Antiquitopia

For my chapter on the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice , I am revisiting other texts that discuss, depict, or allude to heavenly hymns. Most apocalyptic texts refer to heavenly liturgies sung by heavenly, divine beings (most people call them "angels"), but very rarely tell us what these heavenly beings actually say. When they do report the content of such hymns, they tend to be highly indebted to, or in fact are verbatim quotations of Isaiah 6:1-4: In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the hose filled with smoke. 2 Enoch 21:1 (J) repeats this ...

I thought it was strange that I was getting referrals to my website from a wikipedia page . It was somewhat disheartening, however, to discover that I was cited on Wikipedia not for any of my own ideas that I have thrown out on this blog, but for my long quote of a message sent to Jim Davila by Andrei Orlov concerning Coptic fragments of 2 Enoch found here . So, perhaps the interesting aspect of all of this is that Wikipedia cited someone (me) who was citing someone else (Davila) who was quoting someone else (Orlov)...a citation of a citation of a citation...a citational simulacrum... The trail runs cold there...for now...

Jim Davila reports message from Andrei Orlov, whose own site on 2 Enoch is here (and on my sidebar): No longer ‘Slavonic’ only 2 Enoch attested in Coptic from Nubia During his work preparing the publication of Coptic manuscripts from Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, Joost Hagen, doctoral student at Leiden University, The Netherlands, very recently came across some fragments he could identify as part of the text of the so-called ‘Slavonic Enoch’ (2 Enoch), the first time a non-Slavonic manuscript of this intriguing text has been found. The fragments were discovered at Qasr Ibrim, one of the capital cities of Christian-period Nubia (southern Egypt, northern Sudan, 5th-15th cent. AD), during excavations by the British Egypt Exploration Society (EES) which started in 1963 and have brought to light an astonishing number of finds, textual and other. Joost Hagen has been entrusted by the EES with the edition of the manuscript material in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt and one of the lit...

Andrei Orlov, a friend of mine from Marquette and scholar of Slavonic Pseudepigrapha, asked me to post the following: The Slavonic Pseudepigrapha Project would like to announce the launch of two new resource pages devoted to 2 (Slavonic) Enoch ( http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/2enoch.html ) and the Apocalypse of Abraham ( http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/apocalypseabraham.html ). The resource pages include original manuscripts, translations, extensive bibliographies, and research articles pertaining to these important apocalyptic works which survived in Slavonic language. The Slavonic Pseudepigrapha Project ( http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/pseudepigrapha.html ) is an electronic resource developed by scholars from the Theology Department at Marquette University (Milwaukee, USA).