Enochic Biography and the Manuscript History of 1 Enoch: The Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers

This article suggests that the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers attests a new arrangement of the work, one organized around a Genesis-style biography of Enoch. I argue that the two scribes of the Book of the Watchers in Codex Panopolitanus are pursuing radically different literary goals and produce different narrative progressions. The first, Scribe 1, begins with an Enochic tour of the cosmos (corresponding to 1 En. 19–21), smoothly transitions to Enoch’s earthly life (1 En. 1–11), then addresses his final period of angelic companionship and ascent to heaven (1 En 12–14). This narrative progression has been universally overlooked because the initial tour of the cosmos has been classed as a mistake in transmission (duplicate material), being so deviant from the expected version of the text. Here, in contrast, Scribe 1’s text is read as a thoughtful composition, corresponding to the progression of Enoch’s life and culminating in an ascent to heaven. The observed practices of textual arrangement in service of biography are further contextualized alongside an analogous transformation of the Ascen-sion of Isaiah into the Greek Legend of Isaiah. I identify the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers as a complex site of both reception and transmission, emphasizing the crucial role of reception history in the text criticism of ancient Jewish and Christian works.


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Journal of Biblical Literature 140, no. 1 (2021)   "beginning" of the work, what we now call 1 En.1.1 Greek editions of the Book of the Watchers, without exception, pass over this inconvenient misordering and present the text from 1:1 onward, corresponding with the Ethiopic version.Any variants are noted in critical apparatuses, except for the enormous variation in order.Though every treatment of which I am aware unanimously dismisses this variation in order as a scribal mistake or hiccup in the production of the manuscript, I will argue that this manuscript represents a new arrangement of the Book of the Watchers as a Genesis-style biography of Enoch. 2 In the first part of the article, I establish the conditions for the possibility that the manuscript need not be deemed deficient.I directly address the current evaluation of Codex Panopolitanus's Book of the Watchers, critiquing the scholarly consensus that the manuscript is a shoddy or rushed production.Guarding against the assumption that the manuscript is the product of scribal error, I focus on the contribution of the first scribal hand, or Scribe 1-for there are two distinct hands responsible for the construction of the Book of the Watchers in this codex.I retrieve textual material from the contribution of Scribe 1 that has previously been classed as error ridden for the purposes of a new approach.
In the second part, I propose that the material production of Scribe 1 is a biographic arrangement of the Book of the Watchers in keeping with Enoch's life and times.For a comparison, I introduce a previously noted example of biographical arrangement in the manuscript tradition of the Ascension of Isaiah.I then argue that Scribe 1's Book of the Watchers, as it is found in the manuscript, chronologically narrates the story of Enoch's life, beginning with his tours alongside the angels, moving through his earthly proclamations of judgment, and culminating in his translation to heaven.I introduce consonances between this arrangement and the Genesis 5 account of Enoch's life.
The most specific contribution of this article is the proposal that Codex Panopolitanus's Book of the Watchers is best understood as a literary production highlighting the personage of Enoch, to whom the work is pseudepigraphically ascribed.I suggest that the literary device of ascription has material consequences.Said differently, the force of a pseudepigraphal attribution changes the way the text is viewed over time.Biography was found by readers amid the text in the process of transmission.
But there is a larger contribution to the study of ancient philology more generally.This manuscript can manifest itself to scholars very differently depending on what we ask of it.If we are looking for a witness to a literary archetype of the text of the Book of the Watchers, as arranged in Ethiopic, then deviations from that overall pattern will be deemed corruptions and variants, and Codex Pano politanus becomes a problematic document, as it has been treated in the past.If, however, we see this manuscript as an artifact in Enochic reception history, another set of data emerges, one that points to interested scribes in late antiquity walking and blurring the fine line between transmission and generative composition.
Indeed, the fact that the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers was created at all points to an ongoing interest in Enoch and Enochic texts.We cordon off this interest under the rubric of reception history, but it is ultimately inseparable from the manuscripts in which the interest is manifest.The study of manuscripts is as much the practice of the reception historian as it is of the text critic, and this study of the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers is a reminder of the insights available to those attentive to both avenues of inquiry.

I. Out of Order, or Reordering?
Situating the Document The scholarly consensus has been that Codex Panopolitanus was a rushed production, subject to technical errors.Yet we will see that many of the features classed as mistakes become less troublesome when we read the production of each scribe independently.The textual production of the first contributing scribe, whom I call Scribe 1, is not as problematic as has been assumed but flows relatively well as a continuous literary product.
Codex Panopolitanus (BAAM 0522; cf.TM 59976/LDAB 1088) is also known as the Akhmim or Gizeh manuscript. 3It was likely discovered in a grave in an excavation of Akhmim (the ancient city of Panopolitanus, hence the two monikers) in the winter of 1886-1887. 4Because of the manuscript's Christian contents, Urbain Bouriant, the initial publisher, postulated that the codex was deposited in the grave by a monk, though there is no independent evidence for a monastic context.Codex Panopolitanus contains, in order, a large Coptic cross illustration (p.1), excerpts from the Greek Gospel of Peter (pp.2-10), excerpts from the Greek Apocalypse of Peter (pp.11-20), the Book of the Watchers (pp.21-66), then, glued to the rear backboard, a one-page extract from a martyrdom of Julian.Thus, more than half the codex is our Enochic material.
