2. Venice 2003

The success of the First Enoch Seminar convinced the promoters to expand the call to a larger number of international scholars and specialists in the Enoch literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Second Enoch Seminar was organized by the University of Michigan (Dept. of Near Eastern Studies and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies) and for the first time, by the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies, in collaboration with the City of Venice, the Catholic Dioceses and the Jewish Community of Venice, the Segretariato Attività Ecumeniche of Venice, and the Italian Biblical Association BIBLIA. It probed the role played by the Enoch literature in shaping the ideology and the practice of the Essene movement and the Qumran community, focusing on the work of five international specialists—John Collins, James VanderKam, George Nickelsburg, Florentino García Martínez, and Gabriele Boccaccini.
15 papers (and 32 short papers) circulated in advance and were discussed at the conference in plenary sessions. In attendance were 53 scholars from 10 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America). Among the newcomers: Matthias Albani, Albert Baumgarten, Stefan Beyerle, James Davila, Marcello Del Verme, Torleif Elgvin, Ida Fröhlich, Lester Grabbe, Matthias Henze, Armin Lange, Erik Larson, Timothy Lim, Emile Puech, Annette Reed, Jacques van Ruiten, Lawrence Schiffman, Shemaryahu Talmon, and James VanderKam.

The final session of the Enoch Seminar, a panel at the Scuola Grande of San Giovanni Evangelista, marked the beginning of another conference on Jewish and Christian messianism, Il Messia tra memoria e attesa, open to the public and jointly organized with the Italian Biblical Association BIBLIA, with more than 200 participants. Enoch Seminar members Gabriele Boccaccini, John Collins, James Charlesworth, and Ithamar Gruenwald offered papers together with Italian specialists Rinaldo Fabris, Bruno Maggioni, Sergio Caruso, Amos Luzzatto, and Paolo De Benedetti.

The Proceedings of the Second Enoch Seminar were published in 2005 by Eerdmans [Enoch and Qumran Origins: New Light on a Forgotten Connection, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini]. An additional volume on the early Enoch literature was planned and published in 2007 by Brill [The Early Enoch Literature, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and John Collins]. The Proceedings of the BIBLIA meeting were published in 2005 in Italian by Morcelliana [Il messia tra memoria e attesa, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini].