Over the last few years, scholars have devoted a great deal of time to the question of whether or not there existed within Judaism a distinct group that, among other things, regarded the revelations given to the patriarch Enoch as of greater importance than those given to Moses.

At the heart of the Enochic Judaism discussions are several chapters from 1 Enoch. Chapters 6–16 of this book reflect the story of the descent of the Watchers, angels who came to earth, mingling with mortal women and revealing the secrets of divination, metallurgy and other practices. The part of this story that concerns the sexual union of angels and women centres on a Watcher called Shemikhazah; the part that concerns the revealing of secrets centres on another Watcher, ‘Aza’el. In addition, the stories seem to associate the Watchers with the heavenly bodies, so that they are often almost equated with ‘the stars’. Generally scholars have seen three earlier traditions lying behind these three elements within 1 Enoch. These have been edited together into a unity, with the Shemikhazah story generally seen as the earliest.

David R. Jackson’s Enochic Judaism: Three Paradigm Exemplars provides us with a new approach to these chapters and their impact upon Jewish thought. Jackson draws on the work of Thomas Kuhn, who carried out an analysis of the processes involved in paradigm shifts within the hard sciences. Kuhn argued that, at some point, an accepted or prevailing paradigm is incapable of accommodating new discoveries and a new paradigm must arise. Applying this to the Watchers story, Jackson argues that Enochic Judaism is a unique paradigm within Judaism, centred on angelic deviation and responding to a single event, and that the three elements are nor distinct traditions redacted together. They are instead different paradigm ‘exemplars’, (different ways of looking at the problem of angelic sin), intended to accommodate or anticipate problems that may arise within the worldview. He then traces each exemplar into later Jewish literature. Eventually, he concludes that the Enochic paradigm influenced Qumran thought, but is not attested in Jewish thought outside of that community (or is even actively rejected).

Jackson’s work is extremely interesting. The application of the paradigm model to the Watchers story does raise the possibility that redactional approaches have overlooked the unity of the three elements in the narrative’s final form. Also, as he traces these exemplars into later literature, Jackson provides us with a wealth of detailed analysis of a broad range of texts, helpfully demonstrating the thorough penetration of the Watchers story into Qumranic thought.

There are, however, some problems with his work. First, although he states early on that ‘we have three applications of a single paradigm describing three problems arising from the same event’ (27), he does not clarify or specify what that event might be, beyond the vague sense that Hellenization is a factor. Second, it is not always clear that there are grounds to assign a given element in later thought to one or other of the angelic exemplars. Jackson categorizes certain elements in later texts as being derived from either the Shemikhazah or ‘Aza’el exemplars, but it is often less than clear that there is reason to separate these—we have to be open to the possibility that angelic sin generally is in view. Third, Jackson goes too far in neglecting the real redactional issues that are undoubtedly important in the development of Enochic Judaism and that are provocatively dealt with by Boccaccini. His work may be contrasted, on this level, with the recent book by Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which succeeds in dealing with the final form of the Enochic texts while still dealing with redactional questions. Fourth, Jackson’s conclusion—that the Enochic paradigm is not attested outside of Qumran—simply does not follow from his work. Such a conclusion could be justified only in the context of a full study of later texts, of a kind not found in the book.

In conclusion, then, Enochic Judaism: Three Paradigm Exemplars is a stimulating work that is often helpful in its detail, but misleading in its conclusions.

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