Bouriant originally transcribed and published the Enochic text in 1892, with corrections from Adolphe Lods appearing in the same series a year later. 5In this same publication, Lods also provided a facsimile of the entire codex, a task for which scholars can be especially thankful today, as it is still the only publication that preserves its pages in order. 6In the subsequent decades, the Greek text was edited and treated many times, often in concert with the Ethiopic material. 7In more recent years, Matthew Black has prepared a helpful edition and collation of the Greek Enoch material, 8 and Erik Larson's dissertation on Greek Enoch represents a substantial analytical treatment of the text. 9In recent articles, Marcello Del Verme and Luca Arcari, as well as Kelley Coblentz Bautch, have provided up-todate treatments of the history and dating of the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers, alongside other Greek Enoch material. 10he codex has been dated according to the interpretation of three factors-the exact place of discovery in the Akhmim necropolis, paleography, and assumptions concerning the relationship between the production of the codex and the burial.Mss. and with the Gizeh and Other Greek and Latin Fragments Which Are Here Published  in Full (Oxford: Clarendon, 1893).See also his subsequent re-editions of the Greek in his 1906 and 1912 editions of 1 Enoch. 8Black bases his text of the Book of the Watchers on the Codex Panopolitanus manuscript.See Matthew Black, Apocalypsis Henochi Graece, PVTG 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1970).Black also provides text, when extant, from excerpts of a Greek Book of the Watchers found in the ninth-century chronography of George Syncellus (see ch. 6:1-9:4, 8:4-10:14, and 15:8-16:7; note that 8:4-9:4 is therefore attested twice, each time being slightly different).
Given the apparent "carelessness" of our Enochic manuscript (which is to say, the degree to which it is not deemed a satisfactory translation or transmission of a proposed Book of the Watchers archetype), many scholars, among them Emil Schürer, Michael A. Knibb, Black, and Albert Marie Denis, suggest that the manuscript was copied in haste so as to make sure it was ready in time to be included in the grave burial. 12For this hypothesis, however, a close alliance between the time of composition and the time of burial is essential, a correlation that cannot be established with any degree of certainty, thanks to the relative weakness of our evidence on provenance.Moreover, in my literary analysis I will argue against the view that our scribe was careless, an assumption born out of scholarly confusion at the misordering and duplication at the start of the manuscript, for which I will provide an alternate explanation.
Indeed, sufficient attention has not been paid to the two hands responsible for producing the Book of the Watchers.So, Knibb breaks the Codex Panopolitanus manuscript into "GrPan = Eth 1-32" and "GrPan a = the duplicate version of Eth 19.3-21.9." 13 Against this delineation, Codex Panopolitanus is best broken into two according to the different scribes that produced it.Scribe 1 copied a text corre sponding to 1 En.19:3-21:9 followed by 1:1-14:22 (fig.1); at which point Scribe 2's contribution begins, copying text corresponding to 1 En.14:22b-32:6 (fig.2). 14The Codex Panopolitanus manuscript of the Book of the Watchers is the work of two scribes, not one, and reconstructions of the circumstances behind its composition must thus account for two actors, one continuing the work of the other.
To conclude the discussion of date, I accept a rough sixth-century date for the Enochic piece of the codex, thanks to convincing paleographic analyses conducted elsewhere.I am suspicious of the supposition that our codex was hastily prepared so as to be included in an immediately contemporary burial, because I do not agree with the corresponding evaluation of the quality and production of the codex, and because the reality of two scribal hands has not been fully addressed.
"Fixing" the First Quire: A New Hypothesis I described the contents of Codex Panopolitanus above, but further comments are required concerning the physical assembly of the Book of the Watchers.These will demonstrate that the first quire of the Book of the Watchers is missing its first two pages, whereas the remainder of the quires used by Scribe 1 seem to be preserved in their complete form.I do this to establish the material limits of the literary composition of Scribe 1.
The codex comprises thirty-three sheets of parchment, or sixty-six pages, in a leather-bound codex measuring 15 cm tall × 12 cm wide.It begins with excerpts from the Gospel of Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter, written in the same hand.The hand is semicursive, unlike the (differing) majuscules of our two Enochic scribes. 15The Apocalypse of Peter, the second discrete work in the codex, is bound upside down.This last observation demonstrates the validity of van Minnen's hypothesis that the codex is organized according to quires, as the physical displacement of eight pages in one fell swoop suggests a higher level of organization than individual pages.In the case of the Apocalypse of Peter, van Minnen suggests that the displaced eight pages point to the existence of a binio, or two bifolia comprising four leaves or eight pages. 16fter the Apocalypse of Peter, the Book of the Watchers begins.Van Minnen suggests that it comprises three quires, all quaternios, consisting of four bifolia/ 14 Larson's dissertation correctly describes this scribal activity, though he assigns only the categories of GrPan 1 and GrPan 2 to the two different texts that emerge out of the "duplication" of 1 En.19:3-21:9, the former being the marker when it appears in its "proper" place, and the latter marking the unexpected appearance at the start of the manuscript.It is equally important to stretch the categories of GrPan 1 and GrPan 2 to describe the scribal activity of our two separate scribes.See Larson, "Translation of Enoch, " 67, 74.See also the similar description (and note that the categories do not correspond to our scribes) in Bautch, "Panopolitanus, " 78. 15 Cavallo and Maehler, Greek Bookhands, 90. 16Van Minnen, "Greek Apocalypse of Peter, " 21.  eight leaves/sixteen pages apiece.17Altogether this would add up to forty-eight pages, though only forty-six are extant, a point to which I will return. 18By this count, Scribe 1 is responsible for the first two of three proposed Enochic quires-as is visible in figure 1, the handwriting, "a bold sloping majuscule of a rather crude type, "19 is apparent throughout.Scribe 2 is responsible for the final quire-as can be seen in figure 2, the handwriting is smaller and finer. 20his proposed quiring cannot be conclusively proven, since the bifolia were split to facilitate photography. 21However, my own analysis of the Enochic material produced by Scribe 1 can now provide some clarity on the matter.Scribe 1 depended on pricking (evident on the photographs of the manuscript, including fig. 1) to regulate the number of lines he put on any given page in a quire, which is generally quite consistent within a quire.Scribe 1 was apparently inconsistent when it came to maintaining the number of lines from quire to quire.Thus, from the number of lines per page, it seems that Scribe 1's contribution comprised four binios, rather than two quaternios, though this is speculative.In table 1 on the following page, I have tallied the number of lines on each page.It should become clear that there are subdivisions of eight-page sets, which I have named Quires A, B, C, and D, which generally have the same number of lines per page.
