Apocalyptic spatiality in 1 Peter and selected 1 Enoch literature: a comparative analysis
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Date
14/03/2022Author
Abebe, Sofanit Tamene
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Abstract
The present work is an exegetical analysis that outlines the spatio-temporal
aspects of the Jewish apocalyptic framework that has shaped the later 1 Enoch texts
(1 Enoch 91–108) on the one hand, and as will be demonstrated, the First Epistle of
Peter on the other.
Using critical spatial theory to analyse spatial categories in these traditions, I
will consider how reality is portrayed in these traditions and in what ways the Jewish
apocalyptic framework shapes the authors’ perspectives, emphases and moral
visions. Towards this end, I will analyse the later 1 Enoch traditions (the Exhortation,
the Apocalypse of Weeks, the Epistle of Enoch and the Eschatological Admonition)
and their respective constructions of symbolic space. I will argue that their respective
visions of reality is constructed on the basis of an axis linking heaven and earth
through the disclosure of divine revelation by the Enochic authors. The revelatory
basis on which the Enochic authors’ form their text serves to identify their readers as
those who are divinely constituted through election and given access to a new
spatial reality.
Through a programmatic recalling of cultic spatial practices and significant
events from Israel’s sacred past, 1 Peter depicts the Christ-elect addressees as
constituting the space where the divine dwells. Behind this disclosure lies the basis
for his call of allegiance and orientation towards serving God and imitating Christ as
well as his concern with maintaining divine presence. Such a spatial construal
provides the means to reconstitute the addressees as the mobile axis linking heaven
and earth and bring the notion of moral purity to the centre of 1 Peter’s lived space.
In doing so, 1 Peter construes the readers’ corporate and corporeal existence in
Roman Asia Minor within the Jewish matrix of exile as a mode of existence on an
apocalyptic stage newly configured by Christ.
Without resorting to a genealogical or literary dependence of one tradition on
the other, such a comparative reading provides a fresh understanding of the
comparanda that is grounded in the ancient authors’ construction of lived space
within a Jewish theological matrix. This will serve to ground my engagement with
recent scholarly evaluations of the ancient authors’ socio-historical and political
stance such as the response to hostile others including imperial realities and
institutions. Taking the conversation beyond the confines of counter-imperial
readings, the present work examines the respective authors’ critical engagement
with hostile others and evaluation of persecution from a wider angle that takes into
account the texts’ theocentric–and Christocentric, in the case of 1 Peter–
understanding of reality along a temporal and spatial axis.