Robert Henry Charles

“ As regards the first problem the writer shows, in the first vision, that suffering and death come from sin—no less truly on the part of Israel than of all men, for God created man to be immortal; that the end is nigh, when wrongs will be righted; God’s rule will then be recognized. In the second he emphasizes the consolation to be found in the coming time, and in the third he speaks solely of the next world, and then addresses himself to the second problem. The fourth, fifth and sixth visions are eschatological. ”

“ This second writer singles out three of the Maccabean priest kings for attack, the first of whom he charges with every abomination; the people-itself, he declares, is apostate, and chastisement will follow speedily-the temple will be laid waste, the nation carried afresh into captivity, whence, on their repentance, God will restore them again to their own land, where they shall enjoy the blessedness of God’s presence and be ruled by a Messiah sprung from Judah. ”

“ The writer already sees the Messianic kingdom established, under the sway of which the Gentiles will in due course be saved, Beliar overthrown, sin disappear from the earth, and the righteous dead rise to share in the blessedness of the living. ”

“ After four days Holofernes, smitten with her charms, at the close of a sumptuous entertainment invites her to remain within his tent over night. No sooner is he overcome with sleep than Judith, seizing his sword, strikes off his head and gives it to her maid; both now leave the camp (as they had previously been accustomed to do, ostensibly for prayer) and return to Bethulia, where the trophy is displayed amid great rejoicings and thanksgivings. Achior now publicly professes Judaism, and at the instance of Judith the Israelites make a sudden victorious onslaught on the enemy. ”

“ This ethical teaching, which is indefinitely higher and purer than that of the Old Testament, is yet its true spiritual child, and helps to bridge the chasm that divides the ethics of the Old and New Testaments. [1]
In the early decades of the Christian era the text was current in two forms, which are denoted by Hα and Hβ in this article and in the edition of the text published by the Oxford University Press. “The former of these was translated not later than A.D. 50 into Greek, and this translation was used by the scholar who rendered the second Hebrew recension into Greek. ”

“ Some views of Author.—Our author’s views on Moses are remarkable. He writes that Moses was prepared from before the foundation of the world to be the mediator of God’s covenant with his people (i. 14, iii. 12) . During his life he was Israel’s intercessor with God (xi. 11, 17) . Praying on their behalf as a “great angel” (xi. 17) , “a sacred spirit who was worthy of the Lord manifold and incomprehensible” xi. 16) . Apparently his relation to Israel did not cease with death, as he was to be their intercessor in the spiritual world (xii. 6) . ”

“ His successors proved themselves the basest of men. Their infamy is painted in lurid colours by contemporary writers of the 1st century B.C., and by a strange irony the work, or, rather, fragments of the work of one of these assailants of the later Maccabees, has achieved immortality by finding a covert in the chief manifesto that was issued on behalf of one of the earlier members of that dynasty. ”

“ In the next verse the second person should be changed into the third. Thus we recover the original text of this difficult chapter. The Messianic doctrine and eschatology of this section is unique. The Messiah is here for the first time described as the pre-existent Son of Man (xlviii. 2) , who sits on the throne of God (xlv. 3; xlvii. 3) , possesses universal dominion (lxii. 6) , and is the Judge of all mankind (lxix. 27) . After the judgment there will be a new heaven and a new earth, which will be the abode of the blessed.
The Book of the Secrets or Enoch, or Slavonic Enoch. ”

“ But there is a stronger argument for a Hebrew original of certain sections to be found in the fact that the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs appears to quote xxxiv. 2, 3 of our author in T. Napth. iv. 1, T. Benj. ix.
The book in its present form was written in Egypt. This may be inferred (1) from the variety of speculations which it holds in common with Philo and writings of a Hellenistic character that circulated mainly in Egypt. (2) The Phoenixes are Chalkydries (ch. xii.) —monstrous serpents with the heads of crocodiles—are natural products of the Egyptian imagination. ”

“ In the Vulgate, however, our author was, through the action of Jerome, degraded into the third place and called 3 Esdras, whereas the canonical books Ezra and Nehemiah (see Ezra and Nehemiah, Books of, below) were called 1 and 2 Esdras, and the Apocalypse of Ezra 4 Esdras. Thus the nomenclature of our book follows, and possibly wrongly, the usage of the Vulgate. [1] In the Ethiopic version a different usage prevails. The Apocalypse is called 1 Esdras, our author 2 Esdras, and Ezra and Nehemiah 3 Esdras, or 3 and 4 Esdras. ”

