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Yet even as Ben Sira was writing, some of his fellow Jews were expressing rather different attitudes to the Greek-speaking world (Argall 1995). Discoveries of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek documents at Qumran (Figure 22.2) (the “Dead Sea Scrolls”) have furnished evidence which allows us, with due caution, to hear from the third-century and early-second-century BCE Jewish voices which offer a vision of the world rather different from that of Ben Sira. The composite text known as I Enoch opens (chs 1–36) with a writing known as the Book of Watchers. Aramaic fragments of this work found among the Dead Sea Scrolls allow us to date it almost certainly to the third century BCE. It focuses on the ultimate judgment of wicked human beings, who have been led into sin by heavenly beings called “Watchers” (see also Dan. 4:13, 17, 23; 8:13). These powerful supernatural creatures have rebelled against God, leading humanity astray into violence and unspeakable crimes. Some students of this text perceive in the lurid and highly charged language of the Book of Watchers symbolic references to historical events, such as the struggles of the Diadochoi (Nickelsburg 2001) or vicious internal disputes within the Jewish priesthood (Suter 1979). Whether or not such explanations of the text hold water, the fact remains that violent conflict is a dominant theme in this writing, and accurate understanding of its outworking in the human realm is perceived as inseparable from the influence of supernatural powers, either good or evil. Not unrelated to this is the third section of I Enoch (chs 72–82), often called The Astronomical Book. Once more, Aramaic fragments of the text discovered at Qumran indicate its origins in the third or early second century BCE. It argues, in minute mathematical detail, for a calendar based on a solar year of exactly 364 days. The complexity of this text is overwhelming, and underscores the importance ascribed by its author or compiler to the movements of the heavenly bodies, by means of which the calendar is calculated. Fundamental is the text’s claim that its knowledge of the calendar derives from the heavenly realms, not from human calculation (Albani 1994; Leicht 2006). Although both texts evince acute awareness of the non-Jewish world, their primary concern is the right conduct of Jews against wickedness and error, which seem to predominate in the non-Jewish environment, and in Jewish activities affected by it.