30 CHAPTER ONEcharacter of nature, and the futility of all human endeavor, including righ-
teous behavior and the seeking of wisdom.^28 If Ecclesiastes recommended
pious behavior at all, it was only for pragmatic reasons: conformity with the
laws of the Torah was likely to be less painful than nonconformity.
Another Jewish boo kwritten in the third centuryB.C.E., known as 1 Enoch,
is preserved not in the Hebrew Bible but only in translation into Ge‘ez (see
the next chapter for more discussion). Fragmentary manuscripts of the work
in the original Aramaic have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.^29 This
book, like Ecclesiastes and Job, is much concerned with the presence of evil
in the world, but its explanation may be the most radical of all. 1 Enoch 1–
36 is based on the brief and enigmatic biblical story, which immediately pre-
cedes the story of Noah’s flood, of the sons of God who descended to earth
and too kfor themselves the daughters of man (Genesis 6:1–4). 1 Enoch fol-
lows Job in imagining that God’s ways are mysterious, though in contrast to
Job, Enoch seems to thin kthat some humans actually have access to God’s
mysteries. Chief among these mysteries is that God, having created the uni-
verse, quickly relinquished control over it, allowing humanity to fall into the
hands of wicked deities (the sons of God of Genesis). These deities were God’s
servant angels, who had successfully rebelled against their master. God re-
sponded by withdrawing to the remotest part of heaven but promised that one
day he and the angels who had remained loyal to him, together with a selected
part of humanity, would overthrow the forces of evil and restore God’s sole
rule over the universe.
1 Enoch thus responds to the claim of traditional Israelite wisdom that the
one God is both good and powerful (a claim made problematic by the pres-
ence of evil in the world) not by reducing the reader to awed and uncompre-
hending silence, like Job, or by dismissing the claim with a resigned and
world-weary shrug, like Ecclesiastes. 1 Enoch solves the problem of evil by
infusing the biblical cosmology with myth, by restoring to his rewriting of
Genesis 1–11 the divine drama and tension that the biblical author was so
careful to omit. The result is a worldview that is closer to dualism than mono-
theism and certainly supposes that many divine beings aside from God can
act independently and are extremely powerful. 1 Enoch is also deterministic:
its human characters are more or less pawns to be manipulated by the divine
protagonists.
The Wisdom of Ben Sira, composed in Hebrew soon after the Seleucid
conquest of Palestine in 200B.C.E., is unique among ancient Hebrew books
(^28) For recent discussion, positing an Achaemenid dating, and a rather too specific social con-
text, see C. L. Seow,Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (New York: Doubleday, 1997), especially
pp. 11–36; cf. E. J. Bickerman,Four Strange Books of the Bible(New York: Schocken, 1967), pp.
141–67.
(^29) See J. T. Milik,The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4(Oxford:
Clarendon, 1976).