In Chains: Slaves and Angels

And then it goes through and talks about all the things that the different angels taught them. Hermoni taught sorcery for the loosing of spells and magic and skill. Hopefully everybody was like, Hermione’s teaching spells. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

You know, we’re— it’s springtime. The blossoms are out in Salt Lake City and it’s lovely.

And those pear trees, man.

Oh, well, look, certain pear trees are fine. And then there’s the— it’s not the Bradford pear tree.

Which gives you no fruit but does have a certain smell about it. And I am not a fan of that smell.

Nobody is. Flies are evidently fans of that.

But, uh, but yes, other than that, you know, I went for a walk recently at the, uh, the Utah State Capitol, which is surrounded by, uh, you got cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms. Uh, they’re only there for a few days and then they’re gone. So you got to, you got to hit them.

Just get them while they’re hot.

Yeah, exactly. So that was— by the time you hear this, they’re gone. Forget about it. Don’t try.

It’s too late.

It’s too late. Anyway, uh, I’m looking forward to today’s show. We have some fun coming up. We’re going to start with a Who’s That? And that’s going to be Hagar. And she is one— it’s an interesting story. I have many questions for you.

And then speaking of questions, we’re getting into some really interesting stuff. We’re going to talk about chaining up some angels.

Yes, this is something that comes up every now and then. Anytime there’s a drought in Iraq and the Euphrates River level gets low. Yeah, you start to hear about these chained up angels.

But also, like, they came up recently. I was on Threads and I had posted something dumb that I post. I like to poke the bear over on Threads. And then somebody like came at me with a whole bunch of like, well, chained up angels. And I was like, chained up angels? I remember about that. But what are we even talking about here?

So we’re gonna, we’re gonna look at the source.

Yeah, we’ll get to it. All right. So let’s— that’ll be our chapter and verse. But for now, let’s dive into Who’s That? And today’s Who’s That? I said Hagar.

Hagar, turn back now.

That’s right. That’s right. We already— we already said it. So Hagar is a slave woman. Let’s just sort of lay the groundwork for who she is. And to whom she belongs, etc.

Yeah, so she is named as an Egyptian, and she pops up in Genesis 16 . So Sarai and Abram are having trouble conceiving, and then the text, if I recall correctly, the text just says, so anyway, she had this Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar. And I want to look at the word for slave. It should be—it’s shifcha. Yeah, shifcha. So, like, handmaid female slave. She’s from Egypt, and her name is probably not Egyptian.

Because her name in Hebrew is just Hagar. Now, this, if you look at the consonants, this could be hager, and hager would mean the foreigner.

Oh my gosh.

A little on the nose.

Little bit.

Come on.

So, um, so this is— she’s probably a literary creation, uh, not an actual historical person, just like Abram and Sarai are probably literary creations. But anyway, um, Sarai realizes, you know, I can’t have kids, but I possess property that is capable of procreation. And so Abram, why don’t you, uh, go have intercourse with my slave girl, and, uh, and, you know, it’ll just count as our child. And Abram, you know, is like, well, okay.

And we should be clear, uh, this is after many years because they are old already. Uh, they, they, they live to ripe old, old, old ages, but like Abram’s already in his 80s, right, at this point?

Uh, I think it says he’s 80— Well, it says at the end of the chapter, he was 86 years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

Right.

So 86, yeah. So he’s already—.

Not a spring chicken.

No, not by any stretch of the imagination.

So she belongs to Sarai, and she becomes a wife of Abram, and not like a - not just, “You are my enslaved person that I am going to sire children with,” but an actual honest-to-goodness wife, which - and the intent here, the author was probably narrating it this way in order that her child would be a legitimate heir of Abraham. So we are keeping it all above board.

Well, and it literally says that Sarai gave her to her husband as a wife. So like, that was - he did not just take her as a wife. This was sort of an anniversary present or something.

