4Q369 "Prayer of Enosh" and Ancient Biblical Interpretation

Abstract

The text 4Q369, designated by its editors Harry Attridge and John Strugnell as the Prayer of was published in 1994.' I should say at the outset that the designation Prayer of Enosh strikes me as somewhat unfortunate. While it is true that the words of this text are in large measure addressed to God-hence, it does indeed seem to be some kind of prayer-the editors themselves suggest that only the first column of the first fragment actually contains a prayer of Enosh, while the second column of that fragment-by far the largest piece of readable text-they believe to be the prayer of a different figure, possibly Enoch. In truth, it seems to me unlikely that there are two different speakers here, and still less likely that the speaker of this second column is Enoch, for the simple reason that, as we shall see presently, this section is actually devoted to the subject of the people of Israel and its founder, Jacob. Of course, the speaker of this section could be Enoch if he were discoursing prophetically about Jacob/ Israel, but there is no indication that that is the case. The speaker of column 2, at any rate, is talking about events that have already taken place. In the following I would like to examine a few of the lines of this column 2 in greater detail. What I propose to do is not so much to comment, stricto sensu, on the words of the text as to sketch briefly the exegetical environment within which they were written, drawing

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