Giant monsters all-out attack: women, impurity, and the mixed monstrous from Exile to Enoch

Abstract

The Book of the Watchers, a portion of the later collection known as 1 Enoch, is a long-form interpretive narrative based on the brief note in Genesis 6:1-4 about the "sons of God" descending from heaven and taking the "daughters of humankind" in marriage. The offspring of this union are depicted as violent and all-consuming giants that throw the cosmos into chaos, necessitating divine intervention. The modern scholarly understanding of the text varies, and to an extent depends on exactly to what period one dates the composition of the text. A common understanding is that the text is a response to Hellenistic imperialism in Judea, similarly to Daniel and the books of Maccabees, with the monsters of the text representing the Seleukid and Ptolemaic rulers and their violence. However, this interpretation does not quite get at all of the concerns demonstrated by the text. This paper takes Monster Theory, which proposes that the monsters that feature in a society’s stories are engendered by, and encode, the cultural anxieties of that society, as its point of departure. Exilic texts like Ezekiel and post-exilic texts such as Ezra-Nehemiah demonstrate certain cultural anxieties regarding especially an intersecting network of concerns regarding purity, mixing, and gender; including a focus on sexual unions that are understood to be illicit intermarriages. The Book of the Watchers encodes similar anxieties taken to an extreme, in the guise of monsters that throw all categories into disarray, with bodies that are inherently mixed and impure, and begotten by cosmically illicit unions. The paper demonstrates that the Book of the Watchers is therefore the best existing fit for a text featuring the kind of monsters that might be expected to be generated by the anxieties these texts exhibit. The concerns of the Book of the Watchers align well with the cultural anxieties that can be identified in the Exilic texts and the texts addressing the post-Exilic era.