Yes, he was given another wife. And according to Genesis 16:4 , he went into Hagar, which is a euphemism, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her. And this is kind of - there are different thoughts on exactly why she would suddenly be contemptuous toward Sarai after having conceived. I mean, that is kind of the point of what is going on here. And then at the same time, Sarai gets upset. But Sarai says, “Hey, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me.” And Abram is, you know, he is in his post-coital whatever and is just like, “Hey, do what you got to do.” And from the NRSV-UE, verse 6, he says, “Your slave is in your power. Do to her as you please.” And then Sarai dealt harshly with her, so she up and runs away.

It does not elaborate on what “dealt harshly with” means.

Yeah, I am going to look what it says.

Um, and she -

Huh, yeah, oppressed her, humiliated her.

Um, violated her is a potential translation, but I, I cannot imagine that that is what is going on in the, in the narrative. Uh, but she runs away, and then we get this interesting story: She is out in the wilderness, she is by a spring of water, and it says the angel of Adonai found her, the spring on the way to Shur.

And we are going to, when we get to the end of this, I will explain why I think it is actually supposed to be Adonai themselves. Yeah.

You know, it is funny, I have been doing this show for long enough that I was like, I know what is going on. Somebody added the word angel later. This was, I know how this works. We have seen this before. Because it stops being an angel partway through. Like, they forgot to do the full find and replace on that. And so the edit is not complete.

Yeah, you have got one doublet that shows up. But the angel says to her, “Hagar, slave of Sarai.” And notice that even the angel is like, “You belong to this woman here. That is your identity. Where have you come from and where are you going?” As if God does not know, right? Uh, she said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” The angel said, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” And then, uh, we get this statement, which is the kind of statement that you would get from God themselves: “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” Yeah. And then says, now you have conceived and shall bear a son. You shall call him Ishmael. But the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man with his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall live at odds with all his kin. And this is actually - there is actually an interpretive debate here among some scholars.

What is going on here with the - Okay, what is the debate? Well, the “live at odds,” because it is literally the Hebrew is “al penei kol echav yishkon,” which means, “Against the face of all his brethren he will dwell.” And so, “al penei,” does that mean he is going to dwell opposite them, like next to them, like they are on one side of the valley, he is on the other? Or is it more he is going to live in contention with them, doing battle with them or whatever. Yeah, so you have in the NRSV-UE, “He shall live at odds with all his kin.” If you look in the King James Version, “He shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” If you look in the NET Bible, “He will live away from his brothers.” So like there are a bunch of different ways to interpret what is going on here. Literally, the Hebrew is al penei means over or against the face of all his brothers or brethren.

So I am going to say it means across the street. He is going to live across the street from his brothers.

It is a different development. They put up a wall because they did not want any of his -

But he’s got a window. It looks directly at their lawn. So yeah, he’s checking them out.

They hit the baseball over the fence from time to time and he comes out and yells at them. Right.

Tell me about the name Ishmael. What does it mean?

So it seems to be based on the verbal root shama, which means to hear or to hearken. And so what happens, what does the angel say, or God? “For the Lord God has given heed to your affliction,” in verse 11. Let me just look. Ki shama Adonai el onyekh. So yeah, shama means to hear or to heed. So give heed to. So it would be God has listened or God has heard or something like that. And this is kind of how the folk etymology— oh, I started to say a very different word. A lot of these stories in Genesis are folk etymologies.

Right.

Where it’s like, oh, this person was named this and they tell a story that results in, so they named him that, right? Um, and here, yeah, the idea is the Lord has given heed to your affliction, so bam, Ishmael.

Okay. Uh, I, I was hoping it meant something about wild ass of a man, uh, but no, alas.

Okay, donkey.

Yeah, yeah, the wild ass thing was so weird to me, but okay, he’s just, he’s just— don’t worry, Says the Lord, I’ll make sure everything’s great by giving you a son who will be a jerk to everybody that he meets. Is that what that means? Wild ass of a man?

