‘Who is Like Me Among the Angels?’ Judean Reinventions of the Scribal Persona

asks how scribes could plausibly claim to know newly revealed things. It argues that the most important process was through identification with ideal figures such as Enoch. While the mechanics of this identification have been seen as obscure, mystical or literary, this chapter argues that instead there are concrete, historically developing mechanisms by which the speaker of a prayer could identify with a mythic figure enthroned in heaven. As in Mesopotamia, the horizons of scribal personhood and knowledge were set by the scribes’ ontologies and epistemologies, their assumptions about how things exist and are known. By the Hellenistic period, a theory had arisen in which God had established fundamental secrets of cosmic order through language—language that humans had the capacity to know. These divine secrets and reckonings were praised in such texts as the Qumran Hodayot and revealed, for example, in early Enochic literature. The result was a scholarly culture that viewed both Babylonian astronomy and Hebrew scriptures as its own ancient Israelite heritage by means of an Aramaic medium, and through its linguistic tools could learn and produce revelation as scientific knowledge as much as religious experience.