1 Enoch

1 Enoch, also known as the Ethiopic book of Enoch, is one of the key writings for our understanding of the development of Judaism in the Second Temple period, and particularly for the emergence of the Essenes, while the latest section of 1 Enoch, known as the parables or as the similitudes, is of particular interest for New Testament studies because of the way in which it develops the Son of Man traditions of Daniel 7. But the book that we possess had a complex history of development and a complex textual history. The oldest parts of 1 Enoch go back to the late third century BCE and are attested in aramaic fragments found at Qumran, but the only complete version that we have is an Ethiopic translation of the book that was made at the earliest in the fourth century CE and probably a century or more later. This book, in the well-established series Guides to the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, is intended to provide an introduction, of interest to students and to scholars, to this fundamentally important, but complex, work.