As can be seen from table 1, Quire A has 22 lines per page, Quire B has 21 lines per page, Quire C has 23/24, 22 and Quire D returns to 22 lines per page.Quires B, C, and D include eight pages each.Most importantly, however, Quire A contains only six pages.Van Minnen had already postulated two pages missing from the front of the quire, which now seems demonstrably correct. 23ith some clarity on the nature and location of the missing pages, we can now address the perplexing beginning of the first quire.As I have mentioned, the initial attestation of 1 En.19:3-21:9-which, in the interest of brevity, I will refer to as "Duplicate Material"-at the start of the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers (pp.21-23) has been the cause of a great deal of concern over the last century of scholarship. 24August Dillmann, working before he saw the facsimiles, even thought the Duplicate Material was from the hand of a third scribe! 25 Two technical solutions have had staying power in the secondary literature, both attempting to recreate the circumstances of a serious scribal mistake. 26There are two core interpretative shortcomings of these approaches.
First, they fail to account for the possibility that Scribe 1 and Scribe 2 are different entities, not necessarily working in concert toward one unified goal.Though Scribe 2 operated according to the progression of Book of the Watchers as we now recognize it in Ethiopic, Scribe 1 may not have been doing the same, and the literary production of his successor cannot be read back onto his own textual production.Moreover, the overlapping passage that is usually called a "duplicate" is actually only a duplicate when you read the two scribal productions together.After all, each scribe 22 Visual inspection of the manuscript shows that the copying is sloped and messy on these pages, especially on p. 38 when the line number slips from 23 to 24.
23 Van Minnen, "Greek Apocalypse of Peter, " 22. 24 A survey of scholarship can be found in Larson, "Translation of Enoch, " 71-74. 25Dillmann, "Über den neugefunden griechischen Text, " 1039. 26The first, found in Lods and echoed (with modifications) in Larson suggests that the Duplicate Material stems from the same exemplar as the rest of the Book of the Watchers, but was physically displaced and placed at the beginning.The scribe noticed the inversion only after copying for a while, then put the sheet where it properly belonged, and carried on copying as if nothing had happened.Any differences between the two versions are due to the carelessness of the scribes.See Adolphe Lods, Le Livre d'Hénoch: Fragments grecs découverts à Akhmîm (Haute Égypte): Publiés avec les variantes du texte éthiopien (Paris: Leroux, 1892), xlvii-xlviii; Larson, "Translation of Enoch, " 84.
Bautch notes in 2018 that "no one explanation has become the consensus" ("Panopolitanus, " 77).writes 1 En.19:3-21:9 only once.We might speculate that Scribe 2 may have seen himself as duplicating, or righting the order of, 1 En.19:3-21:9, assuming that he is working off an exemplar that looks like the Ethiopic Book of the Watchers.This assumption, however, is either unwarranted or unhelpful in the case of Scribe 1.We should take Scribe 1's textual production on its own merits, before looking at it through the lens of Scribe 2 (and thus measuring it against an assumed "order" of the Book of the Watchers, informed by the later Ethiopic tradition).Second, and most important, since the nature of the "jump" between 21:9 and 1:1 has never been considered to be anything other than an error, nobody has ever noticed how smooth the transition is!I have yet to find a single edition of this text that preserves the Greek text in the order it appears-apart from Lods's facsimile, every treatment of the text rearranges the order so the text progresses from 1:1 to 32:6, with an appendix or parallel column for the Duplicate Material when it appears. 27Because of that, it appears that the text merely trails off, thus reinforcing the conviction that the scribe must have realized his mistake and tried to start over before anyone noticed-in fact, more than a few of these editions end their transcription of the Duplicate Material with a bashful ellipsis. 28The actual textual progression of the manuscript is nowhere to be found.

Dugan: The
To correct this, I have assembled in table 2 below the text of 1 En.21:8 and 21:9 in their "fullest" iterations using the work of Scribe 2 (as seems to be expected in all publications of the text thus far), alongside the actual textual progression of the manuscript (including the subsequent move to 1 En.1:1 and 1:2) as it appears in the work of Scribe 1.I have marked in figure 3 a starting point (21:9) and an ending point (end of 1:1).
