The Book of Enoch, or 1 Enoch: Translated From the Editor's Ethiopic Text, and Edited With the Introduction, Notes and Indexes of the First Edition ... from the Editor's Text of the Greek Fragment - Livres de poche

Excerpt from The Book of Enoch: Translated From the Editors Ethiopic Text, and Edited With the Introduction Notes Ans Indexes of the First Edition Wholly Recast Enlarged and Rewritten, Together With a Reprint From the Editor's Text of the Greek Fragments

This is not so much a second edition as a new book. A brief comparison of the first edition and the present work will make this clear even to the cursory reader. Alike in the translation and in the commentary it forms a vast advance on its predecessor. I cannot claim to be satisfied with it even as it stands, and yet twenty additional years spent in Apocalyptic and Biblical studies have not, I would fain hope, been fruitless with regard to the present work.

The translation in the first edition was made from Dillmann's edition of the Ethiopia text, which was based on five MSS. With a view to this translation the present editor emended and revised Dillmann's text in accordance with nine hitherto uncollated Ethiopic MSS. in the British Museum, and the Greek and Latin fragments which had just come to light, but notwithstanding every care he felt his work in this respect to be of a wholly provisional character. From the date of the publication of the first edition in 1893 he steadily made preparation for an edition of the Ethiopic text and of the Greek and Latin fragments. This text, which is exhaustive of existing textual materials in these languages, was published by the University Press in 1906, and from this text the present translation is made. A new and revolutionary feature in the translation is due to the editor's discovery of the poetical structure of a considerable portion of the work. I call it revolutionary; for such it proves to be in respect of the critical problems of the text. By its means the lost original of the text is not infrequently recovered, phrases and clauses recognized as obvious interpolations, and not a few lines restored to their original context, whose claims to a place in the text were hitherto ignored on the ground of the weakness of their textual attestation.

During the past eighteen years the criticism of the book has made undoubted headway, and that, I am glad to say, mainly in the direction defined in the first edition. The idea of a Grundschrift, which was accepted by most of the chief scholars in this field till its appearance, and to which I strove and not in vain to give the coup de grace, is now universally abandoned.

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