Author(s) :

Ephraim Isaac.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Western commentary on 1 Enoch is almost as old as the arrival in Europe of its first Ge'ez manuscripts. The pioneering works of Dillmann and Charles relied on these few manuscripts as well as the scattered fragments of 1 Enoch in Latin and Greek. With the publication of the recently discovered Qumran Aramaic and Chester Beatty Greek fragments, various scholars have continued to shed more light on the difficult passages of 1 Enoch. However, Ethiopian sources for the study of 1 Enoch still remain largely untapped. Indeed, most studies have been content to resort to the Ge'ez text solely to reconstruct from it the Aramaic original.1 The existence of an extensive Ethiopian commentary tradition and its potential for elucidating 1 Enoch has, for the most part, been sadly overlooked.2 The Andemta3 commentary, which is the oral commentary tradition taught in major Ethiopian exegesis schools, took its current shape around the eighteenth century. This exegetical tradition employs various biblical, patristic and local sources to give verse by verse commentary of the Ge'ez text in the vernacular Amharic. Even though western scholars have long known the existence of Andemta commentary manuscripts on 1 Enoch, this commentary tradition has yet to be published and adequately studied.4 Moreover, earlier traditional Ethiopian commentaries on 1 Enoch have been attested as far back as the fifteenth century. At the present stage of knowledge, it is difficult to assess the full extent of these early Ge'ez commentaries (Tergwame5). In his pioneering synopsis of Ethiopian biblical exegesis, Roger Cowley listed three Tergwame manuscripts on 1 Enoch then known to exist.6 We can now add to the list at least two more Tergwame texts.7 Even with these few manuscripts, we appear to possess early Ge'ez Tergwame commentary for all five books of 1 Enoch8—lending support to the possibility that an extensive Tergwame commentary on Enoch might have once existed. This article presents a Ge'ez Tergwame text on 1 Enoch as found in a seventeenth century manuscript.9 This manuscript contains fragments of four Tergwame commentaries. The first commentary text deals with the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch: 85-90),10 whereas the second fragment comments on scattered references to the "Righteous and the Wicked" in the Book of Watchers (1 Enoch: 1-36)11. The third text is a commentary on the Book of Parables (1 Enoch: 37-71),12 and the last text expounds the "Secrets" found scattered in 1 Enoch.13 Only the first Tergwame text on the Animal Apocalypse will be presented in this article.

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