Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

From a Movement of Dissent to a Distinct Form of Judaism

the same scribal and priestly elites and subelites who produced Jewish litera­
ture in general," and dismiss the subversive character of the Enochic literature
as a mere optical illusion, "a trick of perspective."^29 Whatever the motivations
of its promoters were, since its inception "Enochic Judaism" expressed in its
"counterstory" a paradigm of disruption that challenged the Mosaic "master
narrative" and denied the Zadokite paradigm of order.
In Collins's words,

The idea of a movement within Judaism that is not centered on the Mo­

saic Torah may seem anomalous in the context of the Hellenistic age, but

it was not without precedent. The biblical wisdom literature distin­

guished precisely by its lack of explicit reference to either the Mosaic To­

rah or the history of Israel, and it retains this character as late as the book

of Qoheleth, which may be roughly contemporary with the early Enoch

literature.... Judaism in the early second century BCE was not uniformly

Torah centered, even among those who were familiar with the Torah and

respected it as one source of wisdom among others. I would agree then,

with Boccaccini and others, that the Enoch literature reflects a distinctive

form of Judaism in the late third/early second century BCE.^30

While "the invocation of the pre-diluvian Enoch rather than Moses as
the revealer of essential wisdom" is one of "the distinguishing traits of this
form of Judaism,"^31 it would be incorrect, however, to talk of Enochic Judaism
as "a Judaism without the Torah." The problem was not the Mosaic Torah; "at
no point is there any polemic against the Mosaic Torah."^32 The concern of the
Enochians was rather their own victimization, which they took as a paradigm
of the victimization of all of humankind. A group of priests who felt excluded
from, or marginalized within, the Zadokite priesthood gave cosmic dimension
to their exclusion. From their self-understanding they derived the impossibil­
ity of following any laws (including the Mosaic Torah) in a universe that had

29. S. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Prince­
    ton University Press, 2001), 15,2. E. P. Sanders also viewed Jubilees as representative of "com­
    mon Judaism"; see E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977),
    362-86.


30. J. J. Collins, "How Distinctive Was Enochic Judaism?" in Meghillot: Studies in the
    Dead Sea Scrolls V-VI, ed. M. Bar-Asher and E. Tov (Haifa: University of Haifa, 2007), 17-34
    (here 32-33).


31. Collins, "How Distinctive," 33.


32. Collins, "How Distinctive," 31.