David W. Suter
that the portrait of Enoch as a priest offering incense in a sanctuary in Jub
4:25-26 reflects the redactional interests of the author of Jubilees and should
therefore be treated separately from the early material in 1 Enoch in estab
lishing the role of temple, priesthood, and cult in that tradition. As R. H.
Charles suggests, Jubilees shows a concern for having the patriarchs sacrifice
following Levitical procedure, leading the writer to expand significantly the
role of the patriarchs in building altars and offering sacrifices. The absence
of such an impulse in 1 Enoch, however, makes it apparent that the early
Enoch tradition as a whole is singularly uninterested in the matter of priestly
function in a sacrificial cultus, although in other respects it reflects a priestly
perspective and has a deep and abiding interest in the temple, including the
celestial temple and the eschatological temple to be built by God at the end
of days. For that reason, in the previous article I set aside the portrait of
Enoch as priest in Jub 4 and chose to deal exclusively with the early Enoch
tradition in 1 Enoch. This essay is intended to pick up where the previous ar
ticle leaves off by exploring the relation of Enoch to temple and priesthood
from the perspective of his inclusion in the larger enterprise of Jubilees.^3
While Charles's quotation provides food for thought, it is not without
problems, since it assumes that the author of Jubilees would have been able
to distinguish the Priestly Code from the other strands present in Genesis,
which do involve the patriarchs in the offering of a sacrifice or the building
of an altar. What becomes apparent as the study proceeds, however, is that
the author of Jubilees systematically reads later priestly practice characteris
tic of the Priestly document back into the cultic activity of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob. While the Yahwist and the Elohist do represent the patriarchs as
sacrificing (see Gen 8:20-22; 12:7-8; 13:4,18; 22:9; 26:25; 33 :2°; and 35:1-7), and
while the author of Jubilees draws upon those accounts in his narrative (Jub
6:4; 13:4; 14:11-12; 15:2; 18:8; 24:23; and 31:3), it is apparent that his contribu
tion to these narratives presupposes an understanding of priestly practice as
reflected in the Priestly Code and not simply an adaptation of the Yahwistic
- In his response to the second group of papers at the Fourth Enoch Seminar,
G. Nickelsburg commented, "I was struck by the observations of David Suter in his paper
for the last session. Perhaps the first to champion the anti-temple polemics in the Book of
the Watchers, he is cautious about reading the Jubilees material about Enoch the priest back
into the Book of the Watchers." Also note that in his contribution to the present volume,
"Worship in Jubilees and Enoch," from the Fourth Enoch Seminar, E. Larson likewise con
cludes that the portrait of Enoch as a priest does not come from 1 Enoch. Larson also notices
the lack of interest of the early Enoch literature in sacrifice, a feature I noted in contrast to
Jubilees in "Temples and the Temple in the Early Enoch Tradition."