Texts in Conversation
Jubilees and 1 Enoch share Jewish traditions of cosmic geography that imprisons disobedient divine beings in wilderness regions. Both describe an angel binding them in remote places that descend toward the netherworld.
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1 Enoch 10:4
Pseudepigrapha
3 And now instruct him so that he may escape and his descendants may be preserved for all future generations.' 4 And the Lord also said to Raphael: 'Bind Azâzal hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: make a hole in the desert in Dûdâel, and throw him in. 5 Place upon him rough and jagged rocks, cover him with darkness, and let him remain there forever, and cover his face so he may not see light.
Date: 200-50 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Jubilees 10:9
Pseudepigrapha
8 When Mastema, the leader of the spirits, came, he said: 'Lord creator, leave some of them before me; let them listen to me and do everything that I tell them, because if none of them is left for me I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among mankind. For they are meant for the purposes of destroying and misleading before my punishment because the evil of mankind is great.' 9 Then he said that a tenth of them should be left before him, while he would make nine parts descend to the place of judgment. 10 He told one of us that we should teach Noah all their medicines because he knew that they would neither conduct themselves properly nor fight fairly.
Date: 150-100 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Mastema ... asks God to leave him a minimal number of followers, and God agrees: a tenth of the evil spirits who had previously been his are to remain unbound. (The theme of the evil spirits being bound up after the food is apparently borrowed from 1 Enoch 10:4-6, 11-14; 13:1-2, where the evil Shemihazah [or—another version—'Asael] and his associates are sentenced to be bound up for seventy generations ..."
Kugel, James L.
A Walk through Jubilees: Studies in the Book of Jubilees and the World of Its Creation
(p. 83) Brill, 2012
* 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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