Book of Enoch

• 1. Introduction

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  The Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text, tells of two hundred angels who swore a binding oath on Mount Hermon. Their leader, Semjaza, wanted them to take human wives and father children. He was afraid of the cost. In the text he says: "I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin." The angels answered by swearing together, and the book says they named the mountain Hermon because of that oath. It all happens in the days of Jared. Tradition ascribes the book to Enoch, the father of Methuselah and the great-grandfather of Noah. Its older sections are estimated to date to about 300-200 BC, and its latest part, the Book of Parables, probably to about 100 BC. Who actually wrote it? Why did the Western world lose track of it for centuries? Why do some churches still treat it as scripture while most traditions do not? And what is a book about fallen angels doing with calendars, kings, and the end of the world?

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• 2. The Fallen Watchers

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  Three hundred ells, an old unit of length, was the height of the giants born from those angelic unions. According to the book, the giants first consumed everything that people had gathered. When people could no longer feed them, the giants turned on mankind and devoured it. They then sinned against birds, beasts, reptiles and fish, and began to eat one another's flesh and drink blood.

  Azazel, the most prominent of the fallen angels, taught men to make swords, knives, shields and breastplates. He also revealed the metals of the earth and how to work them. His lessons covered bracelets, ornaments, costly stones, colouring tinctures, and antimony for beautifying the eyelids. Much godlessness followed, the text says, and people became corrupt in all their ways.

  Other leaders had their own specialities. Semjaza taught enchantments and root-cuttings, and Armaros taught how to resolve enchantments. Baraqijal taught astrology, Kokabel the constellations, and Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds. Araqiel taught the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon.

  Four archangels, Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel, appealed to God to judge the world and the fallen angels. In the book's logic, this corruption is why the Genesis flood was morally necessary. God sent Uriel to Noah, the son of Lamech, with a short command: "Hide thyself!" Uriel was to reveal that a deluge was about to destroy everything on the earth, and to teach Noah how his seed might be preserved.

  The punishments are specific. Raphael is ordered to bind Azazel hand and foot and open a pit for him in the desert at a place called Dudael. Jagged rocks are to be laid on him and his face covered so that he never sees light. On the day of the great judgement he will be cast into the fire. Gabriel is told to set the giants against each other so that they destroy one another in battle. Michael is told to bind Semjaza and his associates for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth.

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• 3. Five Books Stitched Together

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  Chapters 1 to 36 form the Book of the Watchers, and 108 chapters in all hold five distinct books. The Book of Parables fills chapters 37 to 71 and is also called the Similitudes of Enoch. The Astronomical Book runs from 72 to 82 and is also called the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries. The Book of Dream Visions, also called the Book of Dreams, covers 83 to 90. The Epistle of Enoch covers 91 to 108. Most scholars believe these five began as independent works with different dates of composition. Editors joined them later.

  A sixth work, the Book of Giants, haunts that arrangement. One recovered Qumran fragment of it was written by the same scribe who copied a portion of Enoch. The Giants follow the children of the Watchers, who dream of coming devastation and ask Enoch to interpret the dreams and to intercede for them. The Parables survive only in the Ethiopic manuscripts. So it seems likely that the Parables replaced the Giants in an original set of five Enochic books, sometimes called the Enochic pentateuch.

  The Epistle of Enoch is itself a patchwork of five subsections. Its Apocalypse of Weeks narrates the history of the world in ten periods called weeks, seven in the past and three in the future. The climax comes in the seventh part of the tenth week, when a "new heaven shall appear". A short exhortation follows, in which Enoch urges his son Methuselah toward righteousness. The epistle proper then describes the two paths of righteousness and unrighteousness and delivers six oracles against sinners. Boccaccini sees two layers in it. An earlier layer has a theology near the deterministic doctrine of the Qumran group. A slightly later layer stresses personal responsibility and often portrays sinners as the wealthy and the just as the oppressed.

  Chapters 106 and 107 tell of Noah, who is born already with the appearance of an angel. Qumran fragments separate this passage from the preceding text with a blank line, so it looks like an appendix. It probably comes from a separate Book of Noah, rearranged as direct speech from Enoch. Chapter 108 was not found at Qumran at all. It is considered the work of the final editor, and it sets a "generation of light" against sinners destined for darkness.

