Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [303]
Second Enoch
SECOND ENOCH, extant in two Slavonic versions, is a further extension of the Enoch legend, most probably through a Christian recension, since the importance of Torah does not figure in the story. Yet, the possibility of a Semitic language, possibly even a Jewish Vorlage (original edition), especially in the shorter version, cannot be ruled out. Many Christians wrote in the Aramaic language as well, and there were Jewish Christians who claimed both Jewish and Christian identities at once, whatever their Christian and Jewish brothers may have thought of them. In 2 Enoch 22:7, Enoch is transformed during a face-to-face encounter with the LORD into “one of his glorious ones”-in short, an angel and a star. Note, however, the use of glorification language to characterize angelic status. God decrees: “Let Enoch join in and stand in front of My face forever,” thus explaining for us the Rabbinic term “Prince of the Presence,” which is normally applied to Metatron. It is the highest category of angel in 4 Ezra, and in this book it has become an official, titled position. Then, on the basis of this promotion, Enoch is transformed into his new angelic status:
And the Lord said to Michael, “Go, and extract Enoch from [his] earthly clothing. And anoint him with my delightful oil, and put him into the clothes of my glory. And so Michael did, just as the Lord had said to him. He anointed me and he clothed me. And the appearance of that oil is greater than the greatest light, and its ointment is like sweet dew, and its fragrance myrrh; and it is like the rays of the glittering sun. And I looked at myself, and I had become like one of his glorious ones, and there was no observable difference. (2 En 22:8-10, recension A)
Here, the transformation is effected through a change of “clothing.” The clothing represents Enoch’s new transformed, immortal flesh as it is immortal clothing. This is a significant parallel with Paul’s future glorification of the mortal body in 2 Cor 5:1-10.22 Enoch has been put “in” the body of an angel, or he is “in” the manlike figure in 1 Enoch 71. This may all be a further explanation of Paul’s use of the peculiar terminology “in Christ.”
The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Daniel
THE ORIGIN and date of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs have been much debated in recent years. It may either be a Jewish work composed as early as the second century BCE but to which a Christian editor later added material, or it may instead be a Jewish Christian work dating from the second century CE. The older notion that the text was composed in Greek must now be reevaluated because of the Hebrew and Aramaic fragments found at Qumran. These suggest that at least two of the testaments, the Testaments of Naphtali and Levi, were originally written in Semitic languages. Even if others are later Christian compositions, the traditions inherent in the testaments have so many affinities to 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Dead Sea Scrolls that the non-Christian material may be assumed also to be pre-Christian.23
Like Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Testaments emphasize the struggle between cosmological forces, which are typical of apocalypticism and at the same time reflections on cataclysmic events in Judea during the first centuries. The Testaments are particularly emphatic in their notion that the patriarchs were resurrected. They use the word “raised,” typical for Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity, to express it in T Jud 25:1; T. Sim 6:7; T. Zeb 10:1-4; and T. Ben 10:6-10. In T. Ben 10, the patriarchs’ resurrection, is combined with a universal resurrection: “All shall rise, some to glory and some to shame” (10:8), just as in the general resurrection prophesied in Daniel 12. In T. Simeon 6:7, the patriarch prophesies his own resurrection: “Then I shall rise in joy and I shall