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1 Enoch 17 refers to a flaming sword, echoing the imagery found in the Greek Septuagint translation of Genesis 3 where a flaming sword guards the tree of life. Some translations of 1 Enoch are clearly aware of Hellenistic Greek traditions.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
LXX Genesis 3:24
Septuagint
22 And God said, Look, Adam has become as one of us, to know good and evil, and now for fear that at any time he stretch forth his hand, and take of the tree of life and eat, and so he shall live forever... 23 So the Lord God sent him forth out of the garden of Delight to cultivate the ground out of which he was taken. 24 And he cast out Adam and caused him to dwell over against the garden of Delight, and stationed the cherubs and the fiery sword that turns about to keep the way of the tree of life.
Date: 300–201 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
1 Enoch 17:3
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 And they brought me to a place where those present were like flaming fire, and when they wished, they appeared as men. 2 And they led me to a place of darkness, and to a mountain whose peak reached to heaven. 3 And I saw the places of the sun and moon and the treasuries of the stars and of the thunder in the utmost depths, where there was a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver, and a fiery sword and all the lightnings. 4 And they took me to the living waters, and to the fire of the west, which receives every setting of the sun. 5 And I came to a river of fire where the fire flows like water and pours into the great sea towards the west.
Date: 300 BCE – 100 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The Ethiopian has in addition “and a flaming sword,” for which compare the “flaming sword” of Genesis 3:24 (LXX) ..."
Michael A. Knibb, “The Use of Scripture in 1 Enoch 17–19,” in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in Honour of A. Hilhorst, ed. Florentino García Martínez and Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, JSJSup 82 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 167.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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