Book of Enoch

Context

The historical context in which the book of Enoch was written is referred to as Second Temple Judaism. This period began with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem in 520–516 BCE (the First Temple having been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE) and ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. This was a time of important changes in Judaism. In particular, it was during this period that the Hebrew Bible was assembled. As such, it marked the roots of what came to be called rabbinic Judaism, which originated in the teachings of the Pharisees, who stressed the need for critical interpretation of the Jewish Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. This form of Judaism emphasizes the study of the Talmud—the record of rabbinic discussions of law, philosophy, customs, traditions, and ethics—and debate regarding the theological and legal issues it raises.

The Second Temple period was also a time of considerable turmoil in Jerusalem and the Middle East. After Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, the Greek empire broke into three regions: the Syrian portion, ruled by the Seleucid Dynasty; the Egyptian portion, ruled by the Ptolemaic Dynasty; and Greece proper, including Athens, Sparta, and other city-states. Jerusalem fell under the Ptolemies of Egypt. Matters changed, however, in 198 BCE, when the Seleucids, led by King Antiochus III, defeated the Ptolemies and assumed control of Palestine. His successor, Antiochus IV, felt that the Seleucid position was weak; the Ptolemies were a continuing threat, as was the Roman Empire. Further, he believed that the Jews of Palestine were resistant to the imposition of Greek culture. In fact, to the Greeks, the Jews were an alien culture, particularly because the Jews were monotheistic, meaning that they believed in a single deity; in contrast, the Greeks were polytheistic, meaning that they believed in a panoply of gods and goddesses. For their part, however, the Jews of Palestine admired the Greeks, particularly the value they placed on education and intellectual pursuits. The Hebrew Torah was translated into Greek in the third century BCE, and this Greek version came to be called the Septuagint, named after the seventy rabbis who carried out the translation. Jewish culture and the Hellenic culture of the Greeks were becoming intertwined.

Matters were complicated by divisions among the Jews. On the one hand, some Jews in the empire became entirely Hellenized—that is, they adopted the dominant Greek culture. They spoke Greek, sent their children to Greek schools, and adopted Greek customs and traditions. In contrast stood traditional Jews, who maintained their religious beliefs as well as the culture and traditions they had inherited from the time of the patriarchs. But making matters tenser, beginning in the third century BCE, a division emerged within the group of traditional religious Jews. On one side of this division were the Sadducees, who did not accept the divinity of the oral Torah, or the religious revelations Moses had acquired on Mount Sinai that were not written down. The Sadducees accepted only the written Torah, which they interpreted literally, even when the laws of the written Torah were obscure, even incomprehensible. They believed that God has no concern with the activities of humans and, in particular, has no concern about whether any human activity is evil. They regarded any choice between good and evil as a choice made by humans. They did not believe in the immortality of the soul or in punishment or rewards in an afterlife. On the other side of the division were the Pharisees, who followed traditional, orthodox teachings and accepted the truth of the oral Torah. The Greek overlords in Palestine found the “modern-thinking“ Sadducees more compatible than the stodgy Pharisees.

Matters worsened again in the late second century BCE, when the Hellenized Jews enlisted the support of Antiochus IV in an effort to Hellenize all Jews in the empire—in effect, to destroy traditional Judaism. What followed was a kind of reign of terror (as described in the biblical book of Maccabees). Antiochus seized control of the Temple; tried to eliminate the Jewish calendar; forbade the observance of the Sabbath, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and other major Jewish holy days; and outlawed studying the Torah and keeping the Old Testament’s kosher dietary laws. Copies of the Torah were burned, and the Temple was defiled by pagan sacrifices. Antiochus also forbade the practice of circumcision. Jews were forced to eat pork, and those who refused were tortured. Altars to the Greek god Zeus were constructed in the villages. Being a high priest at the Temple became a political appointment, and because the Sadducees were more Greek than Jewish, they were appointed to the highest positions in the priestly class—and accordingly became corrupt.

Ultimately, mainstream Jews—that is, the traditional Jews and Pharisees who were not Hellenized and did not have any rapport with the Greeks—revolted. A rebel army called the Maccabees seized control of parts of Palestine, reasserted their traditions, and reduced the influence of the Greeks. After Judas Maccabee’s victory in the revolt, the Jews rededicated the Temple in 165 BCE, an event celebrated in Jewish tradition as the festival of Hanukkah. It is in this historical context that the book of Enoch examines the origin of sin and comments obliquely on the corruption of the priestly class.