Project Details
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Text-critical Edition and Translation of 1 Enoch

Subject Area Protestant Theology
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Term from 2015 to 2020
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 270668285
 
Final Report Year 2021

Final Report Abstract

The research leading to the edition and translation of 1 Enoch for publication in 2023 has resulted in the following advances. (1) Whereas before, the number of manuscript witnesses to the early Ge‘ez version 1 Enoch (which is only fully preserved in Ethiopic) in an edition was 8 (Knibb 1978) and 11 (behind the translations of Uhlig 1984 and Nickelsburg-VanderKam in 2004/2012), the edition has drawn on no less than 33, many of which are now the most important witnesses to the book. The number does not include formal quotations, some extensive, from 13 Ethiopic compositions dated to the 15th to 17th centuries. (2) The edition presents synoptically the text-critically derived early recension (Eth I) opposite the traditional text of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (Eth II, using IES 77), around which 12 mostly unstudied manuscripts are collated. (3) The texts plus apparatus display the rich diversity of the 1 Enoch tradition in Ethopic as never before. (4) Whereas scholarly discourse about 1 Enoch has used the Ethiopic tradition to access a Second Temple text, the edition yields and displays a much more complex picture, one that has implications for other textual research on tertiary versions of Second Temple literature. (5) The edition is the first to include a critical analysis of the division markers within the text. During the analysis of a fuller range of manuscripts than had previously been studied, the project was surprised by the number (seven) of late 19 th and 20th century Ethiopic manuscripts that preserve some of our earliest forms of the text. These manuscripts, in turn, are each copies of a now lost Vorlage that bear similarities to texts of the older recension (Eth I) dated to the 15th and 16th centuries. A further surprise has been the degree to which paratexts among the manuscripts to 1 Enoch illuminate the text tradition, for example, through glosses, erasures, corrections, internal headings, and even illustrations/drawings. Moreover, the editorial work was expanded to accommodate the unexpected significance that differences among division markers among the manuscripts make for determining alternative translations. Finally, the discovery of 1 Enoch in the underwriting of a palimpsest at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin was unanticipated and provided impetus for research involving specialist photography to recover the otherwise illegible text. This discovery, along with the continuing identification of further text for the older recension (Eth I) has required continuous reworking of the edition to take into account significant evidence for what was once rare for the study of the text.

Publications

 
 

Additional Information

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung