1 Enoch 19:2

Pseudepigrapha

1 And Uriel said to me: 'Here shall stand the angels who have connected themselves with women, and their spirits assuming many different forms are defiling mankind and shall lead them astray into sacrificing to demons ⌈⌈as gods⌉⌉, (here shall they stand,) till ⌈⌈the day of⌉⌉ the great judgement in which they shall be judged till they are made an end of. 2 And the women also of the angels who went astray shall become sirens.' 3 And I, Enoch, alone saw the vision, the ends of all things: and no man shall see as I have seen.

LXX Isaiah 13:21

Septuagint

19 And Babylon, which is called glorious by the king of the Chaldeans, will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorra. 20 It will not be inhabited forever, nor will they enter it for many generations, nor will Arabs pass through it, nor will shepherds rest in it. 21 But wild animals will rest there, and the houses will be filled with noise; there sirens will rest, and there demons will dance. 22 Donkey-centaurs will dwell there, and hedgehogs will build nests in their houses; it is coming quickly and will not delay.

 Notes and References

"... Is it possible to trace pure Na'amah in 1 Enoch? At 1 Enoch 19:2, Uriel says of the daughters of men that the angels had seduced (compare 1 Enoch 6: ‘And the wives of these angels who transgressed shall become sirens’). Black was bewildered by the occurrence of ‘Sirens’ here: 'I have retained the Greek term ... Could the original have been (Targum Isaiah 13:21), literally ‘daughters of loveliness’, a term apparently applied to these ‘desert owls’ on account of their attractive looks?' I would like to suggest that, given what we know about Na'amah the Siren, Gnostic Norea, and Esterah / Na'amah, it is more likely that the Aramaic original read (‘daughters of Na'amah’). Accordingly, 1 Enoch 19:2 appears to imply that ‘the daughters of men’, whom the angels forced, would be ultimately redeemed. In that case, we have in 1 Enoch the earliest trace of that minority reaction, which Stroumsa and Pearson have discussed, against the negative descriptions of Na'amah as a seductress. If this suggestion can be sustained, Pearson’s interpretation of Gnostic Norea as the result of a ‘typically gnostic hermeneutical inversion’ is not binding: Gnostic thinkers could have simply developed the pattern they had found in 1 Enoch. Finally, if Na'amah is indeed present in 1 Enoch, the identification of ‘the sons of God’ with the Sethites and ‘the daughters of men’ with the Cainites definitely has its roots in Judaism and can be dated earlier than the time of Josephus ..."

Papoutsakis, Manolis Ostriches into Sirens: Towards an Understanding of a Septuagint Crux (pp. 25-36) Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2004

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