When all of Scribe 2's version of 21:9 is restored, several (21:8, 21:9) confessions of fear are followed (with no transition) by a proclamation of Enoch's grand revelation, which would be an awkward narrative shift.But this is not the text witnessed by the manuscript.Rather, in the text written by Scribe 1, Enoch expresses fear in response to his tour of the places of punishment for the disobedient stars.Then "he" (and it must be Uriel, for he is Enoch's only conversation partner in Scribe 1's text so far) answers Enoch, and speaks the words that Nickelsburg's edition dubs "superscription to the book." 29 By speaking the verse 1 "superscrip-27 Bouriant adds facing columns when the text reaches 1 En.19, as do Dillmann and Charles; Lods presents the text of Scribe 2, with variants from the Duplicate Material in an apparatus; Swete and Black present the text of Scribe 2, with all of the Duplicate Material reprinted in the apparatus.See Bouriant, "Fragments du texte grec, " 132; Dillmann, "Über den neugefunden griechischen Text, " 1089; Charles, Book of Enoch, 55; Lods, Le Livre d 'Hénoch, 42-47; Swete, Psalms of Solomon,  40-41; Black, Apocalypsis Henochi Graece, 33.And this is even the case for the photographs hosted by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at Oxford, which moves the photographs of the "duplicate" pages from where they appear in the manuscript and displays them at the very end of the slideshow, after the work of Scribe 2, as of March 2021.
28 See Bouriant, "Fragments du texte grec, " 132; Black, Apocalypsis Henochi Graece, 33; Charles, Book of Enoch, 55; Larson, "Translation of Enoch, " 78. 29In a progression of the Book of the Watchers beginning with 1 En. 1, this obliquely voiced tion, " and verse 1 only, thanks to Scribe 1's literary arrangement, Uriel authenticates the remainder of the revelations contained in the Book of the Watchers, introducing Enoch's oracle and affirming his prophethood.It is still a bit of a jarring narrative transition, with the rapid switch from Uriel speaking to Enoch on a tour of the cosmos (21:8), to an earth-focused oracle beginning in 1:1.But on a phrase-by-phrase level, it is not entirely abrupt.On the contrary, the syntax is largely without problems and might even provide evidence of a particular literary choice to emphasize the role of angelic revelation and angelic guidance. 30o summarize the above discussion, Scribe 1's text should not automatically be read as a deficient attestation of an Enochic archetype.Rather, the possibility that this text represents a unique and creative arrangement of Enochic material has not yet been considered in the secondary literature.I have sought to correct this oversight.Through attention to codicology and reimagination of the nature of the "transition" from 21:9 to 1:1, I create the conditions for appreciating Scribe 1's contribution as a literary choice.I have argued against evaluations of the text that regard it as a hasty composition or the result of scribal mechanics gone wrong.Up to this point, I hope the reader will agree that the manuscript need not necessarily be deemed deficient.In what follows, I will demonstrate that this suspension of suspicion bears fruit in allowing us to see Scribe 1's composition as a biographical arrangement of the Book of the Watchers.
third-person verse does read like a sort-of title or superscription.But, in the progression of Scribe 1, these words appear in a different grammatical context and are ascribed to a real character, Uriel, so the generic classification of "title" or "superscription" cannot be affirmed automatically.This is the word of the Blessing of Enoch, 34 according to which he blessed the righteous chosen who will be present on the day of tribulation, to remove all the hateful, and the righteous will be saved. 35

II. Scribe 1's Composition: A (Biblical?) Biography of Enoch
Precedent in "Biographic" Greek Pseudepigrapha I suggest that Scribe 1's Book of the Watchers is arranged to better narrate the biography of Enoch, to whom the work was pseudepigraphically ascribed.But, before addressing the Enochic manuscript, we can find precedent in a previously noted (though historically later) example of biographic arrangement in the manuscript tradition of a Greek pseudepigraphal work.
The transformation of the Ascension of Isaiah into the so-called Greek Legend of Isaiah is most notable because it rearranges the text so that Isaiah dies (more logically) at the end.The Ascension of Isaiah comprises eleven chapters in the extant Ethiopic text.This is the basis for most available translations and presentations of the work. 36Here is a much-simplified summary:  (11:33-43)   device of third-person speech used to refer to oneself could have inspired or worked in concert with the choice to place Uriel as the speaker of verse 1, but it becomes problematic fairly quickly, as Enoch begins to use the first person to describe his visions by the second half of the verse, and from that point on.For this reason, I think Scribe 1's innovative move is limited to giving Enoch's opening "line, " 1:1, to Uriel. 36The most recent critical editions of the Ascension and Greek Legend of Isaiah can be found in Enrico Norelli et al., Ascensio Isaiae, vol. 1, Textus, CCSA 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 1-129, 329-51.
These eleven chapters are usually split into two originally independent works-the Martyrdom of Isaiah, being chapters 1-5, and the Vision of Isaiah, or chapters 6-11. 37If we follow the eleven-chapter narrative progression as found in Ethiopic, the work runs as follows: First, Isaiah's persecution and death at the hands of Manasseh, to which chapters 1-5 of the published text are devoted.By the close of chapter 5, Isaiah has been sawed in half with a wooden saw.Without explanation, a very-much-alive Isaiah reappears at the start of chapter 6, as Isaiah visits Hezekiah and recounts his vision of heavenly ascent.As the vision concludes with chapter 11, the Ethiopic narrator reminds the reader that Isaiah was sawed in half because he had visions like this, thus (belatedly) knitting together the first and second narrative arcs.
