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26 • • • FallenAngels to the Bible story included in the vision till we come to the account of the shepherds. The fallen angels brought sin into the world; the seventy shepherds harried Israel. The two concepts meet, but do not fuse. The later sections of Enoch—composed, according to Dr. Charles, in the first pre-Christian century—make little reference to the fallen angels. This fact is of great importance, for the content of the later chapters provides ample opportunity for such allusions. But they occur rarely.6 In several places the Flood is explained as the punishment for human sin, and the angels are not mentioned at all.7 Those who wrote of fallen angels in the Book of Enoch were not playing with a folk tale. They were wrestling with a central problem of religion. To them, the realm of evil is summed up in the rebel angels and their progeny: the giants and the evil spirits . The Devil in the conventional sense does not appear in this work.8 Semjaza and Azazel are the arch-sinners. The belief that evil came into the world when the angels took mortal wives, taught them forbidden arts and engendered monsters and demons—all this was in its heyday before the Maccabean revolt. Never thereafter do we meet the story in such full detail and with such stress on its importance. In the later strata of I Enoch, as in other Jewish writings of the same time, the belief in fallen angels no longer holds a central place. But though its influence declined, the belief persisted. CHAPTER SIX Jubilees, Testaments, Zadokite Work W:e come now to three writings, each unlike the others, yet all three somehow related. The Book of Jubilees, which we possess in a secondary Ethiopic translation, retells the Bible story from Creation to the giving of the Torah, with many changes and embellishments. These Jubilees,Testaments,Zadokite Work • • • 27 reflect the peculiar religious ideas of the author, especially his distinctive calendar system. The date of Jubilees is much debated.1 The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are a series of booklets purporting to come from the twelve sons of Jacob. Each is pictured on his deathbed. He gathers his children about him, reviews his own life and finds in it the illustration of some virtue to be adopted or some vice to be avoided. His discourse ends with a vision of the distant future. The Testaments are extant in Greek and were formerly regarded as a Christian work; but it is now agreed that the original text was in Hebrew and was composed in the latter part of the second pre-Christian century. There are many parallels and similarities between Jubilees and the Testaments; but we are not sure which author borrowed from which, or whether both drew on a common source.2 Among the treasures brought to light from the attic of the old synagogue in Cairo were two Hebrew manuscripts, both incomplete , which Dr. Solomon Schechter published as Fragmentsof a Zadokite Work. They contain the history and constitution of a Jewish sect which left Jerusalem to settle in the neighborhood of Damascus. The Zadokite Work refers to Jubilees by name, and seems to have borrowed some details from it. But the date of the Zadokite writing is also in dispute.3 Several distinguished scholars have dated both the Zadokite document and the Book of Jubilees in the period of the Maccabean kings, that is, in the same period as the Testaments. The present inquiry appears to corroborate this view: for the three works are much alike in dealing with fallen angels and with powers of evil in general, and the views they contain point to a time somewhat later than that of the oldest sections of I Enoch. The Book of Jubilees does not introduce any demonic power into the Eden story: the serpent is just a snake. But it speaks of the Watchers who descended to earth in the days of Jared. This descent was not (as in Enoch) due to rebelliousness; nothing is said of an oath to persist in sin, or of a deliberate attempt to corrupt mankind by revealing forbidden knowledge. On the contrary , the angels came down "to instruct the children of men, and that they should do judgment and uprightness in the earth." But despite their good intentions the angels fell from grace. They began to wed the daughters of men and were defiled. Wit- [18.218.61.16] Project...

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