| Description |
This study analyzes the use of prior authoritative literature in the Book of Watchers (BW), an ancient Jewish text written ca. 200 BCE. The authors of this text were intimately familiar with several texts that would later become part of the Hebrew Bible, and they interacted with and altered the narratives now found in Gen. 2-4 and 6-9, as well as several sections of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Job. Past scholarship has identified almost all of these literary correspondences, but few projects have been aimed specifically at examining and explaining how and what texts the authors of the BW employ. Lars Hartman's research was the most thorough, next to Nickelsburg's commentary, in examining the influence of prior authoritative texts on the first five chapters of the BW. His study was often too cluttered, and some of his identifications are not as strong as others once given critical scrutiny. Siam Bhayro's research on chapters six through eleven also significantly moved this field forward, but he failed to make several important connections that other scholars had made while providing a few new ones himself. Chapters twelve through thirty-six of the BW have not received as close scrutiny as the prior chapters in earlier studies. This thesis aims to fill that void by bringing to the foreground several important texts underlying the composition of the BW. These connections highlight the priority of the opening chapters of Genesis over the Enochic BW by pointing out how the BW assumes that the reader already knows the details of the Eden narrative, the expulsion from the garden, and the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It is hoped that this study helps to settle the question of the direction of dependence, and also provide a well-organized resource for future work looking at the use of the Hebrew Bible in the BW as well as compositional techniques by the authors of this work. |