Well, I think the idea is what a wild ass is characterized by, kind of recklessness, is resistant to being restrained and contained and stuff like that. So I think that’s probably the idea here. And these are supposed to be the— this is supposed to be an etiology for the Arab peoples. And so this is a way to characterize them in a particular way. And it’s kind of like, it’s not quite as explicit when you get down to Abraham and Lot and Lot’s 2 daughters become the ancestors of the Moabites and the— is it Ammonites or Edomites? I think it’s the Ammonites. But that’s like, “Hey, look at you. You all descend from incest.” And here it’s a way to say you descend from an enslaved person, but there is still kind of a positive aspect to this where God themselves is actually appearing to this ancestor.

And here’s where we get to that part in verse 13. So she named the Lord Adonai who spoke to her, “You are El Roi,” for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” Now there’s something to note here as well, is the NRSVUE, that’s a pretty interpretive approach.

Oh, okay.

Because the name that she gives. She calls it, uh, the, the well was— what does she say? Where’s verse 13? Yeah, so, uh, yeah, so there are different ways to interpret that. So the King James Version says, has I— have I also looked after him that seeth me? And, uh, and then, uh, the NET says, here I have seen one who sees me. So it has something to do with seeing. And El Roi could mean, um, the God who sees, or it could mean the God who is seen, or something like that. It’s confusing, and, and some scholars suggest that it has been corrupted, that the letters have changed somehow. We’re not exactly sure what it is, but verse 13 says she has been speaking to Adonai themselves, right? Not the angel.

And she names She names him, which is an interesting thing to do.

Yeah, gives God a name. Which, you know, I mean, as the great poet said, “I got a name.” Like the pine trees lining the winding road. “I got a name.” And so, but this is just a feature of the literature of this time period.

And it’s probably also an attempt to account for a title for God that was in circulation in this time period.

Oh, sure, sure.

And so, it’s a way to say, “That’s where that name came from.” You know how They sometimes call God El Roi. Well, that’s where that came from. So there’s a great discussion if you look in Ted Lewis’s book, The Origin and Character of God, which is over 1,000 pages long. It’s, yeah, it’s a long book. But anyway, there’s a good discussion of what’s going on here. So I think that’s, and the whole visiting someone and saying, I will greatly multiply your offspring. Here, you’ve conceived a child. The announcement, the prophetic announcement of conception in the other literature from ancient West Asia, it’s always the god themselves that does that. It’s never a messenger.

Okay. And so, well, and yeah, as you say, by the end here, she is saying she is, she is naming God and saying, I, you know, I, I saw God. She’s talking to God. She’s like, it’s pretty clear what, what’s happening. At the end, even though it’s an angel at the beginning.

Yes. And so this is interesting, because once we get out of the story of the Garden of Eden, the first person in the Bible to see God, like that the narrative says saw God, right, is an Egyptian enslaved woman.

Yeah, that is fascinating. Yeah, a woman, a foreigner, like all of these, all of these characteristics, you know, an enslaved person. Yeah. Did they seem like they would be? And also, like, you know, when you say that this is sort of an explanatory story of where the Arab people came from, this feels like it really honors that story. Like, like you say, rather than the story of Lot and his daughters, this is some big honor to be bestowing on that lineage.

Yes. And this is a reason that a lot of, for a long time now, Black Christians and particularly Black Christian women have held up Hagar as a matriarch.

Because she is someone who gets to talk with God and she is someone who’s who’s watched over and was kind of done wrong in the story, but is still offered a blessing and becomes the matriarch of a large group of people.