The reader is justifiably perplexed that Isaiah dies halfway through his own pseudepigraphon.Indeed, this is not just the assessment of a modern reader-it seems to have been the grounds for the emergence of the transformed work called the Greek Legend of Isaiah.The Greek Legend is extant in two manuscripts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries-Palatinus gr.27 (folios 86-89v; cf.Pinakes 65760) and Parisinus gr.1534 (folios 245-251; cf.Pinakes 51152). 38The Greek Legend has been recognized from its first publication as a reorientation of the Ascension around the personage of Isaiah-or as Oscar von Gebhardt's initial publication called it, "Die Ascensio Isaiae als Heiligenlegende."39 On the following page is the progression of the Greek Legend using the eleventh-century Palatinus gr.27, compared with the Ascension. 40he Greek legend has essentially used the Martyrdom as a frame narrative and situated it around Isaiah's heavenly ascent.The story begins at Hezekiah's court, where a similar passing of the torch to Manasseh takes place.The vision that takes place at Hezekiah's court is, naturally, narrated next, and the death and burial of Isaiah mark the end of the story in the Greek Legend of Isaiah.The shape of the story changes, but the text does not change beyond recognition. 41 Legend is not a new work; it generally uses the text of the demonstrably earlier Ascension.It is simply the arrangement of preexisting material to tell a coherent story.And the principle by which coherence is judged is, at least in part, whether it effectively narrates the life and death of Isaiah.Most specifically, there is a responsiveness to the truism that death is the end of the story. 42nterest in the prophet to whom the text is attributed is borne out in the trajectory of the material history of the Ascension of Isaiah.This textual transformation suggests that ancient scribes felt keenly the gravity of key features in the human lives of their eponymous sages-like the death of Isaiah, or, as we will now explore, the curious ascent and/or non-death of Enoch.In addition, it is crucial to note that this interest is manifest in practices of textual arrangement, rather than composition from scratch.

Enoch in Codex Panopolitanus
We can now pursue the case for a biographical recension of the Book of the Watchers in Codex Panopolitanus, arranged to tell the story of Enoch's life including his walks with the angels and culminating in his ascent to heaven.Codex Panopolitanus, if my case is accepted, would represent an early example of the kind of Greek Legend of the Ascension of Isaiah, " in Philomathestatos: Studies in Greek and Byzantine Texts Presented to Jacques Noret for His SixtyFifth Birthday, ed.Bram Roosen, Peter van Deun, and Bart Janssens, OLA 137 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 671-701.Verheyden concludes that the Greek Legend falls somewhat short of being a medieval vita, strictly speaking, though he suggests that it participates in the medieval discourse of holy men more generally.
42 An analogous, though more complex, example of biographic arrangement in pseudepigraphal manuscript traditions can be found in the biographically oriented sixteenth-century Manuscript D of the Testament of Solomon, on which see, most recently, Ryan Bailey, "Greek Manuscripts of the Testament of Solomon in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, " in The Embroi dered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in Honour of Michael E. Stone, ed.Lorenzo DiTommaso, Matthias Henze, and William Adler, SVTP 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 170-212, here 172-73.Note Bailey's suggestion that this manuscript represents a Byzantine metaphrasis, and a vita of Solomon.biography-sensitive textual transformation that presents itself more obviously in the medieval manuscript tradition discussed above.
The chart below provides a brief overview of the literary production of Scribe 1, representing the Duplicate Material (1 En. 19:3-21:9), followed by 1:1-14:22, in the order in which it appears in the manuscript.I turn now to possible consonances with a "biblical" Enochic biography and suggest that the logic of Scribe 1's arrangement has to do with narrating a kind of biography of Enoch, moving through two tours of heaven and culminating in Enoch's final ascent to heaven.
We begin with the Duplicate Material.Concerning the missing two pages from the start of Quire A, the logical restoration would be some material from Enoch's journey around the earth in 1 En.17-19.Although everything currently extant in the Ethiopic version would not fit in the two pages needed to fill out our quire, this difficulty is not insurmountable.As has been noted elsewhere, this particular collection of Enochic material (1 En. 17-19, as extant in the Ethiopic) shows all the telltale signs of some sort of independent circulation, redaction, and textual exchange with other pieces of the Book of the Watchers. 43It would not be unreasonable to expect the missing two pages to contain a version of Enoch's journeys that is either excerpted from a longer account (which might be roughly equivalent to what exists in Ethiopic recensions) or drawn from an independently circulating recension (no longer extant). 44Nonetheless, whichever piece or pieces of chapters 17-19 are restored, it is a natural starting point.While chapters 14-16 narrate Enoch's ascent to heaven and commissioning to preach to the Watchers, in the Ethiopic (and Scribe 2's) progression, chapter 17 turns a new page in the narration of the Book of the Watchers, to focus on Enoch's travels around the earthly and cosmic planes.Indeed, Scribe 2's transmission of chapter 17 begins with the transitional phrase "and they took me, and led me away to a certain place" (καὶ παραλαβόντες με εἴς τινα τόπον ἀπήγαγον).Something new begins at this point, and it is feasible that it therefore might have seemed a reasonable starting point for a creative and editorially minded ancient scribe.
With this hypothesis in mind, we now enter the extant text of our manuscript.It begins abruptly or, rather, appears to do so because context has dropped away.Below are a transcription and translation, with Scribe 2's text for comparison: There are a few things worth noticing in Scribe 1's text.The first is that the name of Uriel (ουριηλ) goes unmentioned, perhaps because he will be introduced later, or because he was introduced in our missing pages.The latter seems more likely, as the upcoming list of angels in 1 En.20:7 will close with the summation "the names of the seven archangels, " who only number six without Uriel.In any case, Uriel's name is implied, even if not extant.