“ In the Apocalypse of Baruch on the other hand it is definitely maintained that not a few shall be saved (xxi. 11) . Moreover, the sufferings of the wicked are so great in the next world it were better, according to 4 Ezra (as also to the school of Shammai) , that man had not been born. “It is much better (for the beasts of the field) than for us; for they expect not a judgment and know not of torments” (vii. 66) : yet “it would have been best not to have given a body to Adam, or that being done, to have restrained him from sin ”

“ Many passages which are obscure or wholly unintelligible in the Greek become clear an retranslation into Hebrew. Of the large body of such passages (see op. cit. § 12) we will give only one. In T. Jud. ix. 3, we have the following impossible sentence, where Esau is referred to: ἤρθη νεκρὸς ἐν ὄρει Σιείρ, καὶ πορευόμενος ἐν Ἀνονίραμ ἀπέθανεν. Here a fragment of the Hebrew original, which has happily been reserved, reads נחלח‎, “wounded,” where the Greek has νεκρός=נבלח‎, which is manifestly a corruption of the former.
In all the above cases there is no divergence among the MSS. and Versions. ”

“ God reveals to Enoch the history of the creation of the earth and the seven planets and circles of the heaven and of man, the story of the fallen angels, the duration of the world through 7000 years, and its millennium of rest. xxxviii.-lxvi. Enoch returns to earth, admonishes his sons: instructs them on what he had seen in the heavens, gives them his books. Bids them not to swear at all nor to expect any intercession of the departed saints for sinners. lvi.-lxiii. Methuselah asks Enoch’s blessing before he departs, and to all his sons and their families Enoch gives fresh instruction. ”

“ This Ten-Weeks Apocalypse, therefore, we take to be the work of the writer of the rest of xci.-civ.
Chaps. i.-xxxvi.—This is the most difficult section of the book. It is very composite. Chaps. vi.-xi. is apparently an independent fragment of the Enoch Saga. It is itself compounded of the Semjaza and Azazel myths, and in its present composite form is already presupposed by lxxxviii.-lxxxix. 1; hence its present form is earlier than 166 B.C. It represents a primitive and very sensuous view of the eternal Messianic kingdom on earth, seeing that the righteous beget 1000 children before they die. ”

“ Second Vision. v. 14-vi. 34.—Phaltiel, chief of the people, reproaches Ezra for forsaking his flock. Ezra fasts, and in his prayer asks why God had given up his people into the hands of the heathen. Uriel replies: “Lovest thou that people better than He that made them?” Man cannot find out God’s judgment. The end is at hand; its signs are recounted.
Third Vision. vi. 35-ix. 25.—Ezra recounts the works of creation, and asks why Israel does not possess the world since the world was made for Israel. The answer is that the present state is a necessary stage to the coming one. ”

“ Original Language.—That the Book of Enoch was written in Semitic is now accepted on all hands, but scholars are divided as to whether the Semitic language in question was Hebrew or Aramaic. Only one valuable contribution on this question has been made, and that by Halévy in the Journal Asiatique, Avril-Mai 1867, pp. 352–395. This scholar is of opinion that the entire work was written in Hebrew. Since this publication, however, fresh evidence bearing on the question has been discovered in the Greek fragment (i.-xxxii.) found in Egypt. ”

“ Twenty-eight MSS. of this version are in the different libraries of Europe, of which fifteen are to be found in England. This version was made from an ancestor of the Greek fragment discovered at Giza. Some of the utterly unintelligible passages in this fragment are literally reproduced in the Ethiopic. The same wrong order of the text in vii.-viii. is common to both. In order to recover the original text, it is from time to time necessary to retranslate the Ethiopic into Greek, and the latter in turn into Aramaic or Hebrew. ”

“ In iv. 12 the nexus of life, sin and suffering just referred to, is put still more strongly: “It were better we had not been at all than that we should be born and sin and suffer.” [1] The different attitude of these two writers towards this question springs from their respective views on the question of free will. ”

“ The sixth heaven: seven bands of angels arrange and study the courses of the stars, &c.: others set over the years, the fruits of the earth, the souls of men. xx.-xxxvi. The seventh heaven. The Lord sitting on His throne with the ten chief orders of angels. Enoch is clothed by Michael in the raiment of God’s glory and instructed in the secrets of nature and of man, which he wrote down in 366 books. ”

