Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Apocalypse of Weeks

READING ACTS: The Apocalypse of Weeks – 1 Enoch 93:1-10; 91:11-17. Past posts in the series, plus on related matters, are noted here and links.

Not mentioned in the linked-to post, but the Apocalypse of Weeks is a rare case where redaction criticism has been vindicated by a manuscript discovery. Scholars had concluded that the order of the verses in the Apocalypse of Weeks had been confused in the surviving Ethiopic manuscripts and had reordered them accordingly. Hence the odd order in the title above. When the original Aramaic text was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QEnochg), it had the order of verses reconstructed by the scholars. So there!

(I know the sequence of the verses around the Apocalypse is somewhat different in the Aramaic than either in the Ethiopic or the pre-Qumran scholarly reconstructions, but the reconstruction of the Apocalypse itself was correct.)