Commenting on 1 Enoch 106 and its portrayal of Noah, Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis wrote:
Is
Noah an Angel?
How are we to interpret the story
as we have it in 1 Enoch 106? Noah’s beauty, his luminescent eyes and
generally glorious appearance is typical of Jewish texts which describe the
angelomorphic identity of the righteous (Compare, e.g., the near contemporary Joseph
and Aseneth 22:7-10). However, the consequences of his appearance troubles
his father Lamech who fears the working of a more malevolent power and the
possibility that the child is the product of intercourse his wife has had with
a heavenly being a watcher. This would explain the baby's suprahuman
appearance, but might also mean that the child represents a terrible rupture in
the order of the cosmos (cf. 1 Enoch 7:2-5; 9:9). In the story that
follows this explanation of Noah’s appearance is dismissed and Noah's
righteousness is affirmed.
But, somewhat frustratingly, the
story does not then spell out just how Lamech and the implied reader is to
understand Noah's glorious appearance. In the first instance the affirmation of
Noah's purity and his pivotal role in coming salvation-history should probably
be taken to imply that his angelic appearance is what it is and that this is
how it should be. In 106:17 Enoch says that the watchers who are to come upon
the earth will sire giants who are "not of the spirit, but of the
flesh." This would seem to imply that, by contrast, Noah is of the spirit,
and not of the flesh. The statement is unavoidably paradoxical in its narrative
context because the legitimacy of Noah's identity depends on Lamech being his
true parent—in the flesh. Precisely how Noah is "of the flesh", yet
ultimately "of the spirit" is not clear though it echoes the sense
that the angelomorphic righteous are transferred beyond the confines of the
realm of the flesh in Sirach 45 and Jubilees 31. The idea is perhaps
that Noah is one of a "spiritual lineage", a concept that we will
find echoed in the DSS where the righteous are an angelic "people of
spirit".
One feature of the birth story
helps clarify in what way Noah is heavenly but not angelic by virtue of any
inappropriate angelic miscegenation. 1 Enoch 106:2 focuses attention
on his glorious white head of hair. This is not so much an angelic
characteristic but one which brings Noah into the likeness of God himself.
Both the Ethiopic and the Greek compare Noah's hair with white wool and we
think immediately of Daniel 7:9 where it is the Ancient of Days whose
"clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure
wool". Coupled with the fact that Noah's body (he could not, of course, be
wearing clothes at this point) is also said to be white as snow there
seems here to be a deliberate attempt to identify Noah more with God himself
than his angelic attendants. I would suggest that here the visual
iconography follows a firmly established grammar and that our text wants to say
that Noah is the fully human bearer of God's image. In the second century B.C.
text Joseph and Aseneth of the divine and angelic Jacob it is also said
that "his head was white as snow, and the hairs of his head were all exceedingly
close like those of an Ethiopian" (22:7). In two late first century A.D.
texts, the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Christian book of Revelation
this same language is used of God's visible angelic manifestation (Iaoel: Apoc.
Abr. 11:3) and the risen and divine Jesus (Rev 1:14). (Crispin H.T.
Fletcher-Louis, All The Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead
Sea Scrolls [Studies on the Texts of the Deseret of Judah 42; Leiden:
Brill, 2002], 37-38, emphasis in bold added)
In a footnote to the above, we read that
Philo also expostulates at
length on the way in which Noah is identified with the first man, the bearer of
God's image [Quaestiones in Genesis 2:56). In 4Q534 I 1-2 the'
protagonist has red hair. I am not at all sure that this person is Noah as some
think (e.g. Martinez 1992b, 1—44) and, even if he is, this would mean the understanding
of Noah in that text is slightly different from that of 1 Enoch 106. In Jub.
23:25 the heads of children are white with grey hairs as a sign of the
decline of humanity and the loss of longevity in the sinful generation. Pace
A. Caquot 1974 this negative use of the image of white hair on
children is not related to that in 1 Enoch 106. (Ibid.,
38 n. 21)
