Footnotes
[1.]Documents of Jewish Sectaries. Volume I. Fragments of a Zadokite Work. Edited, with Translation, Introduction, and Notes, by S. Schechter. Cambridge University Press. 1910.[2.]It may be added that the quotations are singularly inexact.[3.]In my translation I have sometimes thought it possible to adhere to the text where Dr. Schechter has preferred a conjectural emendation.[4.]That is, probably, against the legitimate high priest of the time (perhaps Onias).—The rendering “by his Anointed” is grammatically admissible, but would be unintelligible in this context.[5.]It would be possible to render “the penitents of Israel.”[6.]The four or five words which follow are unintelligible.[7.]The references are to page and line of the Hebrew text.[8.]Others sought refuge in Egypt; the temple of Onias at Leontopolis had its origin in the same circumstances.[9.]So they understood the words translated in the English version “the cruel venom of asps.”[10.]See 2 Macc. 4 16: “By reason of which (sc. their predilection for Greek ways) a dire calamity befel them, and those for whose customs they displayed such zeal and whom they wanted to imitate in everything became their enemies and avengers.” Assumption of Moses, 5 1: “When the times of retribution shall draw near, and vengeance arises through kings who share their guilt and punish them,” etc., describes the same situation.[11.]Cf. “the whole race of the elect root,” Enoch 93 8.[12.]See Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes (3 ed.), vol. iii. p. 189.[13.]
A comparison with the Apocalypse of the Ten Weeks in Enoch (93 + 91 12-17) is in point here. The sixth “week” (period of 490 years) ends with the destruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar; in the seventh a rebellious generation arises, all whose works are apostasy (the hellenizers of the Seleucid time); at its end the “chosen righteous men of the eternal plantation of righteousness” are chosen to receive the sevenfold instruction about God's whole creation (apparently the cosmological revelations of Enoch); the historical retrospect closes before the robbery and desecration of the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes (170, 168 b.c.), of which the seer knows nothing. The chronological error here amounts to sixty or seventy years.
In the Introduction, p. xii, by a typographical error which is repeated on p. xxii, Dr. Schechter says that the 390 years of the text would bring us “to within a generation of Simon the Just, who flourished about 290 b.c.,” and twenty years more would bring us into the midst of the hellenistic persecutions preceding the Maccabaean revolt (about 170 b.c.). Margoliouth, whose hypothesis 490 does not suit any better than 390, takes courage from Schechter's doubts to disregard the numbers altogether. Gressmann (Internationale Wochenschrift, March 4, 1911) is led by metrical considerations to treat all the chronological notices as interpolations, and gives them no further consideration. But even if the figures were introduced by a later hand, they may still represent the tradition of the sect.