sure, I would in n o way deny thatindividual pietists were active within or at the ma rgins of Jewish society. I amquestioning only the existential sta tus o f a distinctive social aggregate bearingthe name Essene. To sharpen this poin t an d to urge caution amon g those whowould blithely accept the historicity o f a Jew ish Essene sect solely on the basisof one o r more Iiterary source(s), I introduc e here for consideration a series ofsemi-anthropologica l, descriptive excerpts taken from a medieval accountabout a Jewish group, allegedly to be foun d somew here east of Palestine, whoarem ost frequently called the beney Mosheh (Arabic banu Musa) or "the peopleof Moses" (Je llinek 1853-77.2:103-~;:g-11; 5x8-20; 6:15-16; Albeck 1940,124; Ox-


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John C. Reeves Complicatin g the Notion of an "Enochic J~rdaism"ford Bodl. Ms. Opp. 603, 41b-4za; Shahrastgn i 1951-55, ~ 5 0 7 ; azwini apudWiistenfeld 1848-49,2:18). The accoun t, which enjoyed g reat popularity in me-dieval folkloristic an d apocalyptic collections, belongs am ong a gro up of writ-ings associated with the m ysterious figure of Eldad ha- Dani, a traveling messi-anic agitator (Epstein apud Ha be rm an n 1949-5 6, ]:I-211, 357.90; Ne uba ue r 1888-89; Shochat 1971) of the eighth or ninth century:

the levitical beney Mosheh: they are encam ped east of the River Sa(m)bat-yon. . . no unclean animal o r bird or creeping thing can be foun d amongthem; they have with them (only) their flocks and cattle. Six springs arethere whose waters they have collected into a pool which they constructed,and they irrigate their land fr om the p ool. All types of pure fish flourish init (the pool), and by the spring s and the poo l flourish all kinds of pure wa-terfowl. They enjoy all kinds of fruits: ( the fertility of the land is such that)whoever plants one seed harvests a hundredfold. They are religiously ob-servant, each of them learned in Torah, Bible, Mish nah, and Aggadah. Theyare "pu re pietists" (O'l'Oll O11l;lD). No ne of them ever swears a false oath.They live to be one hund red and twenty years old, and a son or daughternever dies du ring th e lifespan of their father : they witness the succession ofthree or four generations. They construct their own houses and do theirown sowing and harvesting because they have no slaves or maidservants.They never lock their door s at night. A very small child m ight go a nd tendtheir cattle for a nu mb er of days, and no one will be in th e least bit anxious,for the re are no thieves or dan gerous w ild animals o r pests, and there are nodemons o r anything that might cause har m. Because they are holy and per-sist in the sanctity revealed by our teacher Moses, He (God) has granted allthis to them and chosen th em .. .a nd they will remain there until the t imeof the Eschaton. (Yassif zooi, 220-21)I would suggest that i t migh t prove instructive to begin situating and

studying the classical accounts ab out the Essenes in tandem with the recurrenttestimonies a nd traditions we find in late antiq ue an d medieval Jewish, Chris-tian, and Mus lim sources about utop ian pietist groups l ike the beney Mosheh,the Rechabites, and the Maghariyya. Zeev Safrai (1979) has already pointed tosome interesting connections l inking the biblical and rabbinic discussions ofthe adherents of Yehonadab b. Rekhab w ith behavioral an d doctrinal aspects ofthe Essene a nd Qum ran sects. Patristic sources, Nilus of Ankara, the ByzantineSuda, probe the Essene-Rechabite axis even further, and there are versions ofthe Eldad ha-Dani legend which link the Rechabites with the beney Mosheh(Friedlaender 1910-11).

It does not require a trained eye to see that there exist a num ber of con-ceptual and thematic similarities between the descriptions provided by classicalsources of the Essenes, or barbarian uto pia n comm unities , and that of Eldadha-Dani of the people of Moses. Yet to my knowledge no responsible post-Enlightenment thinker has ever seriously maintained that the latter group re-ally existed, or sought to attrib ute any Jew ish li terature to their creative pens.Why then sh ould the Essenes be so uncrit ically privileged?


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E N O C H A N D Q U M RA N O R I G IN SNew Light on a Forgoiten Connection

Edited byGabriele Boccaccini

Associate EditorsJ. Harold Ellens and James Alan W addellwith the collaboration ofJason von Ehrenkrook, Ronald Ruark, and Aaron Brunell

reeves enochic judaism

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