First Glance
In “When the Sons of God Cavorted With the Daughters of Men,” Ronald S. Hendel focuses on a story that has scandalized Bible readers for millennia. How did it get there? What does it mean, this seemingly polytheistic tale of earthly women and fallen angels? In a sometimes breathtaking analysis, Hendel explains how strains from earlier Canaanite and Babylonian stories have been transformed in the Bible to teach moral lessons and to explain humankind’s mortality.
A former excavator at Tel Lachish Archaeological Project in Israel, Hendel is assistant professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University. In 1985, his paper, “Parallel Themes in the Ugaritic Epic Poems and the Hebrew Bible,” won the Mitchell Dahood Memorial Prize in Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic.
The strange story of the sons of God and the daughters of men is carried forward in the apocalyptic book of Enoch, which was considered scriptural by several New Testament writers. Unknown to modern scholars until its rediscovery in the 19th century, the Book of Enoch caused a sensation when it first appeared in English in 1821. Themes of the Last Judgment, resurrection, and the world beyond, inspired poets and, artists and gave scholars grist for years of study.
Long thought to post-date Jesus, Enoch is now dated by scholars centuries earlier, as shown by recently published fragments of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In “The Strange Visions of Enoch,” Matthew Black explains how this Jewish book provides a bridge between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and how its concepts and philosophy affected early Christianity.
Black, emeritus professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and an eminent Bible scholar, recently published a translation and exhaustive textual study, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch (Leiden: Brill, 1985). Black pursues old traditions in his leisure time as well, playing golf on Scotland’s famous greens.
The Book of Enoch is only one of a vast literature of Bible-like books produced between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. In “Don’t Let Pseudepigrapha Scare You,” BR editor Hershel Shanks describes a range of pseudepigraphic genres—visions, apocalypses, philosophy and psalms. They can be studied and understood, says Shanks, with the help of Professor James H. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary; Charlesworth recently wrote a book on how the pseudepigrapha have revealed varied and sophisticated aspects of Judaism that enriched early Christianity. Charlesworth also edited The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.
“Was the Last Supper a Passover Seder?” asks Baruch M. Bokser. To answer, we must first appreciate historical modifications in the Passover observance. From Biblical times until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., Passover observance centered around the sacrifice; after the destruction of the Temple, significant changes were made in the ritual—and the changes have survived to this day. To understand the Last Supper we must understand these changes.
Associate professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Bokser has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at Brown University. His books include The Origins of the Seder and Post-Mishnaic Judaism in Transition.
In “Illuminations,” Rabbi Stephen Fuchs discusses a little-noticed aspect of King Solomon’s reign: No prophet advised Solomon. The prophet-priest Samuel controlled Saul, the prophets Nathan and Gad rode herd on David, but Solomon took leave of prophets after his anointment by Nathan and Zadok. Fuchs suggests that special qualifications may have exempted Solomon from this standard liaison, but the lack of a prophet may have led to Solomon’s downfall.
Senior Rabbi of the Ohabai Sholom Congregation in Nashville, Tennesee, Fuchs has published numerous articles on interfaith relations in national journals.
The “My View” department presents “Faith vs. Scientific Study of the Bible,” by F. F. Bruce. As an evangelical Christian and an acclaimed and versatile scholar, Bruce offers a rich personal view of the Bible and its heroes in their historical and sociological settings.