The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions:

3 Symbolic Resistance in the Book of the Watchers

3 Symbolic Resistance in the Bo Book of the ok of the W Watchers atchers Anathea Portier-Young The Book of the Watchers provides one of our most important starting points for tracking the growth and development of the Watchers traditions. As is well known, its writers crafted their portrait and myth of the Watchers by drawing on other earlier traditions. Much attention has been given to the connection between the Book of the Watchers and traditions preserved in Genesis 6–8. I focus on the use of non-native myths and motifs in the formation of the early Watchers traditions. The writers of the Book of the Watchers adapted key myths and motifs from Hellenic and Mesopotamian traditions to mount a pointed critique of their Hellenistic rulers and the local cultic leaders who collaborated with them. In so doing they countered imperial claims to power and the ordering of the world. They simultaneously assailed the practices and epistemological foundations of local religious leadership. Through critical inversion of non-native myths and motifs the writers of the Book of the Watchers engaged in symbolic resistance to imperial violence and hegemony and to perceived corruption of the cult, asserting an alternative cosmology and epistemology that sought to reclaim and reshape the political, religious, and moral imagination of its audience. Hellenistic kings ruled by force. Conquest was the engine of empire, and warfare was accordingly a constant throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms.1 But empire’s success also depended on nonviolent means of control. Commonly labeled “hegemony,” these means include “the whole range of dominant cultural institutions and social practices, from schooling, museums, and political 1. Michel M. Austin, “Hellenistic Kings, War, and the Economy,” Classical Quarterly 36 (1986): 450–66. 39 parties to religious practice, architectural forms, and the mass media.”2 These institutions and practices, including a culture’s arts, technologies, stories, and myths, convey a cosmology, a story and map of the world that establishes a framework for belief and action.3 Hegemony asserts as normative and universal what are in fact particular and contingent ways of perceiving the world, mapping the universe and humanity’s place in it, and defining poles of opposition. This cosmology demarcates inside from outside, center from periphery, normal from aberrant. Its logic legitimates claims about truth and morality. Some have emphasized the difficulty of thinking beyond hegemonic cosmologies.4 Its logic can become so invisible as to resist questioning.5 To the extent that this logic becomes internalized, the merely possible appears necessary, the contingent appears absolute, and ways of ordering human life that have taken shape through time appear to be part of “nature.”6 In this way, hegemonic cosmologies simultaneously constrain imagination and action. Yet periods of rapid change, including experiences of intensive cultural contact and crisis, open up possibilities for challenging this cosmology, for renaming, and answering hegemony with resistant counter-discourse.7 The Book of the Watchers presents this alternative cosmology in part through its narrated heavenly journey. It also answers myth with myth, inverting symbols to assert an alternative order and account of reality. The very binary nature of the hegemonic construction of reality (inside/outside, center/ periphery, good/bad, civilized/barbaric, normal/aberrant) creates the possibility for resistance to hegemony through critical inversion, wherein categories are retained but the hierarchy of values or assignment of value is turned upside 2. Timothy Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19 (1990): 545–77, 553. See further Joseph Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 3. Daniel Miller, “The Limits of Dominance,” in Domination and Resistance, ed. Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands, and Christopher Tilley (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 63–79, 64. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 168. 5. Miller, “Limits of Dominance,” 66. 6. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78–79. 7. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 166. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 59. 40 | The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions down.8 This inversion is most effectively achieved by recasting myths and revalorizing symbols. The Book of the Watchers asserts not only cosmology but also cosmic drama. In both, the Watchers play a crucial role. They represent, in part, the Hellenistic rulers. They...