The second noteworthy feature, and perhaps the most fascinating, is the reading ὡς ἐγὼ ἴδον ὡς εἷς τῶν ἁγίων ἀγγέλων.Usually, the text of Scribe 2 is restored, and ὡς is read as a corruption of ὁ.This makes some sense-ο and ω are routinely swapped out by Scribe 1-but the sigma is clearly visible in the manuscript.I have instead accepted the reading of Scribe 1, and translated this to say: "[no one among] humans [has seen] as I have seen, as one of the holy angels, who is in charge of the cosmos and Tartarus." The unique implication is that Enoch saw as Uriel, or, as the story implies, with Uriel as his visionary guide.Enoch's ontological and visionary relationship with Uriel is brought to the forefront, as was noted above in my analysis of the transition from 21:9 to 1:1.Enoch, now, is not so singled out as a renegade visionary among all humans-he is a human granted capacities already assigned to the angels, and angelic primacy is assured.
The remainder of the Duplicate Material (corresponding to the verses we now call 1 En.20:1-21:9) keeps up the angelic emphasis, introducing the seven archangels and alluding to the functions they will play "later" in Scribe 1's text.The extant text also implicitly contrasts the archangels to seven imprisoned stars, thus foreshadowing but crucially not presupposing the rebellion of the angels, which is still to come in this literary progression.The Duplicate Material closes with the transition of 1 En.21:9 to 1:1, explored at length above, which provides an angelic framing for Enoch's revelations.
At this point, according to my reconstruction, Scribe 1's progression has followed Enoch's movement and tours around heaven and earth and has revealed the names and functions of the seven archangels.I have also argued that several of Scribe 1's textual variants (in 19:3 and in the transition from 21:9-1:1) uniquely serve to highlight the special closeness of Enoch with his angelic guides, especially Uriel, thus grounding his revelation in its angelic source.The Duplicate Material, then, chronicles an Enochic tour with the angels.
These actions could recall, to anyone familiar with Genesis (or Enoch), something like the formulation of Genesis 5: Enoch walks ‫)יתהלך(‬ with ‫האלהים‬ once (5:22), lives to the ripe (and solar!) age of 365 years (5:23), walks with ‫האלהים‬ once more (5:24), and is taken by ‫אלהים‬ (5:24).Though a Greek translator rendered both ‫האלהים‬ and ‫אלהים‬ as θεός, the ΜT as we have it suggests that Enoch walks with "the Elohim, " perhaps to be understood as angels, twice, and only then is taken up by and the ε → ι transformation happens often.The orthographic omission of an intervocalic γ is a well-documented phenomenon, at least in early Greek papyri.See James Ronald Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri, NTTSD 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 886 esp.n. 5.
"Elohim" (this last without a definite article, perhaps signifying God). 47Such an interpretation can be most readily and succinctly demonstrated with reference to the MT, but the idea that Enoch embarked on multiple angelic adventures carried over into texts produced in languages other than Hebrew and became a mainstay of Enochic reception history. 48Therefore, when discussing parallels between Codex Panopolitanus and the MT below, rather than proposing a bilingual scribe directly exploiting a Hebrew ambiguity, it is more sensible to see the MT as an influential encapsulation of one way of imagining Enoch's life that would then percolate in Enochic reception history for centuries to come.
Returning to the MT, one way to understand the biblical text is to propose that Enoch's life separates into a few parts-an initial walk with the angels, an earthly career, and a final angelic jaunt followed by his removal by God. 49as he is commissioned by God and the Watchers to mediate their dispute (Gen 5:24a). 51Finally, as in Gen 5:24b, Enoch's story closes with his removal by God, represented by an ascent to heaven in 1 En.14:8-22.Then, with Enoch's life fully narrated, Scribe 1's text ends-not accidentally, as is often assumed, but rather because the story is all told.
In addition to possible parallels with Genesis, we can also note another Enochic work that ends with an ascent to heaven, or an audience with the divine presence.The Book of Parables (1 En. 37-71) culminates in Enoch's ascent to heaven, described in language reminiscent of 1 En.14 (the chapter with which Scribe 1's account culminates). 52It is relevant to my argument here that the chapters providing this account, 1 En.70-71, are often hypothesized to represent a later addendum to the Book of Parables. 53The Book of Parables would thus represent a parallel example of the textual development of Enochic works to better reflect Enochic biography, with special interest in capturing a final ascent.
We can now return to Codex Panopolitanus and establish why the end of Scribe 1's contribution represents a materially marked and literarily suitable "ending" for the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers.First Enoch 14:8-22, the last verses copied by Scribe 1, moves Enoch from his place on earth up into the heaven, into a complex three-chambered building, and deposits him at the foot of the throne of God.He has no angelic companions and is taken up directly by a platform of winds.The constant fixation of the passage is the movement of Enoch into the innermost depths of this structure, the otherworldly quality of these structures, and the ecstatic impact that these visions have on Enoch, who is seized by fear and trembling (14:13-14).The heavenly structure to which he is transported 51 Scribe 1's text of 1 En.12:1-2 is the only version extant besides the Ethiopian text, and the verses seem to work well in their narrative context here, though they are quite awkward as they appear in Ethiopic.These verses are usually read as a paraphrase of the last stage of Enoch's life, Gen 5:24 ("Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him"), even though in the Ethiopic progression, they ostensibly introduce Enoch's first walk with the angels.Meanwhile, in Scribe 1's text, they do introduce the final stage of Enoch's life and are quite easily classed, therefore, as a paraphrase of Gen 5:24.