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• 4. The Son of Man

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  On the throne of glory at the final judgment, the Book of Parables places a figure with several names. He is called the "son of man", the "Righteous One", the "Chosen One", and "Messiah". The first known use of "Son of Man" as a definite title in Jewish writings is in 1 Enoch. Its use here may have shaped the early Christian understanding of the title. The Parables build on the Book of the Watchers but widen the judgment. It now falls not only on fallen angels but also on the evil kings of the earth.

  The dating of these chapters is the central scholarly fight. In 1976, Jozef Milik dated the Parables to the third century, pointing to similarities with the Sibylline Oracles. He linked the events in the text to historic events of about AD 260-270. On his theory, a Jewish Christian wrote the chapters in later Christian times and borrowed Enoch's authoritative name. Knibb followed his reasoning. He noted that no fragments of chapters 37-71 turned up at Qumran, and that the Greek translation lacks them too. Most scholars have rejected Milik's date. David W. Suter suggests a tendency to place the Parables between 50 BC and AD 117. In 1893, Robert Charles judged chapter 71 a later addition, but he later gave the whole work an early date, between 94 and 64 BC.

  Emil G. Hirsch, in a 1906 article, argued that the phrase "Son of Man" never appears in the original material. He said it occurs only in what are called Noachian interpolations, where it means nothing more than "man". Charles read the same title as a supernatural messiah who is not of human descent. Hirsch thought those passages betrayed Christian editing. Many scholars now accept the interpolation idea, since the passages seem to interrupt the narrative. Darrell D. Hannah suggests they derive from an earlier Noah apocryphon, and that some refer to Herod the Great, around 4 BC.

  Chapter 69 ends with the words: "This is the third parable of Enoch." Chapters 70 and 71 then add a startling twist. Like Elijah, Enoch is generally thought to have been taken up to heaven alive, though some suggest the text means a natural death. In these chapters the Son of Man is identified with Enoch himself, and the narration switches from third person to first person. That contradicts earlier passages where the Son of Man is a separate figure. Most scholars treat chapters 70-71 as a later addition. James H. Charlesworth rejects that view and believes no additions were made to the Parables.

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• 5. A 364-Day Calendar

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  Four fragmentary copies of the Astronomical Book, labelled 4Q208 to 4Q211, were found at Qumran. Two of them, 4Q208 and 4Q209, date to the beginning of the 2nd century BC. That gives the book a latest possible date in the 3rd century BC. The fragments include material that the later versions of Enoch do not contain. The book itself describes the movements of the heavenly bodies and of the firmament as knowledge revealed to Enoch on trips to heaven, guided by Uriel.

  The calendar it describes has exactly 364 days. The year splits into four seasons of 91 days. Each season holds three months of thirty days, plus one extra day at the end of the third month. That makes exactly 52 weeks, so every calendar date falls on the same day of the week every year. Each year and each season always starts on a Wednesday. The text ties Wednesday to the fourth day of creation in Genesis, when the lights, seasons, days and years were made. The same solar calendar appears in the Book of Jubilees and was used by the Dead Sea sect. Following it made it impossible to celebrate festivals at the same time as the Temple of Jerusalem.

  The tropical year runs 365.24 days, so a 364-day calendar drifts. Nobody knows how its users reconciled the two. At least seven suggestions have been made, and it is not even certain the users felt a need to adjust. The surrounding chapters cover the sun, the moon and its phases, the twelve winds and their portals, and the four quarters of the world. The contents list names seven mountains, seven rivers and seven great islands. Chapter 82 mentions four intercalary days.

  The text's references to the sun and stars have also caused trouble for modern readers. Some interpret them as sunlight and starlight, which avoids a clash with modern cosmology. That reading is linguistically possible. The Akkadian relative of the Hebrew word for sun, šamšum, can mean sunlight or a day. The Akkadian relative of the Hebrew word for star, kakkabum, can refer to an object resembling a star, or even a meteor.

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• 6. Animals as History

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  A white bull stands for Adam in the Dream Visions, and a female heifer stands for Eve. The second of the two dreams, the Animal Apocalypse, is an allegory of the history of Israel. Animals represent human beings, and human beings represent angels. Most scholars date the section to Maccabean times, about 163-142 BC. Colour carries meaning in one reconstruction, built on the work of R. H. Charles and G. H. Schodde. White marks moral purity, black marks the sin and contamination of the fallen angels, and red marks the blood of martyrdom.

