Michael Stone, Ancient Judaism: New Visions and Views. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

ISBN
978-0-8028-6636-3. 256 pages, $30.00. 2011.

Reviewed by Jim West

Chapter Two-
Adam and Enoch and the State of the World

Stone brilliantly shows here the two major trends (in Judaism) concerning the source and cause
of evil in the world: the Adamic and the Enochic.

Modern people may be more familiar with the idea of Adam’s sin,
but, to understand ancient Judaism, we must also consider what the
world felt like when suffering, illness, and death were attributed to
direct demonic intervention rather than to human disobedience.
How then was the state of the world’s affairs understood? (p. 33).

Stone is quite right that Christians especially are more familiar with the ‘Adam brought sin into
the world’ ideology and probably widely ignorant of the ‘demons brought sin into the world’ line
taken in the Enochic literature. As he called on readers to think ‘outside the box’ in the opening
chapter, his efforts in the present chapter certainly will cause much of that.

Stone explains the various threads in chapter subsections titled ‘The Priestly-Noachic Tradition:
Qahat’ (pp. 33-39); ‘Teaching Descended from Noah’ (pp. 39-42); ‘Book(s) of Noah’ (pp. 42-
46); and ‘The Priestly-Noah Tradition in the Qumran Library’ (pp. 47-51). These sections mine
the Dead Sea Scrolls for relevant material.

Next Stone addresses ‘The Enochic Axis’ (pp. 51-52) of which he says

The numerous copies of these Pseudepigrapha and the absence of

developed Adam traditions highlight the sect’s concentration on
the period from Enoch to Noah’ (p. 51).

And in these materials

The evil that precipitated the flood stems from angelic sin and not
from human disobedience (p. 52).

So at this juncture it becomes necessary for Stone to go into more detail on the ‘Axis of Adam
and Eve’ (pp. 52-57). Noting the relative absence of ‘Adam’ materials at Qumran (in
comparison to the Enoch/Noah literature which is widely present), Stone suggests

… the absence of legendary Adam material takes on a redoubled

significance (p. 53).
But does it? Isn’t it possible that the materials at Qumran reflect a minority opinion amongst
Second Temple Jews and that the counting of manuscripts found there and extrapolating greater
significance for the Enochic line amongst the sectarians is eisegetical? Perhaps the scrolls
contain more Enochic/Noachic materials simply because the Adamic line of thought was so
widespread it wasn’t deemed useful to use valuable resources to codify what was already
codified in biblical texts?

In other words, perhaps there just wasn’t any need to copy Adamic stories because the biblical
text already had them (not to mention ‘The Life of Adam and Eve’ which may have been widely
known as well).

The chapter concludes with a treatment of ‘The Implications of Adam and Enoch’ (pp. 57-58).

Many readers may be familiar with these materials, but many may not. And many may be quite
surprised that within Second Temple Judaism two streams of thought concerning the origins of
evil were present and competing. That Christianity adopted the one has more to do with Paul’s
treatment of Adam more than anything else. So imagine – if you’re a Christian reader – what
may have happened to our theology if Paul had adopted the other?

Next, Chapter Three.