52 Upon his ascent in the Book of Parables, Enoch is also identified with the Son of Man (1 En. 71:13-17), though this controversial tradition will not be addressed here.On parallels with 1 En.14, see Michael A. Knibb, "The Translation of 1 Enoch 70:1: Some Methodological Issues, " in Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Texts: Essays in Memory of Michael P. Weitzman, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Gillian Greenberg, JSOTSup 333 (London: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 340-54. 53 On the structure of the Parables, and in agreement that chapters 70-71 are to be regarded as a later addition, see George W. E. Nickelsburg, "Discerning the Structure(s) of the Enochic Book of Parables, " in Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables, ed.Gabriele Boccaccini (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 23-47; and, in  mirrors the First and Second Temples, and the indebtedness of this vision to the book of Ezekiel or Daniel is readily apparent. 54ith this final vision of the encircling myriads, Scribe 1's account ends.The conclusion of Scribe 1's extant account mirrors a natural transition in the text.The holy of holies within the heavenly temple is a perfect place to end Enoch's narrative arc. 55The account clearly articulates the exclusivity of this particular element of the vision, and the impossibility for any human to match it.This final destination is marked off by verses 16 and 21 as extraordinary beyond compare, in a way the previous stops in the celestial tour are not.It is the climax of Enoch's journey.
We can also consult the final lines of the manuscript itself (reproduced above in fig. 1) to clarify one important physical feature.As is clear in figure 1, there is substantial rubbing off on the right side of the page, here and throughout the folio. 56his sort of wear likely comes from these quires circulating independently without a cover-in other words, without the physical protection of Scribe 2's pages, at least for some part of its history.Since we lack the first two pages of Scribe 1's Book of the Watchers, we cannot confirm that this wear also occurred to the start of the work, but it is possible.This physical deterioration suggests that this is the concluding page of a quire, and perhaps, of an entire codex. 57t could be objected that the neat fit of text to final page implies a later quire completing the Book of the Watchers that has dropped away, on the grounds that it might be difficult to imagine a scribe so perfectly fitting the text that the scribe wished to include in the allotted space. 58The material evidence of wear, therefore, would simply be a product of accidental deterioration, rather than an intentional literary end-point.
But such an objection assumes that a "dropped-away quire" would have contained the Ethiopic-style progression of the Book of the Watchers, and that the 54 Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13-20. 55 This is obviously the case if we are imagining a Second Temple setting for the composition of this account.It is far less obvious, though not impossible, that the holy of holies might be so central a point of fixation for a scribe, ostensibly Christian, of the sixth century.
56 I am grateful to Roger Bagnall, and the community of the Papyrological Seminar in New York City, for this insight. 57The last three lines of figure 1 read, καὶ πῦρ μέγα παρειστήκει αὐτῷ, καὶ οὐδεὶς ἐγγίζει αὐτῷ κύκλῳ μυρίαι μυριάδες ἑστήκα ("And a great fire stood by him, and none of those about him approached him.Ten thousand times ten thousand stood").We might expect the last word to read ἑστήκασιν, being a third-person plural referring to the myriads, and this is what is restored by most commentators.If this is the case, then the text cuts off in the middle of a word.However, Scribe 2's contribution does not complete this word but simply picks up at the next half of 1 En.14:22 (as found in the Ethiopic progression).It is not unheard of for a scribe to opt for a singular ending for a plural verb, especially with the obvious space constraints witnessed in the picture above.
58 I am grateful to Ted Erho for this suggestion.
Ethiopic progression is the only way to understand what constitutes the "whole" Book of the Watchers.It is equally possible that a hypothetical, now-lost quire contained one or very few Enochic verses (perhaps 1 En.14:23?), or illustrations like the large cross decorating page 1 of Codex Panopolitanus, or even unrelated, non-Enochic material.If our extant text can be accounted for without large speculative restoration-and to this end I have argued for the suitability of the ascent-toheaven ending of Scribe 1's Codex Panopolitanus-this should be our default explanatory posture.The Petrine material in Codex Panopolitanus provides parallel examples of excerpting in the codex.The Apocalypse of Peter (at least) is known in other, longer forms and thereby offers significant precedent for thinking of the texts included in this codex as the product of curation and creativity, rather than mechanistic copying, collection, and transmission. 59The Petrine contributions to the codex are shaped just as much by codicology (each sticks to the pattern of binios), space considerations, and (depending on our analysis of the excerpts) the editorial penchant of the reader or compiler as they might be by any sort of allegiance to an archetypical text or a commitment to textual preservation.Thus, any concerns about understanding Scribe 1's work as a curation, or excerpt, of the Book of the Watchers may be safely laid aside.The work is hardly the only member of Codex Panopolitanus to contain such arrangements. 60What is more, the Petrine precedent may provide some evidence that Scribe 1's version might have been executed specifically for this codex and might hint at the possibility-albeit speculativethat we might have here an "autograph" of this particular version of the Book of the Watchers.
In Scribe 1's composition, then, not only has Enoch seen the ends of the earth, the depths of the abyss, and the treasuries of the winds, but he has gone where no human has gone before, and ostensibly, none after.The formulation of 14:21, "no flesh could behold him" (καὶ οὐκ ἐδύνατο πᾶσα σὰρξ ἰδεῖν αὐτοῦ), happens to echo the phrase with which the preserved text of Scribe 1's Book of the Watchers opens: 59 On which see van Minnen, "Greek Apocalypse of Peter." 60 This was already noted in Nickelsburg's study of the Akhmim codex as evidence for Egyptian Christianity: "Codex Panopolitanus is, then, a collection of extracts from three separate texts" ("Two Enochic Manuscripts: Unstudied Evidence for Egyptian Christianity, " in Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins Presented to John Strugnell on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed.Harold W. Attridge, John J. Collins, and Thomas H. Tobin, Resources in Religion 5 [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990], 251-60, here 253).In this article, Nickelsburg proposes that the contents of the codex suggest that it as a Christian "Book of the Dead." My argument that Scribe 1's contribution was a biographic arrangement of Enoch material might support this argument, as its culmination in Enoch's ascent to heaven (and therefore non-death, depending on how the account is understood) might suit a "Book of the Dead." Nevertheless, consideration of the full contents of Codex Panopolitanus goes beyond the bounds of this article.
