From Scribalism to Sectarianism: The Angelic Descent Myth and the Social Settings of Enochic Pseudepigraphy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE COMPOSITE NATURE AND COMPLEX REDACTION-HISTORY OF THE Book of the Watchers point to its origins, not in the vision of a single author, but rather in the hands of a series of authors, redactors, and tradents. The previous chapter surveyed some of the scribal concerns that dominate this apocalypse: we noted its elevation of Enoch as a “scribe of righteousness” ( 1 En . 12:3–4; 15:1) and its self-consciousness about the power of writing, as well as its “scientific,” exegetical, and epistemological interests. Most scholars infer from these features that the apocalypse emerged from a scribal milieu. Important questions, however, remain unanswered: should we imagine these scribes as a closed group of apocalypticists, visionaries, or “Enochians,” who can be readily distinguished from other Jews? Or should we see their distinctive interests and concerns as part of a broader continuum of “normative” ideologies in the third century bce , reflecting ongoing discussions about knowledge, purity, and piety within a single scribal discourse? And, most importantly, what was their relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and to the tradents responsible for the continued transmission of the texts that would eventually form the Tanakh? We lack the evidence to reconstruct Judaism in the third century bce with any degree of certainty. Consequently, scholarly answers to these questions have often been shaped by the reception-history of the Book of the Watchers .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".