This is a great book by a great scholar. A defining trait of all of Reed's scholarship, which she displays in the current volume, is an ability to articulate leading perspectives in order to put them aside and explore new interpretive possibilities. A term she uses throughout the book to describe the kind of intellectual activity she undertakes is “experiment.” This volume is a successful experiment.

To use Viktor Shklovsky's famous Russian expression, this book is a powerful instantiation of ostranenie, a defamiliarization of the familiar. The volume focuses on material that is quite familiar to scholars of ancient Judaism—the Enochic Book of the Watchers and the Astronomical Book, and the book of Jubilees. The publication of the Aramaic Enoch texts in the 1970s sparked an explosion of interest in Jewish apocalypticism. Reed, however, opts not to use apocalypticism as her interpretive lens for her study of the early Enoch literature (e.g., pp. 105, 194). Reading these Enochic texts as apocalypses, she emphasizes, can privilege questions of literary classification and runs the risk of flattening out the differences between distinct apocalyptic texts, which are mostly later than the early Enoch literature. Reed favors a synchronic approach to these Enochic writings, examining them in their cultural context rather than in terms of an etic literary category (8–9). She also makes a powerful case for avoiding biblicizing approaches to the study of the Second Temple period, a perspective that has dominated the study of 1 Enoch and Jubilees (24–25). Her critical insight is to ask: When we adopt prevailing perspectives and approaches, what are we missing?

A core thesis of this book is that the patent interest in angels and demons evident in the early Enochic literature, generally taken as a hallmark feature of an apocalyptic world view, can serve as an opportunity to appreciate these writings more fully against the backdrop of the early Hellenistic period in which they were produced (28–36). These texts evince an interest not only in angels or demons but more broadly in angelology and demonology—that is, they engage in systematic reflection about these creatures. These books’ interest in angels and demons are thus illustrative of the scribal practices, conceptions of textuality, and modes of organization of knowledge that shaped the composition of these Enochic writings. Reed turns to comparanda engaged more often in classics than biblical studies to demonstrate that the scribalism evident in the early apocalypses is compatible with the contemporary intellectual culture of the Hellenistic Near East. The period was characterized by the emergence of new forms of intellectual activity, which were heavily textualized and book centered. Under the patronage of the Ptolemaic court, intellectuals such as Callimachus, an important third-century figure at the library of Alexandria, engaged in forms of scholarship with a totalizing and universalist scope; in his lost work Pinakes he catalogued and organized types of books and knowledge about “every branch of learning” (242). In this period intellectuals from self-consciously ancient cultures such as Berossus and Manetho (third-century priests from, respectively, Babylonia and Egypt) promoted accounts in Greek of the origins of human civilization, which gave pride of place to their native traditions by claiming that their people was the first to develop critical forms of knowledge such as writing and astronomy.

Astronomy was not only a technical realm of “scientific” expertise at the time: Reed illustrates the broader appeal of astronomical discourse in the period through a compelling discussion of Aratus (also third century BCE), whose popular didactic poem “Phenomena” reflected the conviction that, in a time of chaos and uncertainty on earth, the discernible and orderly motion of celestial orbs testifies that divine order and structure exist (181). These broader Hellenistic intellectual trends explain the extensive interest of the early Enochic literature in astronomy.

The valorization of Enoch as a scribe in the Book of the Watchers and the Astronomical Book can also be understood as part of the scribalism of the Hellenistic Near East. 1 Enoch claims that angels revealed everything to the sage (1:2). While such epistemological audacity is at odds with biblical tradition (compare, for example, 1 Enoch 17:7–8 and Job 38:16), it accords with the intellectual culture of early Hellenism, with its totalizing and universalist claims, as evident in contemporary scholars such as Callimachus. The placement of early Enochic literature in its cultural context is one of the most compelling features of Reed's monograph.

Reed also situates the early Enochic literature in a synchronic Jewish context—the wealth of other Aramaic texts from Qumran, an important corpus from the third and second centuries BCE that has been published only in recent years. These texts in general show an interest in venerable early ancestors of Jewish tradition: Enoch, as well as figures such as Abraham and Levi. She intriguingly portrays these Aramaic texts as shedding light on an otherwise lost Jewish scribal culture, not in Greek, the prestige language of the imperial powers, but Aramaic. This is also an important scribal medium in Hellenistic Mesopotamia, allowing for traditional Babylonian knowledge (on topics such as astronomy) to be appropriated and reconfigured by Jewish scribes as Jewish knowledge transmitted by their patriarchs of old. In Reed's reading, the emergence of this Aramaic scribal culture should be understood as a response to the universalizing claims of Greek paideia. This is an important point and there is definitely something to this. It also sets a new direction for scholarship on the early Enochic literature and the Qumran Aramaic texts in general. Further scholarship would be welcome on the modes of transmission of knowledge about Hellenistic pedagogy in the Near East and, also, on what sorts of Jewish responses should be envisioned to it. Does the Aramaic scribal culture Reed describes constitute a single response or does one find in the Qumran Aramaic corpus differing forms of interaction with it?

The book's last chapter successfully makes the case that the “lost” Aramaic scribalism of the early Hellenistic period is an important context for understanding Jubilees. This composition incorporates various Enochic traditions that Reed's study highlights. Jubilees 4, for example, extols Enoch not only as a scribe, but also as the originator of the art of writing and as a scholar who wrote a book on astronomy (which, it is implied, was the first book ever written), claims consistent with Hellenistic discourse about the origins of human culture. But in clear distinction from the older Enochic literature, Jubilees thematizes Hebrew, not Aramaic, and attests an interest in Halakhah not paralleled in the earlier Enochic literature. These are both themes that accord with cultural and religious developments that took place in Palestine after the Maccabean crisis. Reed compellingly argues that Jubilees draws from the older Aramaic scribal culture while also transforming and occluding it.

Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism demonstrates the value of simultaneously moving away from dominant scholarly models and branching out beyond conventional demarcations of academic fields of study. The result is the production of new and important knowledge about ancient Judaism and its modes of textuality and scribalism.