  The same reconstruction fills out the cast. A red calf is Abel, a black calf is Cain, and a white calf is Seth. Noah is a white bull, and three bulls released from the Ark are his sons: white for Shem, red for Ham and black for Japheth. The Lord of the sheep is God, and the sheep are the faithful. Foreign nations appear as predators. Wild boars are Esau and his descendants, dogs are the Philistines, and foxes are the Ammonites and Moabites. Lions and tigers are the Assyrians and Babylonians. Ravens are the Seleucids, kites are the Ptolemies, and eagles are possibly the Macedonians.

  The story runs through Israel's past in this code. Moses and Aaron appear in chapter 89, verses 13-15, with the miracle of a river splitting in two so they can cross. The sheep reach a "pleasant and glorious land" in verse 40, where dogs, foxes and wild boars attack them. David replaces Saul in one image. The Lord of the sheep raises a lamb to be a ram and leader in place of the ram that forsook its glory. A tower on a house stands for the temple, with the Lord of the sheep standing on the tower. Dillmann, Vernes and Schodde accepted that reading.

  Israel fell to the Assyrians in 721 BC, and Judah fell to the Babylonians a little over a century later, in 587 BC. The vision shows God handing the sheep to lions, tigers, wolves and hyenas. The Babylonians burn the tower and demolish the house, which the text presents as the sack of the temple in 587-586 BC. When Cyrus lets the Jews return, three sheep turn back and begin rebuilding, and the Second Temple is completed in 515 BC.

  The book's own verdict on that rebuilt temple is harsh. Verse 73 of chapter 89 says the returned Jews raised up the tower again and put a table before it, but "all the bread on it was polluted and not pure".

  The vision then turns to the Maccabean revolt of 167 BCE against the Seleucids, according to Western scholars. A great horn sprouts on one of the lambs, and the sheep run to it. The Seleucids try to lay it low, but "they had no power over it". Scholars identify the horn as Judas Maccabeus, who fought the Macedonians, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies between 167 and 160 BC. It cannot be Mattathias, who died a natural death. The text calls the horn "one great horn among six others", possibly pointing to the five brothers of Judas and Mattathias. Judas was eventually killed at the Battle of Elasa, where he faced twenty thousand foot soldiers and two thousand cavalry.

  The vision ends with a birth: "And I saw that a white bull was born, with large horns". Some read this as the birth of a Messiah. Another interpretation reads the last chapters as the battle of Armageddon, in which all the nations march against Israel. The War Scroll, which describes how such a battle might look to the group at Qumran, supports that second reading.

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• 7. Lost and Found

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  In 1773, the Scottish traveller James Bruce returned to Europe from six years in Abyssinia with three copies of a Geʽez version of the book. One went to the Bodleian Library, another to the royal library of France, and Bruce kept the third. They sat unused until the 19th century. Silvestre de Sacy then published extracts with Latin translations, and a German translation by Rink followed in 1801. The first English translation, by Richard Laurence, appeared in 1821. In 1838 Laurence released the first Geʽez text of 1 Enoch published in the West. It was soon judged unreliable because it transcribed only a single manuscript.

  Better editions followed. August Dillmann produced the first critical edition in 1851, based on five manuscripts. Robert Henry Charles dominated Enoch scholarship from 1890 until World War I. His 1893 translation drew on ten additional manuscripts, and his 1906 critical edition used 23 Geʽez manuscripts. His English translation of the reconstructed text appeared in 1912. He sorted the Geʽez manuscripts into two families. One is thought more ancient and closer to the earlier Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek versions. The other is more recent and apparently edited.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, writing in 1616 while imprisoned in the Tower of London, made a curious claim. He said the part of Enoch about the course of the stars had been found in Saba in the first century. He credited Origen, although no such statement exists in Origen's surviving works. Outside Ethiopia, the book was considered lost until the early seventeenth century. Then Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc bought a book claimed to be identical to the one quoted by the Epistle of Jude and the Church Fathers. Hiob Ludolf, the great Ethiopic scholar, soon called it a forgery produced by Abba Bahaila Michael.

