Abstract
Loren Stuckenbruck's The Myth of the Rebellious Angels is a comprehensive, in-depth exploration of the references to fallen angels, Watchers, Nephilim, giants, as well as a range of potential general allusions to the circulating expansions of Genesis 6. This detail-oriented study engages with a full range of resources from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the New Testament, as well as thorough reviews of secondary literature. The book is mostly a compilation of previously published articles, which would otherwise be difficult to easily access and compile. Although a reader could approach the chapters piecemeal, the way in which the articles were brought together and the use of footnotes to connect the chapters in the book makes it a valuable resource that functions as a sustained monograph on these themes rather than as an edited volume of individual essays by the same author. I would suggest two different reading approaches depending on the background knowledge of the reader. For readers familiar with the Jewish pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, and/or Enochic traditions, it is most useful to read the book beginning to end as it will offer a buildup of themes chronologically that has the potential to spark connections to other reception points. For readers unfamiliar with these texts, the beginning may be overwhelming with new material as there are several points where this background is assumed. However, this background is introduced most accessibly in the second half of the book, which focuses on New Testament connections to the themes. Therefore, I would suggest that readers start there and then circle back and read the first half, or look to the footnotes to see when another earlier chapter is referenced for further information and zig-zag back and forth in that manner. I think that either of these approaches would help readers gain the Second Temple context so that the connections highlighted in the first half could then be appreciated more fully. With these reading strategies in mind, this book would be of benefit to a broad range of interested readers.
As a scholar of Second Temple Judaism, I think that one of the most important contributions of this book is the compilation of all of the relevant primary source texts related to the myth of the fallen angels and the subsequent detailed comparisons Stuckenbruck offers that are particularly sensitive to differences in the Hebrew and Aramaic documents from Qumran. Often these differences are collapsed, which leaves the impression of a false consistency, but Stuckenbruck's analysis reveals greater nuance and broadens the range for potential allusions and reception of the fallen angel tradition. Some chapters are more fully developed as far as the potential ramifications of the insights gained through these close textual comparisons than others, but the New Testament chapters in particular offer new insights by contextualizing some of the now lost anxieties regarding the interaction between angels and humans that inform and illuminate some of the wording and depictions found in the Gospels, Paul, and the deutero-Pauline letters, as well as Revelation.
No one book can explore all avenues, but this one explores a wide range of possibilities that offers a springboard for further in-depth analysis. For example, while the book offers an extensive range of Jewish and Christian primary source materials and in-depth engagement with certain Ancient Near Eastern myths, the relevant Greco-Roman traditions are sometimes noted but not explored. Engaging with the myth of the Greek Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy myths has the potential of adding further nuance to Second Temple constructs of the fallen angel myth and its relationship to etiologies of sin, ideas concerning the nature of struggles between divine and mortal realms, and the lived reality of injustice for mortals. Along this line, the euhemeristic account of the Titanomachy in Book III of the Sibylline Oracles offers a different Hellenistic Jewish perspective that is briefly alluded to but not explored, but also offers an interesting point of intersection for circulating Mediterranean dialogue on the relationship between the divine and mortal realm and the entrance of war and strife into the world. Stuckenbruck's book paired with Annette Yoshiko Reed's Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005) which would expand the reception investigation into the medieval period, would cover almost anything one would need in order to begin an in-depth academic study of these topics as both have well-researched and up-to-date footnotes to direct the reader to further relevant research.