Enoch was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic by Jews, and some ancient fragments of it have been found near the Dead Sea. But the oldest complete versions are in the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez because Ethiopian Christians are the only enduring church group that revered the book as Scripture.
James C. VanderKam, a professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Notre Dame University and a leading expert on the Book of Enoch, has inspected the book on loan to the trust and estimates that it’s probably one of the five oldest manuscripts of the work.
“We don’t have very many that go back that far,” said VanderKam, who is co-author of an English translation of Enoch and is working on a commentary. VanderKam estimated that the text was about 500 years old because its script and contents are similar to a manuscript of that age in the British Museum. Specialists in Ethiopian script could make a more specific determination, he said.
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