Seth L. Sanders’s 2014 prepublication paper, “Beyond Borrowing: Aramaic Scribal Culture and the Creativity of Second Temple Judaism,” argues that Jewish writers did not simply “borrow” Babylonian ideas.
His bottom line is historical rather than slogan-level: Aramaic scribal culture translated, adapted, and reorganized Mesopotamian legal, political, and technical knowledge, and Judean authors could then recast some of that inherited material in revelatory works like the Astronomical Book of Enoch and the Aramaic Levi Document.
Genesis 6 remains Scripture; these Second Temple texts give historical context, not doctrine.
No: Sanders says “borrowing” is the wrong model
Sanders’s main target is not the existence of Babylonian parallels. It is the explanation that stops once a parallel has been noticed. Early in the paper, he objects to treating tablets and scrolls as if they contacted each other without human mediation:
“Yet in contrast to the many studies comparing the literary patterns of Mesopotamian and Jewish writings, little has been done on the historical relationship between actual Babylonian and Judean writers, and the connections have seemed difficult to trace. Scholars have tended to talk about contact between literatures rather than between people, as if tablets and scrolls could speak to each other.”
He then states the methodological problem directly:
“But second, does the idea of influence or borrowing really explain the relationship?”
For Sanders, “influence” and “borrowing” can become placeholders for the thing that needs explaining: which people carried the knowledge, in what language, through which institutions, and on what media. His alternative model is built around scribes who could work across cultural worlds. “Aramaic scribal culture,” in his usage, means the network of Aramaic-writing scribes in courts, chanceries, legal archives, and temples who translated, drafted, copied, and reorganized inherited genres.
Sanders sets his view between two less satisfactory options. On one side, he engages Mladen Popović’s caution about the difficulty of determining how Jews learned Babylonian scholarship beyond Aramaic as a possible medium. Sanders treats that as a real warning: we usually cannot write biographies of individual Judean scribes. But he argues that wider epigraphic and archaeological evidence lets us trace real channels of contact, even if we cannot name every person involved.
On the other side, he cites Henrik Drawnel’s work on the Aramaic Levi Document as a more specific reconstruction, especially the proposal that the author of Levi’s composition received Babylonian scribal schooling or training modeled on Babylonian scribal education. Sanders does not need that level of precision. He accepts that Aramaic Levi contains Babylonian-style metrological knowledge, but he explains it through long-term Aramaic mediation rather than a confident biography of one author.
His conclusion states the larger point:
“Pervasive in the training of writers all over the ancient Near East by the 5th century, Aramaic was a scribal culture whose power resided precisely in the fact that it did not seem like a culture at all.”
“Judean scribes came to share this cosmopolitan Mesopotamian culture and Aramaic parchment medium with larger communities of knowledge during the Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic periods. The connections were more intimate than borrowing: in certain ways Jewish and Mesopotamian scholars were simply part of the same community, one in which Aramaic had moved from being a cosmopolitan language to a cosmic one.”
I went to Sanders expecting another study of parallels. What makes the paper useful is that he keeps forcing the question behind the parallel: what historical infrastructure made the parallel possible?
| Model | Explanation | Sanders’s judgment |
| Simple borrowing | Judean authors directly copy or adapt Babylonian ideas. | Too thin; it skips people, institutions, and media. |
| Skeptical agnosticism | Aramaic may be a channel, but mechanisms are mostly unknowable. | Too cautious for Sanders; broader evidence reveals real scribal pathways. |
| Direct Babylonian schooling | Specific Judean authors trained in Babylonian schools. | Possible in theory, but often more biographical than the evidence permits. |
| Shared Aramaic scribal culture | Aramaic scribes translated and reorganized Babylonian knowledge across centuries. | Sanders’s preferred model; it best fits the cumulative evidence. |
The trail runs through scribes, courts, oaths, and documents
Sanders begins centuries before 1 Enoch. In his discussion of the ninth-century Tel Fekheriye bilingual inscription, he highlights a monument with Akkadian and Aramaic texts that are related without being a flat translation. The point is not just bilingualism, but genre contact:
“The implications for any study of Mesopotamian-to-West Semitic textual transmission should not be underestimated: it demonstrates that not only languages but textual genres in East and West Semitic were already being intertwined during the 9th century B.C.E.”
That changes the later question about Judean literature. If Akkadian and Aramaic scribes were already interweaving royal genres on the same monument, then later Aramaic Jewish texts do not require an imagined one-time raid on Babylonian libraries. They can be placed inside a much older scribal habit.
