The Epistle of Enoch: Genre and Authorial Presentation

To the extent that a writing openly presents itself as the result of authorial activity, discussions of genre cannot dispense with the question of how, formally, communication occurs. Taking the Epistle of Enoch and Apocalypse of Weeks in 1 Enoch as the points of departure, the present essay attempts to show that a discussion of what a document declares about its own writtenness opens up a way of understanding it in comparison to other documents that do the same along analogous lines, whether sapiential or apocalyptic.