The Five Fragments of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel: A Critical Study.

• Author: Greenberg, Moshe
• Position: Review

By JAMES R. MUELLER. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series, vol. 5. Sheffield: SHEFFIELD ACADEMIC PRESS, 1994. Pp. 196. [pounds]27.50, $41.

"Scholars who wish to describe the past . . . must investigate the totality of the evidence available . . . we need to listen to every voice . . ." (p. 11). Radical commitment to philology can alone justify this painstaking, minute restudy of what may be traces of a lost Apocryphon of Ezekiel.

Evidence of a work so titled appears in a book list of the ninth century C.E. (Stichometry of Nicephorus). In Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (New York: Doubleday, 1983), I: 487-95, Mueller and S. E. Robinson introduce and translate what have long been regarded as five citations (= "fragments") from it. Of those, only one is explicitly ascribed by its author (Epiphanius, fourth c. C.E.) to Ezekiel's "own apocryphon." It is a version of a well-known parable about a lame man and a blind man who collaborate in despoiling an orchard; nothing in it reminds one of the canonical Ezekiel. The other four sayings ascribed to Ezekiel are much shorter (two are single sentences), and occur mainly in the writings of the Church Fathers. They have no - or only a partial - correspondent in the text of the canonical prophet. That they nonetheless go by his name may indicate the existence of an apocryphon - a non-canonical literary creation falsely ascribed to an ancient worthy.

Mueller describes in great detail the history of research, bringing it down to 1992 and the publication of the dramatic non-biblical Ezekiel fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (4Q Second Ezekiel). These surely are candidates for an "Ezekiel Apocryphon"; but since they are unconnected with the "five fragments" Mueller merely sets out their Hebrew text and a translation. Returning to the fragments, he presents the cluster of sources for each of...