nora
(Nora)
#1
Hindy Najman
ancient Judaism. I do not claim that we can establish in any way that there
are schools of Mosaic, Enochic, or Ezran Judaisms. Neither do I think that
we have the evidence that we can clearly distinguish communities that dis
cuss Mosaic Law and Torah from those that do not. On my reading of these
texts (e.g., Jubilees, 1 Enoch, Ben Sira), none of them defines a school. Nei
ther do Jubilees or early Enochic traditions demonstrate that there were de
bates between actual schools of thought, or even show that there was an estab
lished framework of discipleship within a school. In short, there is simply no
explicit textual or material evidence of the kind in the third and second cen
turies that supports the existence of two distinct schools associated with
Enoch and Moses.^26
Instead, distinctive founders are linked to particular discourses. These
discourses are not mutually exclusive, but are instead overlapping — some
times even within a single text. Jubilees is an example, as is 4 Ezra. In Jubilees
we can find traces of Jeremianic, Deuteronomic, Enochic, and Mosaic tradi
tions; all these have other expressions of these discourses that function and
grow beside and apart from the book of Jubilees itself. But what we can see
in Jubilees is that these discourses that are linked to different founders can
be absorbed within a single work without any obvious tension.^27 It seems
strange to construct or to posit schools when we don't have the evidence to
support them. We do have much in the way of silence — and I am not pre
pared to construct arguments or communities or schools out of that silence.
Rather, I want to focus on what we can reconstruct from the texts.
Many texts are linked and associated with the figure of Moses, and
others with Enoch, and still others with Ezra. We can trace those traditions
and understand that one way in which traditions were composed and devel
oped in the ancient world was by attaching new tradition to older figures
and according that new tradition the status of the old, i.e., prophetic status. I
26. For a different view in support of Mosaic and Enochic schools, see G. Boccaccini,
Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
27. See A. Y. Reed's contribution to this conference, "Enochic and Mosaic Traditions
in Jubilees: The Evidence of Angelology and Demonology." In it she discusses the author of
Jubilees: "If it is difficult to determine Jubilees' assessment of the relative worth of Enochic
and Mosaic texts, this is perhaps not accidental. The task of weighing the relative worth of
the constitutive elements of Israel's literary heritage does not seem particularly central for
the text itself. Rather, the main function of Jubilees' epistemology — aside, of course, from
asserting its own authority — may be to argue that the Jewish people actually possessed a lit
erary heritage that predated the life of Moses." See also the earlier discussion of Enoch and
Moses in Jubilees in I. Grunewald, From Apocalypticism to Gnosticism, 35.
