Only the last language kept the whole book

Claim (verbatim)

First Enoch ran a three-language relay - composed in Aramaic in the last centuries BCE, translated into Greek, translated from Greek into Geez for the Aksumite church - and the attrition ran BACKWARD along the chain: the original language did worst, the intermediary did middling, the terminus kept everything. Aramaic: eleven fragmentary Qumran manuscripts (Milik's 1976 edition), touching four of the five component books but not one verse of the Parables. Greek: two substantial accident-survivals - the Akhmim codex from a monk's grave (chapters 1-32) and the Chester Beatty-Michigan papyrus (chapters 97-107; Bonner's 1937 edition) - plus Syncellus' excerpts and a Vatican scrap, perhaps two-fifths of the book. Geez: all 108 chapters, in a living manuscript tradition running from the fifteenth century (Knibb's 1978 edition; Nickelsburg's Hermeneia commentary charts the coverage). The Parables of Enoch - the Son of Man chapters, the book's theological detonator - exist EXCLUSIVELY at the far end of the translation chain. The mechanism is canonization at the terminus: every intermediate community eventually ejected the book - rabbinic Judaism dropped the Enochic literature, the Greek church demoted it after the fourth century - reducing its copies to hoard-and-grave accidents, while the terminal community made it scripture and copied it liturgically forever. Survival tracks the final custodian's institutions, not the original's priority: in a translation relay, the safest place for a book is the last language in, provided that language canonizes what it received.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: building a chapter-level three-column coverage table over the Ethiopic chapter division (per Knibb and Nickelsburg), Geez will cover 108 of 108 chapters; at least 35 chapters will have neither Greek nor Aramaic witness, and those uncovered chapters will form one dominant contiguous block coinciding with the Parables (37-71), which show zero Aramaic and zero pre-modern Greek attestation (primary clause: the >=35 terminus-only chapters concentrated in the Parables block; the verdict follows it); secondarily, Greek-attested chapters will number under 50 and Aramaic-attested chapters under 60; a chapter counts as attested on any substantial fragment of at least a verse, Syncellus' excerpts count as Greek, modern retroversions do not count, and the test voids if the published coverage charts cannot assign at least 100 of the 108 chapters.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Milik's The Books of Enoch (1976) fragment tables, the Akhmim and Chester Beatty-Michigan Greek editions (Bonner 1937), Knibb's The Ethiopic Book of Enoch (1978), and Nickelsburg's Hermeneia commentary - a chapter-coverage census across the three languages.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The coverage charts are printed: Milik's fragment tables give the Aramaic per-manuscript extents with the Parables' total absence from Qumran as his stated centerpiece, the Greek extents (Akhmim chapters 1-32, Chester Beatty-Michigan 97-107, Syncellus excerpts) are tabulated in Bonner, Knibb and Nickelsburg's witness charts, and the Ethiopic-only survival of the Parables is stated in every modern introduction. The >=35 terminus-only chapters concentrated in 37-71 is chapter-arithmetic on those published charts - the Parables block is 35 chapters exactly and its zero-Aramaic, zero-pre-modern-Greek status is a stated fact, so the primary clause is guaranteed in print.

• J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford, 1976)
• M.A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, 2 vols (Oxford, 1978)
• G.W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia, Minneapolis, 2001), textual-witness charts
• C. Bonner, The Last Chapters of Enoch in Greek (London, 1937)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.