The Aramaic Astronomical Book (4Q208-4Q211) from Qumran: Text, Translation, and Commentary (review)

The Book of Enoch was known since the eighteenth century when travelers became familiar with it. The book was preserved in Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and the research on the Enochic texts was mostly based on the Ethiopic version of the text until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Texts that relate to Enoch are vast within the Qumran collection. Altogether, ten copies of texts that belong to the Enochic corpus were discovered in cave 4 of Qumran. They were assigned to Józef T. Milik initially. Milik published his notes on them in his 1976 monograph, whereas the completion of their publishing was done by a different generation of scholars. While the Dead Sea Scrolls have changed the research of the Enoch material drastically, the Ethiopic version of the book remains the only complete version of the text.

Already the earlier research on Enoch material suggested that the book of Enoch contains sections that were earlier independent. The Aramaic Astronomical Book is one of them and its parallel material is preserved in The Ethiopian Astronomical Book (EAB) chapters 72-82. The framework of the Astronomical Book is angel Uriel's teaching of Enoch that Enoch on his turn passes to Methusaleh (EAB, chap. 82). The content of the book deals with the movement of the moon in its phases, schematic meteorology, and the movement of the stars in relation to the seasons of the year. These contents find close parallels with the ancient Babylonian astronomy. In light of their overlaps, it is no surprise that the relationship between The Ethiopian Astronomical Book and astronomy of ancient Babylonia continues being discussed.

Four Qumran manuscripts 4Q208-4Q211 attest to The Aramaic Astronomical Book. In comparison with the Ethiopian text, the Aramaic version is very fragmentary. Despite Milik's early work with the texts belonging to the Enoch tradition and The Aramaic Astronomical Book in particular, the manuscripts were not published until 2000. Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar published the manuscripts 4Q208 and 4Q209 in the official Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. Meanwhile, until today the manuscripts 4Q210 and 4Q211 have not been published in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. Hence, The Aramaic Astronomical Book (4Q208-211) comes to fill a great gap in the present scholarship and it has to be applauded for that.

The author of the book, Henryk Drawnel is the professor of the Second Temple literature and the Semitic languages at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. Drawnel is known as the writer of An Aramaic Wisdom Text from Qumran: A New Interpretation of the Levi Document. (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 86. E. J. Brill: Leiden, 2004). Apart from this book that deals with a text that is also known as The Aramaic Levi Document, Drawnel has contributed to the study of other texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls too by publishing widely on the texts that are attributed to the testament literature (The Visions of Amram, The Testament of Qahat). Broadly speaking, one of Drawnel's fields of interest is the traditions concerning the Levites preserved in the Aramaic texts of Qumran.

In the present volume, Drawnel provides the first comprehensive edition of all four manuscripts of Qumran that attest to The Aramaic Astronomical Book. The layout of the book is similar to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series that contains the official editions of the Qumran texts. This makes sense, as this book is an official edition of The Aramaic Astronomical Book. Furthermore, new plates (on the basis of the photographs of the Palestine Archeological Museum) were prepared for this publication. The sharp photographs reveal masterful work of the original editor Milik by putting the pieces of fragments together.

The Aramaic Astronomical Book is divided into three parts. The first part (pp. 1-70) concerns the introduction. In that section, Drawnel presents an excellent...