“ To the above we have a good parallel in the Book of Daniel; for the variations of its two chief Greek Versions—that of the Septuagint and of Theodotion—go back to variations in the Semitic.
Date of the Original Hebrew.—“The date of the groundwork of the Testaments is not difficult to determine. Thus Reuben (T. Reub. vi. 10–11) admonishes his sons: Πρὸς τὸν Λευὶ ἐγγίσατε ἐν ταπεινώσει καρδίας ὑμῶν ἵνα γέξησθε εὐλογίαν ἐκ τοῦ στόματος αὐτοῦ . . . ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐξελέξατο Κύριος βασιλεύειν ἐνώπιον παντὸς τοῦ λαοῦ. Here a high-priest who is also a king is referred to. ”

“ Howorth’s further claim that he has established the historical credibility of the book as a whole and its chronological accuracy as against the canonical Ezra has not as yet met with acceptance; but his arguments have not been fairly met and answered.
5. Volz (Encyc. Bibl. ii. 1490) thinks that the solution of the problem is to be found in a different direction. The text is of unequal value, and the inequalities are so great as to exclude the supposition that the Greek version was produced aus einem Guss. ”

“ Chaps. lxxxiii.-xc.—This section was written before 161 B.C., for “the great horn,” who is Judas the Maccabee, was still warring when the author was writing. (Dillmann, Schürer and others take the great horn to be John Hyrcanus, but this interpretation does violence to the text.) These chapters recount three visions: the first two deal with the first-world judgment; the third with the entire history of the world till the final judgment. An eternal Messianic kingdom at the close of the judgment is to be established under the Messiah, with its centre in the New Jerusalem set up by God Himself. ”

“ The Aramaic text behind 1 Esdras here is better than that behind the canonical Ezra. Next, viii.-ix. is from the Ezra document (= Ezra vii.-x.; Neh. vii. 73, viii. 1 sqq.) , though implying a different Hebrew text. ii. 1-15; v. 7-73; vii. 2-4, 6-15 are from the Chronicles: likewise i. is from 2 Chron. xxxv.-vi., 2 Esdras being at the same time before the translator.
Date.—The book must be placed between 300 B.C. and A.D. 100, when it was used by Josephus. It is idle to attempt any nearer limits until definite conclusions have been reached on the chief problems of the book. ”

“ The first heaven: the rulers of the stars: the great sea and the treasures of snow, &c. vii. The second heaven: the fallen angels. viii.-x. The third heaven: Paradise and place of punishment. xi.-xvii. The fourth heaven: courses of the sun and moon: phoenixes. xviii. The fifth heaven: the watchers mourning for their fallen brethren. ”

“ Ezra’s translation is found in the Canon only in the Oriental Versions. In the Latin it was omitted when xv.–xvi. were added.
Integrity.—According to Gunkel (Apok. u. Pseud. ii. 335-352) the whole book is the work of one writer. Thus down to vii. 16 he deals with the problem of the origin of suffering in the world, and from vii. 17 to ix. 25 with the question who is worthy to share in the blessedness of the next world. ”

“ The extraordinary statement in lxxi. 14, according to which Enoch is addressed as “the Son of Man,” is seen, as Appel points out, on examination of the context to have arisen from the loss of a portion of the text after verse 13, in which Enoch saw a heavenly being with the Head of Days and asked the angel who accompanied him who this being was. Then comes ver. 14, which, owing to the loss of this passage, has assumed the form of an address to Enoch: “Thou art the Son of Man,” but which stood originally as the angel’s reply to Enoch: “This is the Son of Man,” &c. Ver. ”

“ The Second Arabic version presupposes a second Greek version.
Modern Versions.—All the English versions are now antiquated, except those in the Variorum Apocrypha and the Revised Version of the Apocrypha, and even these are far from satisfactory. Similarly, all the German versions are behindhand, except the excellent version of Gunkel in Apok. u. Pseud. ii. 252-401, which, however, needs occasional correction.
Contents.—The book (iii.-xiv.) consists of seven visions or parts, like the apocalypse of Baruch. They are: (1) iii. 1-v. 19; (2) v. 20-vi. 34; (3) vi. 35-ix. 25; (4) ix. 26-x. 60 ”