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1 Enoch

About this book
Chapter 3

1 Observe and notice how, during winter, all the trees appear as if they have withered and lost all their leaves, except for fourteen trees that do not shed their foliage⁠ but keep the old leaves for two to three years until the new ones arrive.

Texts in conversation

Compare 1 Enoch 3:1 and Jubilees 21:12

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses · Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions

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Summary

1 Enoch describes fourteen evergreen trees that keep their leaves all winter. Jubilees has a similar tradition, interpreting the evergreens as a priestly rule for which woods may burn on the altar, and credits the teaching to Enoch himself.

Passages

1 Enoch 3:1

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 Observe and notice how, during winter, all the trees appear as if they have withered and lost all their leaves, except for fourteen trees that do not shed their foliage but keep the old leaves for two to three years until the new ones arrive.
300 BCE – 100 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in 1 Enoch

Jubilees 21:12

Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
11 And on all your offerings you shall scatter salt, and do not let the salt of the covenant be lacking in all your offerings before the Lord. 12 And as regards the wood of the sacrifices, be careful not to bring (other) wood for the altar in addition to these: cypress, bay, almond, fir, pine, cedar, savin, fig, olive, myrrh, laurel, aspalathus. 13 And place these kinds of wood on the altar under the sacrifice, such as have been tested by their appearance, and do not lay (on it) any split or dark wood, (but) hard and clean, without fault, a sound and new growth; and do not lay (on it) old wood, [for its fragrance is gone] for there is no longer fragrance in it as before.
170–125 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Jubilees

References

"... priestly halakhah in the Aramaic Levi Document (4Q214b [4QLevif ar] fragments 2-6 and Bodleian c, Athos Greek), in Testament of Levi 9:12, and in Jubilees 21:13 is emphatic that the wood to be used on the altar should not be seasoned or dry. To this effect it should come, rather, from a prescribed list of (twelve or fourteen) evergreen trees (Jubilees 21:12, 14). And bringing it to the temple in late summer helps ensure that, unlike later rabbinic practice, even the evergreen wood that will be used in abundance in Tishri has not been unnecessarily dried out by the intense heat of summer. In Jubilees these regulations are found “written in the books of [Abraham’s] forefathers, in the words of Enoch and the words of Noah” (21:10). ..."
Crispin Fletcher-Louis, “The Book of Watchers and the Cycle of New Year Festivals,” in With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior, ed. Daphna V. Arbel and Andrei A. Orlov, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 161.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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1 Enoch 3:1 and Jubilees 21:12

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