Well, we’ve only done it. We’ve only gotten to half of the done wrong part of the Hagar story. So we should jump to chapter 21 and get to the other half. And so yeah, jumping from chapter 16 to chapter 21, a lot happens in the midst of those, not the least of which being that Abraham is now Abraham instead of Abram, and Sarai has become Sarah. And, you know, again, I’ve done this show long enough to know that probably what we have here, and I’m going to you can confirm or deny, is that these are different, very different stories that have all been sort of mushed and squished and pushed together. Yeah. Which is why different names are coming up, and which is why later we’re going to have a very confusing moment, a timeline thing that took me a long time to sort of parse out. But before we do that, let’s, let’s just tell the story.

Yeah. Because Abraham and Sarah now have conceived. So the thing that seemed impossible has now happened. They are older by a lot. Do you have a sense? What’s your sense of how much older everybody is now?

How much time has passed? Well, at the Uh, let’s see, we’re chapter 21. It’s the beginning of chapter 17. It says when Abram was 99 years old, God appeared.

Um, and so it’s that— what’s that, 13 years later? And then chapter 21, uh, the child grew and was weaned. And so Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. So this is This is a couple years after that.

I don’t know. This says, chapter 21, verse 5 says Abraham was 100 years old when his son Isaac was born.

So, okay.

And he was 86 when Ishmael was born.

Yeah. So, but then in verse, chapter 21, verse 9, Hagar’s son Ishmael is playing with Isaac.

And suddenly Sarah’s like, this won’t do.

And this means that Isaac is very, very young, a baby. Yeah. Or he’s weaned, which means— and probably that was a couple of years, right?

Yeah. If— but yeah, probably. I don’t know how old a weaned child would be in this time period or if they imagined that Isaac was a quick learner or a slow learner.

But right.

Uh, yeah, Ishmael is, is a teenager.

Yeah, by this point, this is, this is what I, in my mind, you know, I thought, you know, he’s playing with this, the, the kid. He’s an, he’s a, a teenager, late teens or whatever, and he’s playing with the baby, and that’s fine in my mind. It’s later that that becomes weird and problematic.

Yes, because Sarah, Sarah gets upset with Hagar.

And is, is like, get rid of her.

And, um, And Abraham was upset about this.

Abraham loves his son Ishmael, and God says, “Eh. " But Sarah gets very sort of Melania about the whole thing and is like, “I want him to go away because I want only my son to have an inheritance. " Yeah.

And God tells Abraham, “Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman,” ‘Oh, you mean Ishmael?

So this is, this is like a 16-year-old kid.

Um, here, you climb up on your mom.

And then she departs and goes into the wilderness of Beersheba. I have been to this wilderness. It is not hospitable.

Particularly the wildery part of the wilderness. I mean, once you get into where there are homes and stuff, great. But it runs out of water, and then it says she cast the child under one of the bushes.

Which is just like, all of this story makes sense as long as Ishmael is little, is a baby. But he’s not. He’s big.

Not according to the way the stories have been woven together.

Right, exactly.

But when you read verse 9 where Ishmael is playing with Isaac, like decontextualized, they make it kind of sound like Isaac and Ishmael are about the same age.

Right. 100%. That’s how it, that’s how it sounds like this entire story. You can tell that the author is thinking of a, of a baby, of a, you know, maybe a 2-year-old, a toddler, because, yeah, she chucks him under the bush and it’s just like, you don’t—this, this dude’s bigger than you at this point. Like, this kid is He’s going to last longer than you are.

Okay, now hang on a second. I do want to come back to verse 9, because I wanted to look in the Hebrew to see what it said about Ishmael playing with Isaac.

And it doesn’t say “play with her son Isaac.” That is something that the NRSV-UE has interpreted into the text.

Because the verb that we have there—is that a participle? Yeah, that’s a participle—is based on the verbal root, is close to the verbal root for Yitzchak, which means to laugh or to joke. And so it looks like it’s a Piel participle. So there are other—it looks like it can mean to joke, to play. It can also mean to dally with or fondle.

So I don’t know if you remember the story where it’s both Abraham and Isaac show up and they say, “This is not my wife, this is my sister.” And then somebody sees out the window and it says that he’s—it uses this verb.

