John C. Reeves
John C. Reeves
Blumenthal Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Religious Studies

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  • Course Materials
    • LBST 2212 Literature and Culture
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 1120: Bible and its Interpreters
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 2000: Topics Courses in Religious Studies
      • Bible and Qur’an
        • Course Syllabus: Bible and Qur’an
      • Building Bible
        • Course Syllabus for Building Bible
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew I (Fall 2019)
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew II (Spring 2019)
      • Out of This World
        • Course Syllabus: Out of This World
      • The Biblical Dark Arts
        • Biblical Dark Arts Course Syllabus
    • RELS 2104: Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament
      • General Principles For Interpretation Of The Tanakh
      • RELS 2104: Syllabus
      • Sennacherib’s Third Campaign: The Siege of Jerusalem
      • Translation Of 1Q Genesis Apocryphon II-XXII
      • Bereshit Rabbati on Shemhazai & Azael
      • Eutychius (Sa’id b. al-Bitriq) on Genesis 6:1-4
      • Moabite Stone (KAI 181)
    • RELS 2600 Orientation to the Study of Religion
      • Course syllabus for RELS 2600
    • RELS 3000: Special Topics Courses
      • Angels and Demons in Biblical Folklore
        • Course Syllabus
        • Some Adam/Satan/Iblīs materials
      • Bible and Its Monsters
        • Course syllabus
      • Bible to Qur’ān
        • Course Syllabus: Bible to Qur’an
      • Pentateuch/Torah
        • Course Syllabus: Pentateuch/Torah
      • Rewriting the Book of Genesis
        • Course Syllabus: Rewriting the Book of Genesis
      • The Biblical Black Arts
        • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 3090: Readings in Primary Texts
      • After One Year of Classical Hebrew …
      • Course Syllabi: Advanced Biblical Hebrew I
        • Syllabus Fall 2006
        • Syllabus Fall 2008
        • Syllabus Fall 2010
      • Course Syllabi: Advanced Biblical Hebrew II
        • Syllabus Spring 2007
        • Syllabus Spring 2009
        • Syllabus Spring 2011
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew I
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew II
    • RELS 3104: Prophecy and Prophetic Literature in Ancient Israel
      • RELS 3104: Course Syllabus
    • RELS 3107: Psalms and Wisdom Literature of Israel
      • RELS 3107: Course Syllabus
    • RELS 3122 Esoteric Traditions: Gnosis and Gnosticism
      • Course Syllabus for Gnosis and Gnosticism
    • RELS 3122 Esoteric Traditions: Thinking About Angels and Demons
      • Course syllabus for Thinking About Angels and Demons
    • RELS 4000/5000 Advanced Biblical Hebrew
    • RELS 4000/5000 Contextualizing the Qur’an
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    • RELS 4000/5000 Early Mythologies of Evil
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    • RELS 4000/5000 Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
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    • RELS 4000/5000 Jewish Fantasy Literature
      • Course syllabus for Jewish Fantasy
    • RELS 4000/5000 Jewish Mystical Literature
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    • RELS 4010/5010: James G. Frazer and William Robertson Smith
    • RELS 4107: Early Judaism
      • A Brief Introduction to Rabbinic Exegesis of the Bible
      • Bavli Menahot 109b
      • Midrash Tanhuma, Noah §3
      • RELS 4107: Course Syllabus
      • The Essene Hypothesis
      • Types of Midrashic Texts
      • Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
    • RELS 4108: Medieval Judaism
      • RELS 4108: Course Syllabus
    • RELS 6000: Pluriform Multilingual Zechariah
      • Various Zechariah Legends
        • Bordeaux Pilgrim (333 CE) on the Temple Mount
        • Cave of Treasures 47.12-17
        • Mas’udi, Muruj al-dhahab
        • Protevangelium Jacobi (Syriac) 22-24
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Jewish Aramaic
      • Course syllabus for Jewish Aramaic
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Rabbinic Hebrew
      • Course Syllabus (2006-07)
      • Course Syllabus (2009-10)
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Syriac
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Ugaritic
    • RELS 6602: Seminar in the Religion of Ancient Israel
      • Course Syllabus (Spring 2009)
    • RELS 6603 Seminar in Early Judaism
      • Course Syllabus (Fall 2005)
      • Course Syllabus (Spring 2006)
      • Course Syllabus (Spring 2008)
    • RELS 6611: Qumran and its Literature
    • RELS 6615: Seminar in the Religions of Late Antiquity
      • Course Syllabus (2008)
      • Course syllabus (Spring 2015)
    • RELS 6631: Seminar in Islamic Studies
    • RELS 6651: Seminar in the History of Religions
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Articles
    • Book Reviews
    • Unpublished Lectures and Fragmenta
      • Assorted Near Eastern Apocalypses
      • Shahrastānī on Mani and Manichaeism
      • Theodore bar Konai on Mani and Manichaeism
      • Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
      • Ya`qūbī, Ta’rīkh
  • Research Projects
    • Cave of Treasures: A New Translation and Commentary
    • Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
    • Illuminating the Afterlife of Ancient Apocryphal Jewish Literature
    • Medieval Jewish Pseudepigrapha
      • Jellinek’s Sefer Noah
      • Son of Samael
      • The Chronicles of Moses Our Teacher
    • Sefer ‘Uzza wa-‘Aza(z)el: Exploring Early Jewish Mythologies of Evil
    • Shades of Light and Darkness: Chaldean Dualism, Gnosis, and the Islamicate Milieu
    • Shahrastani’s Kitab al-Milal wa’l-Nihal On the Dualists
    • Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic
      • ’Otot ha-Mašiah (Signs of the Messiah)
      • ’Otot of R. Shimon b. Yohai
      • Aggadat ha-Mašiah
      • Aggadat R. Ishmael
      • Eldad ha-Dani beney Mosheh texts
      • Midrash Wa-yosha` (end)
      • Nistarot (Secrets of) R. Shimon b. Yohai
      • Pirqe de-R. Eliezer §30 (end)
      • Pirqe Mašiah
      • Prophecy of Zardusht
      • Pseudo-Ephrem (Syriac)
      • Responsum of Hai Gaon on Redemption
      • Sefer Elijah
      • Sefer Zerubbabel
      • Tefillat (Prayer of) R. Shimon b. Yohai
      • Ten Further Things About the Messianic Days
      • Ten Signs
      • Testament of Adam
  • Links
  • Cuneiform Studies Laboratory
    • Law Code for the Scribal Archive
Research Projects » Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Description of the project

