The Story of the Watchers as a Counter Narrative: Enochic Responses to the Authority of Mesopotamian Sages

Abstract

The extant texts of Enochic Judaism present accounts about the early history of humankind, which use the motifs familiar from the ancient Mesopotamian historiography. The different versions of the Jewish story of the Watchers originate as counter narratives about the antediluvian sages, or apkallus, which are known from the cuneiform literature. The myth of Adapa in Akkadian offers a version of the narrative in which the sage was promoted in heaven to a god-like status, which concept is corroborated with an entry in the cuneiform compendium Tintir and the Chronicle of the Esagila. This tradition also associated Adapa with the immortalized flood survivor. In the form of a counter narrative, the Enochic texts of Judaism attributed the heavenly assumption to Enoch and presented the Watchers as the demonic entities subordinated to him. The fall of the Watchers, the promotion of Enoch, and the primordial battle against evil forces are depicted in the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch 85–90. A very similar scenario is found in the Chronicle of Esagila, which describes the early history of humankind from the Babylonian perspective. It can be demonstrated that the Animal Apocalypse uses this or a similar cuneiform historiographic source as the basis of its counter narrative.