He’s dallying with or fondling?

Yes. So I’m looking at other translations. The King James Version says, “Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian mocking.” And that’s what the NET has as well.

Just mocking, with no object of the mocking.

There’s no object to it, yeah.

And I’m looking at the NET footnote. I have criticized heavily the NET footnotes, but sometimes they have some good contextual stuff to say. The Piel participle used here is from the same root as the name Isaac. In the Piel stem, the verb means to jest, to make sport of, to play with. Not simply to laugh, which is the meaning of the verb in the Qal. What exactly Ishmael was doing is not clear. Interpreters have generally concluded that the boy was either 1, mocking Isaac, or 2, merely playing with Isaac as if on equal footing. In either case, Sarah saw it as a threat. The same participial form was used in Genesis 19:14 to describe how some in Lot’s family viewed his attempt to warn them of impending doom. It also appears later in Genesis 39 , where Potiphar accuses Joseph of mocking them.

Huh. So, so it is interesting. The NRSV-UE does have a footnote that says, that just mentions Hebrew lacks “with her son Isaac,” which is, that’s a lot to add and have that be the only footnote.

Yeah, that’s a load-bearing addition right there.

We just chunked that one in. That was just fun for us.

But I think that, and that’s probably based on the notion that, well, the verbal root is the same, it can mean playing, so maybe that’s the idea. And they might, the editors might have thought, oh, this is probably haplography based on homoioteleuton, where it said that and then said with Isaac, but the copyist saw the end of the verb and the end of the verb looks the same as the name Isaac and so skipped over it or something.

It’s Sarah is like, “Don’t like having this kid around. Don’t like that kid.” Yeah.

Even if you don’t have that part being about him being a kid, it sure does seem like when Abraham puts the kid on Hagar’s shoulder, or when Abraham goes and when Hagar is in the wilderness. And by the way, we should mention that the reason that she throws him under the bushes is just— and then she walks away the distance of a bowshot. It’s just so that she doesn’t have to watch him die. She feels like they’re about to die. She feels like she can’t bear to watch the child die, which again, not a teenager, because a teenager is going to outlast a middle-aged lady, uh, in terms of, in terms of, you know, thirsting to death. How do you, how do you phrase that? Whatever.

Anyway, um, and yeah, she doesn’t want to, uh, see him die. The angel shows up again and, uh, says, what’s going on?

Uh, but says, why are you mad? What’s happening? What troubles you?

Uh, don’t be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him. Again, sure sounds like a kid, like a toddler. Yeah. Um, then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water, so she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt. So, okay, what’d you bring me, Mom? Got you a wife.

Got you a wife. So there you go, uh, and that is, that is where Arab people come from, I guess, uh, at least according to this. I think it’s a fascinating story. I love the fact that, like you point out, this is the first person after Eden to talk to God directly face to face. Just a really interesting, though, like non-consequential to any story. Yeah, it’s just sort of a side note story.

And etiology. I think that’s an awful lot of what Genesis is doing is saying, hey, “You know, though, this thing or these people, here’s where it came from. Moving on.” And, um, and they just cruise on past. Yeah, so trying to explain how the world got to be the way it is.

Uh, and, and something interesting is some of the words that are used in here, um, in reference to like the way that Sarah treats— Sarai treats Hagar and, uh, and stuff like that, parallel to how it describes the Egyptians treating the Hebrews in the book of Exodus .

And so some scholars would suggest that this was composed maybe after Exodus and in light of Exodus. So putting the two things parallel, an Egyptian who is enslaved to the Hebrews over and against the story where the Hebrews are enslaved to the Egyptians.

Right.

And maybe God treating one better than in the other story, maybe that’s a way of saying, see, things go better on our end. Maybe there’s something going on there with the— with those parallels. Maybe that’s just us hallucinating stuff like some kind of chatbot. I don’t know.