A cursory perusal of Jewish, Christian, gnostic, and Muslim literature emanating from the Near East during the first millennium of the Common Era produces a substantial number of citations from or references to so-called ‘books of Enoch.’ These ‘books of Enoch’ are pseudepigraphic literary works allegedly authored by the seventh antediluvian biblical forefather Enoch (Gen 5:21-24). Interest in the figure of Enoch was apparently stimulated by the cryptic biblical notice recounting his mysterious removal from human society. A common perception developed wherein Enoch was considered to be an exemplary righteous individual who was transported to heaven and there granted access to divine secrets regarding the governance of the cosmos, the progression of history, and the final judgment of the created order. Judging from the quantity of quotations or allusions to Enochic books, a multitude of these compositions apparently circulated among learned circles during late antiquity well into the medieval period, enjoying wide popularity within diverse religious communities. Ancient estimates regarding Enoch’s literary productivity range from Wahb b. Munabbih’s ‘thirty scrolls’ to the presumably fantastic ‘360 (variant 365) books’ of the Slavonic book of Enoch (2 Enoch). Despite these testimonies to Enoch’s loquacity, only two indubitably Enochic ‘books’ have been recovered to date, and these are conventionally designated 1 Enoch (Ethiopic Enoch) and 2 Enoch (Slavonic Enoch).

Modern scholars have expended considerable energy in the study and analysis of the two ‘surviving’ books of Enoch. Most importantly for our present purposes, they have shown that these ‘books’ are themselves composite works stemming from earlier collections of Enochic lore. Few scholars however have attempted to correlate their studies of these extant apocalyptic books with the numerous fragmentary citations and allusions to Enochic works in the subsequent religious literatures. The primary explanation for such neglect is not difficult to identify. There does not exist (at present) any systematic compilation and/or comparative analysis of the citations from Enochic works in later Jewish, Christian, gnostic, and Muslim contexts. In order to utilize these later citations, scholars of the religions of late antiquity must consult a variety of print and manuscript resources in diverse languages, many of which are not readily available in a convenient form.

I am therefore engaged in a joint research project (with Annette Yoshiko Reed of New York University) whose ultimate objective is twofold: (1) to assemble all the fragmentary extant references to and citations of Enochic works within the aforementioned religious literatures into one convenient collection, and (2) to compare, classify, and analyze these subsequent references and citations in order to gain a clearer picture of the scope and range of what might tentatively be termed the ‘Enochic library,’ or the entire corpus of works attributed to Enoch. Both the collection and the comparative analysis will be published as a monographic study by Oxford University Press, thus providing students of Near Eastern religious history with a new tool for the assessment of the demonstrable intertextual relationships among the diverse religious communities of late antiquity and the early medieval era.  Volume I will be available from Oxford in March 2018.

The initial methodology of the project is rather straightforward. It involves a systematic combing of the available manuscript or printed textual editions of those works wherein references to Enochic ‘books’ or ‘traditions’ occur or might be expected to occur, followed by the extraction and classification of the passage so identified. Texts wherein such passages occur include Jewish pseudepigrapha, Jewish and Christian apocalyptic works, Jewish esoteric works such as magical manuals and mystical treatises (Zohar), Christian exegetical texts (both western and eastern Church Fathers), so-called ‘universal histories’ prepared by both Christians (Syncellus) and Muslims (Tabari), Muslim esoteric texts (Umm al-Kitab), and gnostic compositions (e.g., Pistis Sophia).

The project possesses significance for several interrelated fields of humanistic inquiry. Students of Second Temple Jewish literature, the period wherein Enochic literature first appears, will be able to trace (or discount) the survival of Enochic motifs and mythemes within Jewish literary and intellectual circles from late antiquity well into the medieval period, thereby shedding light on the development of apocalypticism and its possible influence upon the history of Jewish mysticism. Students of Near Eastern gnosticism and Hellenistic philosophies would have further data to exploit in their quest for the origin of gnostic religiosity and its possible impact upon sectarian currents in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Those interested in the medieval literary and intellectual symbiosis among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers, particularly with regard to the transmission of the ‘ancient sciences’ associated with hermeticism (e.g., astrology, theurgy, divinatory techniques, angelology and demonology) would for the first time be able to view, in textual form, a chain of tradition reconstructed in its entirety. Thus the project, when complete, has ramifications not only for students of Jewish pseudepigrapha, but for any scholar interested in understanding the complex development of the history of ideas, and their transmission, among the major religious communities of the ancient and medieval Near East.

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