  The Church Fathers had known the Greek text, and quoted it both positively and negatively. They included Justin Martyr, Minucius Felix, Irenaeus, Origen, Cyprian, Hippolytus, Commodianus, Lactantius and Cassian. In the 8th century, the Byzantine monk George Syncellus preserved passages of it in Greek in his chronography. In the 9th century, Patriarch Nicephorus listed it as a New Testament apocryphon. Other versions survive only in scraps. The Latin translation is known for just 1:9 and 106:1-18, the second of which M. R. James found in an 8th-century manuscript in the British Museum in 1893. The only Syriac example appears in the 12th-century Chronicle of Michael the Great. A sixth- or seventh-century Coptic fragment holds the Apocalypse of Weeks.

  Sixth-century papyri from Akhmim in Egypt, published in 1892, preserve parts of chapters 1-32 in Greek. Elena Dugan argues that the first of its two scribes was not careless, as once thought. She says the first scribe preserved "a thoughtful composition, corresponding to the progression of Enoch's life and culminating in an ascent to heaven".

  Then came the Dead Sea Scrolls. Eleven Aramaic fragments of the Book of Enoch were found in cave 4 of Qumran in 1948. Milik described the leather as white or cream, blackened in areas, smooth, thick and stiff, with ink that was blurred and faint. Paleographic analysis dates the oldest Watchers fragments to 200-150 BC. That ended any claim that the core of the book was composed after the Maccabean Revolt as a reaction to Hellenization. Milik's official edition appeared in 1976. Knibb published a new Geʽez edition in 1978, Matthew Black a commentary in 1985, and George W. E. Nickelsburg the first volume of a comprehensive commentary in 2001. Jay Winter published his translation of the Ethiopian texts in 2015.

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• 8. Canon and Jude

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  A single line from the Epistle of Jude ties Enoch to the New Testament. Jude attributes a prophecy to "Enoch, the Seventh from Adam", saying that the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints to execute judgment. The same words appear in 1 Enoch 1:9, and also in Qumran scroll 4Q204. R. H. Charles concluded in 1912 that the writer of chapters 1-5 used the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 33:2 and presumably wrote in Hebrew. John Barton cautions that a quotation alone does not prove canonical status. Jude cites Enoch by name, so he seems to treat him as a historical prophet. But Jude may instead be drawing on a midrash on Deuteronomy. Davids, writing in 2006, concluded that Jude considered the passage authoritative, but we cannot tell how he ranked it against Isaiah or Jeremiah.

  There is little doubt that 1 Enoch shaped New Testament thinking about the Messiah, the Son of Man, the messianic kingdom, demonology, resurrection, and the last things. Enoch also appears in Luke 3:37, as the father of Methuselah in the ancestry of Jesus. Simon Gathercole has suggested that Luke 10:18 may draw on the cosmology of Enoch, linking the descent of Satan to the downfall of the Watchers. The earlier sections probably influenced other works too, among them Jubilees, 2 Baruch, 2 Esdras, the Apocalypse of Abraham and 2 Enoch. Even there, the connection is typically more branches of a common trunk than direct development.

  The number of copies found among the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests Enoch was widely read in the Second Temple period. The Qumran community fully accepted it. Later rabbis treated it with suspicion, and classical rabbinic literature is nearly silent about Enoch. It was excluded from the Tanakh and the Septuagint. Possible reasons include its teachings on fallen angels and the corruptibility of man, and its focus on mystical and apocalyptic themes rather than legal and ethical ones. Gershom Scholem nonetheless wrote that the main subjects of later Merkabah mysticism already held a central position in the older esoteric literature, best represented by the Book of Enoch. Chapter 14, with its detailed description of the throne of God, drew particular attention.

  The Ethiopian Beta Israel community is the only Jewish group that accepts the book as canonical. It preserves the book in its liturgical language of Geʽez, and the book plays a central role in worship. By the fifth century most Christian biblical canons had dropped it. Today it counts as scripture only for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Meanwhile, since the year 2000, the Enoch seminar has devoted several meetings to a bold hypothesis. It holds that the Enoch literature attests an autonomous, non-Mosaic tradition of dissent in Second Temple Judaism.

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