Sanders next turns to treaty and oath performance. Assyrian vassal treaties, including the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon, were not merely archived as tablets. They were publicly enacted, translated, recited, and received by local audiences. In Sanders’s treatment of oath performance and treaty translation, that setting matters because it gives local scribes more than words on a page: they encounter imperial formulas as performed political realities.
The Neo-Assyrian Aramaic legal tablets supply firmer documentary evidence. Sanders cites Mario Fales on Aramaic contracts and sale documents that closely reproduce Akkadian legal structure. These are not decorative literary echoes. They are working legal habits transmitted through scribes.
By the Persian period, Sanders’s discussion of Aramaic legal papyri from Elephantine and Wadi ed-Daliyeh shows related dependence on Babylonian models: formulae, clause ordering, and legal assumptions that make best sense against Mesopotamian documentary practice.
He also notes Aramaic-writing sēpiru in Babylonian temple environments such as Uruk, Borsippa, Sippar, and Babylon. That matters because temple scribes were close to the worlds of accounts, law, ritual, and scholarship. Sanders does not claim that this proves a particular Judean author read a particular temple scroll. His point is narrower and stronger: Aramaic scribes were embedded in institutions where Babylonian knowledge was produced and maintained.
| Channel | Evidence in Sanders | Payoff |
| Royal chanceries | Tel Fekheriye; Aramaic versions of imperial inscriptions such as Behistun. | Royal ideology and literary forms could move into Aramaic. |
| Oath performance | Assyrian treaties translated and enacted before local audiences. | Treaty formulas could be learned as ritual practice, not just copied text. |
| Legal documents | Neo-Assyrian Aramaic tablets; Elephantine and Wadi ed-Daliyeh papyri. | Babylonian legal structure became normal in Aramaic documentary work. |
| Temple scribes | Aramaic-writing sēpiru in major Babylonian sanctuaries. | Aramaic scribes stood near technical and scholarly traditions. |
| Parchment media | Magallatu colophons, including Sanders’s discussion of BM 41548 and OECT 9, 24. | Some scholarly material may have moved from clay-tablet settings into alphabetic scroll culture. |
The magallatu argument is important, but inferential
The most intriguing part of Sanders’s reconstruction concerns parchment scrolls called magallatu. In his section on late Babylonian colophons, including BM 41548 and OECT 9, 24, Sanders observes that some scholarly texts refer to leather scroll exemplars. One divinatory text describes its sequel as written on a leather scroll, an exemplar from Borsippa. Sanders asks what language and script such scrolls likely used.
He reviews options such as Greek transliteration, Aramaic transliteration of cuneiform, or cuneiform painted on parchment, and finds them historically or practically unlikely. Greek was late and limited in Mesopotamian scholarly circles. Aramaic transliteration would require an elaborate system not otherwise attested in the needed way. Painted cuneiform on leather would be inefficient when clay tablets already suited cuneiform writing.
His preference is that at least some such scrolls were alphabetic, probably Aramaic, translations with real scholarly and legal authority. This should be stated carefully. Sanders does not possess a colophon that says the magallatu were Aramaic translations. The argument is cumulative: Aramaic already functioned as a major documentary language; Aramaic scribes worked in Babylonian institutions; parchment could carry authoritative texts; and the rival explanations look weaker. If that reconstruction is right, then Babylonian technical traditions could plausibly reach Aramaic-literate Jewish scribes through scroll media rather than only through cuneiform tablets.
That is a possible bridge to Enochic literature, not a proven conveyor belt. It makes the Astronomical Book of Enoch historically intelligible within an Aramaic scholarly world, but it does not prove the exact path by which any one Enochic author received any one Babylonian source.
From public power to secret knowledge
In his section “From Public Power to Secret Knowledge,” Sanders identifies a shift in how Mesopotamian material appears in Jewish texts:
“All four strong examples of the transformation of Mesopotamian traditions fit a fundamental literary pattern: they are adapted by being reframed in a story, as revelations to a biblical prophet or patriarch. But there is a substantial difference in the nature of the later texts: the biblical Hebrew genres are public and political, while the Second Temple Aramaic genres are esoteric and scholarly.”
The earlier examples are public genres of power. Sanders draws on existing work that links Assyrian treaty traditions, including Esarhaddon material, with Deuteronomic covenant forms, and Babylonian law, especially Hammurapi traditions, with portions of the Covenant Code. His contribution is not to claim those comparisons from scratch, but to place them in a longer history of Aramaic mediation.
