Contemporary Study of the First Enoch: Review of Two Monographs

Abstract

 The books of Enoch, as well as other apocrypha, mostly remain a marginal field of research, although many prominent scholars, including biblical ones, have worked and are working in this field. The apprehension with which theology treats «repudiated books» is historically understandable and dogmatically reasoned. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that the apocrypha contain a lot of intersections both with the canonical biblical tradition and with non- repudiated texts that are not included in the biblical canon, but included in the Sacred Tradition, and therefore their study is not only important for the hermeneutics of these texts, but also it can provide secular researchers with abundant material for their criticism, which does not al- low theologians to ignore them, as well as questions about authorship of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic literature, motivation for its creation, reasons and ways of penetration into the canon of parallels (and even literal coincidences) with it. In this review, the reader is introduced into two recent (2013 and 2023) monographs on the books of Enoch, mainly devoted to the First of them, as the largest and most significant apocrypha in this seria.