"no one among humans has seen as I saw, as one of the holy angels" (19:3). 61Scribe 1's text emphasizes the singularity and unparalleled nature of Enoch's vision.It is, to the core, a Book of Enoch, organized around Enoch, as a figure to whom was granted unmatched revelation, and the stages of his prophetic career.

III. Conclusions
Scribe 1's contribution to Codex Panopolitanus is not the product of grievous scribal error but instead a biographically interested arrangement of the textual material of the Book of the Watchers.The text as extant in our manuscript begins with Enoch's first tour (the Duplicate Material), moves into Enoch's earthly career (chs.1-5), and closes with Enoch's final walk with the angels and translation by God (chs.12-14).This arrangement of the Book of the Watchers is in keeping with another set of biographical divisions that can be gleaned from Gen 5.The Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers may be formed just as much in conversation with Genesis (at least, macrostructurally) as with the text of the Book of the Watchers, which it ostensibly reproduces.It is thus significant not only as a manuscript of the work known as the Book of the Watchers but also as an artifact in the reception history of Genesis.
This analysis serves as a reminder of how much information can be lost when manuscripts are mined solely for variants, or when these variants are not understood in their contexts.The variance of Codex Panopolitanus, in fact, so far exceeds the atomistic scholarly instrument of the "variant" that it has escaped demonstration in every apparatus and edition for over a century. 62But in this often-discarded textual material, I have found evidence for an ancient reader arranging the Book of the Watchers to better tell the story of Enoch.
In many respects, my work suits the stated goals of narrative textual criticism, which seeks to use variants to reconstruct a history of interpretation and reception of a text. 63But it is still of immediate concern that we have no extensive earlier text of the Book of the Watchers with which to generate an understanding of a textual norm and, conversely, of variants. 64Codex Panopolitanus is one of our only manuscripts for the Book of Enoch that predates the Ge' ez manuscript tradition beginning in the fourteenth century and certainly represents the most extensive and best preserved of our Second Temple and late antique offerings.By saying that Codex Panopolitanus contains variants, or variance, we have to ask ourselves: variance from what?What is the mean, or norm, or standard text by which we have classified this ordering, and these readings, as variance and variants respectively?And how is it possible that we have established an understanding of a normative text from which our earliest full-length manuscript can be demonstrated to deviate profoundly?
Although its example encourages us to be careful when imposing textual expectations on our documents, Scribe 1's composition probably does not present us with a new candidate for earliest-attainable text of the Book of the Watchers.After all, the contribution of Scribe 2 does follow the narrative order that the Ethiopic has trained us to expect.If the balance of probability pits all of the Ethiopian Vorlagen and Scribe 2 against Scribe 1, the logical tilt is obvious.We might even speculate that Scribe 2 was commissioned to "fix" or "complete" the text so that it better resembled this also-circulating version we now know from the Ethiopic tradition (though full consideration of the contribution of Scribe 2 extends beyond the parameters of this article).I have therefore suggested that Scribe 1's composition represents an arrangement of a preexisting textual progression similar to that copied by Scribe 2 or the Ethiopic tradition.The transformation of the Ascension of Isaiah into the biographically oriented Greek Legend provides a precedent for this kind of textual change in the late antique transmission of biblical pseudepigrapha.
Identifying Scribe 1's contribution to Codex Panopolitanus as a thoughtful textual arrangement neatly encapsulates the key contention of this article: that the features of this manuscript once decried as errors are actually crucial features evidencing the status of the Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers as a rich and complex site of both reception and transmission.The contribution of Scribe 1 to Codex Panopolitanus is an example of how textual fluidity and ongoing interest in biblical figures in antiquity worked in concert to create a far more interesting and heterogeneous manuscript record than we had previously imagined or expected. 64Space precludes sustained attention to the Aramaic Enoch fragments, though their fragmentary nature allows for the possibility that they might be arranged to serve different textual progressions.We can note, for instance, Devorah Dimant's concern that the order of the books of Enoch in certain manuscripts might not be on analogy with the order in the Ethiopic version, as Milik assumes; see Dimant, "The Biography of Enoch and the Books of Enoch, " VT 33 (1983):  14-29, here 17; repr. in From Enoch to Tobit: Collected Studies in Ancient Jewish Literature, FAT  114 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 59-73.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The hand of Scribe 1. Page 50 in Codex Panopolitanus (numbering in accordance with Lods's facsimiles), showing text corresponding to 1 En.14:17-22 "P.Cair.10759: Apocalypsis Enochi, " Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum, http://ipap.csad.ox.ac .uk/AE/AE07.html.Reproduced with permission of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (Oxford), the International Photographic Mission of the Association Internationale de Papyrologues, and the Cairo Museum.
the same volume, Michael A. Knibb, "The Structure and Composition of the Parables of Enoch, " 48-64.

Table 2
The Greek

Table 3 .
Scribal Hands of Codex Panopolitanus's Book of the Watchers

Table 5 .
Enoch's Biography in Genesis and Codex Panopolitanus