The later examples are technical and esoteric. The Astronomical Book of Enoch is not mainly a Watchers narrative. It contains calendrical and astronomical material presented as knowledge revealed to Enoch. In Sanders’s treatment of Mul.Apin, Enūma Anu Enlil, the “Lunar Three,” and Qumran texts 4Q319–321a, the Enochic and Qumran materials show analytical engagement with Babylonian astronomical traditions rather than crude copying.
Aramaic Levi offers a second case. Its metrological sequence, working through base-sixty measurements, closely resembles Babylonian school material. Sanders relies on Drawnel’s detailed analysis of the metrological parallels in Aramaic Levi while resisting Drawnel’s more confident reconstruction of the author’s personal education and priestly lineage. That distinction is crucial: the technical overlap needs explanation, but the explanation can be systemic rather than biographical.
Sanders ties these later texts back to the broader Persian-period evidence:
“The patterns of the AB and Levi take on added significance because they correlate with the limited but clear attested evidence of Aramaic adaptation of Babylonian textual material during the Persian period.”
Here “AB” refers to the Astronomical Book. The pattern is not simply that Jewish texts contain Babylonian-looking material. It is that public legal and political forms in earlier Hebrew texts give way, in later Aramaic texts, to scholarly material placed in the mouths of ancient patriarchs. Enoch receives cosmic knowledge; Levi receives priestly and metrological instruction. Mesopotamian technical learning has been relocated into revelatory narrative.
Scripture itself does not describe Enoch teaching astronomy or Levi transmitting metrology. Genesis 5:24 says Enoch walked with God and was taken by God. Genesis places Levi inside the patriarchal story. When Second Temple authors expand these figures into heavenly teachers, they are doing creative theological and literary work. Sanders helps explain why the content of that expansion often looks like translated and reorganized Babylonian technical lore.
What Sanders proves, and what he does not
The hard evidence is strongest where Sanders stays close to scribal practice: bilingual monuments, Aramaic legal tablets, Persian-period papyri, oath performance, and Aramaic scribes in Babylonian institutions. These data make “mere borrowing” look historically thin. They show repeated settings where Aramaic writers handled Mesopotamian genres as part of normal professional life.
The magallatu proposal is weaker only in the proper scholarly sense: it is plausible, argued, and useful, but still inferential. Future discoveries could clarify the script, language, or function of these leather scrolls and force adjustment. Sanders’s presentation leaves room for that.
A second limit is individual biography. Sanders can describe a shared scribal world better than he can identify the life of a particular Enochic or Levitical author. That restraint is a strength. It keeps the paper from turning technical parallels into unsupported claims about who studied where.
For Genesis 6 readers, the scope must remain clear. Sanders does not decide whether the “sons of God” are angels, kings, or another group. He does not make 1 Enoch canonical. He explains how non-canonical Jewish works could combine biblical figures, Watchers traditions, astronomy, measurement, and revelation within a broader Aramaic scribal environment.
In my reading, that is exactly where the paper is most valuable. It neither dismisses Second Temple literature as fantasy nor treats it as Scripture. It shows that texts like the Astronomical Book of Enoch and Aramaic Levi are historically situated works of learned Jewish creativity.
Conclusion
Takeaways: Sanders’s central claim is that Babylonian material entered Second Temple Jewish literature through a long-standing Aramaic scribal culture, not through simple literary borrowing. His best evidence comes from real scribal settings: chanceries, oaths, legal documents, temple scribes, and possibly parchment scholarly scrolls. His most tentative claim is the magallatu-as-Aramaic hypothesis, which is plausible but not proven. For Genesis 6, the result is historical context: Enochic and related texts help us see how some Jews developed Watchers-era traditions, but Scripture alone governs doctrine.
Jake Mooney is a lay researcher and the author of the novel The Descent of the Gods, with 25+ years studying Genesis 6. Chasing the Giants is where he brings Bible-first research together on the topic to help separate what we can really believe vs what is purely sensationalism.
This review is based on Sanders’s prepublication paper, with attention to the specific examples he uses: Tel Fekheriye, Neo-Assyrian Aramaic legal tablets, Elephantine and Wadi ed-Daliyeh papyri, magallatu colophons, the Astronomical Book, and Aramaic Levi. I have treated Sanders’s claims, reasonable implications, and my own biblical-theological boundaries as separate layers.
If you want more careful, Bible-centered work on Genesis 6, the Watchers traditions, and how to read Second Temple material faithfully in light of Christ, consider subscribing to the free monthly Chasing the Giants newsletter.
