Page 3 (part 6)

That sounds almost as though the author of the Book of jubilees had written it. That it is not a merely scientific interest which impels the writer to give expression to his astronomical theories may be seen from the words at the conclusion of the section: 'Blessed are all the righteous, blessed are all those who walk in the way of righteousness, and sin not as the sinners in the reckoning of all their days, in which the sun traverseth the heaven, entering into and departing from the portals for thirty days . . .' (lxxxii. 4-7). Herein one can discern quite clearly the tendency of the writer. He desires the adoption of the solar year, while his contemporaries wrongly followed a different reckoning, and therefore celebrated the feasts at the wrong time. The 'sinners who sin in the reckoning of the year' are the Pharisees; and the righteous ones who are blessed, the Zaddîkim , 2 who walk upon the paths of righteousness ( Zedek ) as the name is made to imply, are the Sadducees." 3 The point may appear small to us, but we may compare with it the Quartodeciman controversy in the Church during the second century. It is, at any rate, a strong point in favour of the Sadducæan authorship of "The Book of the Heavenly Luminaries." The pre-Maccabæan portions (assuming that some portions of it are pre-Maccabæan) of the book of Enoch must certainly be ascribed to the Chassidim ; p. xviii but it is not on that account necessary to ascribe all the later portions to the Pharisees. Three points especially militate against this: some of the teaching concerning the Messiah; the, generally speaking, universalistic spirit, which is quite un-Pharisaic, and the attitude towards the Law, which is not that of the Pharisees. It is not to be denied that some portions ( e.g. cii. 6 ff.) are from the hands of Pharisees; nor can it be doubted that the whole collection in its present form has been worked over by a Pharisee, or Pharisees; but that all the post-Maccabæan portions in their original form emanated from Pharisaic circles does not appear to have been proved. It seems more likely that, with the exceptions already referred to, the various component parts of the book were written by Apocalyptists who belonged neither to Pharisaic nor yet to Sadducæan circles. LANGUAGE The Book of Enoch exists only in the Ethiopic Version; this was translated from the Greek Version, of which only a few portions are extant. 1 The Latin Version, which was also made from the Greek, is not extant, with the exception of i. 9, and cvi. 1-18; the fragment containing these two passages was discovered by the Rev. Al. R. James, of King's College, Cambridge, in the British Museum. The book was originally written either in Hebrew or Aramaic; Charles thinks that chapters vi.-xxxvi., lxxxiii.-xc. were Aramaic, the rest Hebrew. It is, however, very difficult to say for certain which of these two languages was really the original, because, p.