On angels and mountains: Notes on the Levantine and Aramaic background of the fallen angels

The Book of Watchers, one of the earliest components of 1 Enoch, speaks of the sinful descent of “the sons of heaven,” a host of angels who desired the daughters of men, sired with them a race of abominable giants and taught forbidden knowledge. While its narrative framework follows Gen 6:1–4, the Book of Watchers expands and reworks this short, enigmatic story with various details and traditions that reflect knowledge of, and participation in, variegated worlds of knowledge. The attempts to identify these various voices, to locate their possible sources and to evaluate their implications for understanding the cultural and historical contexts of the Book of Watchers gave rise to much scholarly debate.1 In this paper I wish to contribute to this ongoing discussion by exploring intriguing parallels between the Book of Watchers and remnants of (presumably) Phoenician traditions. These parallels, if correct, illuminate obscure details in the watchers’ narrative, while at the same time attest to the antiquity of traditions that came down to us through late and problematic transmission.

In the first, main part of the paper I will consider the peculiar watcher’s name ארעתקף in the larger context of Aramaic usage – in this case, the Aramaic of early Targums (Jewish Aramaic renderings of the Hebrew Bible). Taken against the background of the Targums this name has “mountainous” overtones that link it to the central role of Mount Hermon and its vicinity in the Book of Watchers. These elements in turn find a parallel in a mythological piece preserved in The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos. While the Aramaic Targums, I will claim, provide a lexical and onomastic context for the Book of Watchers, Philo’s Phoenician History is significant for evaluating its broader cultural background. In the second part of this paper, I will discuss a hitherto unnoticed parallel between the cosmogony embedded in Philo’s Phoenician History and another watcher’s name, שמיחזה, demonstrating how both the Book of Watchers and The Phoenician History employed a similar – but not identical – onomastic detail, relating it to primordial creatures yet doing so in very different ways. Thus, a careful examination of these watchers’ names both in their immediate context within the Book of Watchers and in wider linguistic and literary circles will help in shedding more light on the different ways in which the Book of Watchers takes part in local, Levantine traditions.