Fair enough. Well, I think that is crazy fascinating. I really enjoy it. Let’s move on though. To our chapter and verse. So angels getting chained up. What are we talking about? It’s something that if you look for it in your standard, uh, non-Ethiopic Bible, you’re gonna find a couple of very cryptic, weird, uh, mentions of it. Yeah, just the briefest things. You’re not gonna find anything explaining anything.

Yeah, you have the idea in Revelation of angels bound at the Euphrates River. People are always saying they’re under the Euphrates River, but the preposition is epi, which literally means upon but can also mean at.

So anyway, that’s in the Book of Revelation .

I like the idea that they’re floating.

So if it’s upon, then I want to think of them floating. That’s—.

Yeah, I think of them hanging from a, you know, a big thing over the water.

With the alligators snapping. Or if you’ve been to the Guardians of the Galaxy ride at Disneyland, how they have them dangling in the little line, the video you watch when you’re in line where they’re dangling from the the thing over the pit.

Yeah, it seems out of the blue when you’re looking at it in the context of Jude. It’s just like, what are you talking about, man?

Yeah. And the origin of this tradition is not in the Bible. It is actually in the Book of Enoch.

So yeah, I was going to say, point of order, it’s in some Bibles.

Yeah. Okay. Touche. Yes, it is in the Book of Enoch in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s canon. It’s a very expansive canon. But the story— and we’ve talked about the Book of Enoch a bit here and there before— but in chapters 6 through 11, we basically have what some people will call fanfic of Genesis 6 through 9.

And here we have in, uh, chapter 6, you have the angels who decide to, to come down and they’re going to, uh, have intercourse with human women.

And Shemihaza, or Shemihazah, is the chief angel in this telling of the story. There are actually— there’s actually a different telling of the story later, and the angels are different, but, um, it’s Shemihazah with a bunch of leaders like Artaqifa and Armen and Kokabiel and Armumahel and Ramiel and Daniel.

Wait a minute.

And Tummiel and Ezeqeel.

Who called me Tim?

And the 10th one is Asael, or Asael. And Asael becomes a big deal a little later in chapter 8. Asael taught men to make swords of iron and weapons and shields and breastplates and every instrument of war. He showed them metals of the earth and how they should work gold to fashion it suitably, and concerning silver, to fashion it for breastplates and ornaments for women. And he showed them concerning antimony and eye paint and all manner of precious stones and dyes. So we’re talking the lowest of the low making—.

Yeah, what a jerk. Yeah. Teaching people how to arm themselves and defend themselves.

And then it goes through and talks about all the things that the different angels taught them. Shemihazah taught spells and the cutting of roots. Hermoni taught sorcery for the loosing of spells and magic and skill. Hopefully everybody was like, Hermione’s teaching spells!

Um, not Hermione, Hermoni. It’s the, the fashion designer, not the— yeah, no.

Uh, Baraqiel taught the signs of the lightning flashes. And on and on.

And then we get to chapter 9, and then we get the four archangels. And you brought this up, you were like, “What’s going on with these four names?” Because in the translation we’re looking at, which is Nickelsburg and VanderKam’s Hermeneia translation, they’re named as Michael, Sariel, and Raphael, and Gabriel.

And because Donatello and Michelangelo are still— the ooze hasn’t gotten to them yet.

I mean, no, Michelangelo is there.

Oh, Michael. Oh gosh, I totally screwed it up. Yeah. But Donatello anyway has not yet transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop. Right. But, and then there’s a footnote for Sariel, which says, this name is attested in Aramaic, or for this name attested in Aramaic and Greek. Greek has forms of Uriel. And Ethiopic has Suryel. So it’s— and they suggest this is a confusion of the Greek sigma and the Greek omicron because they can both have circles associated with them. But anyway, so these are the four archangels. And this text is being written in a time period when you’re getting all this explosion of literature that is kind of looking at the hierarchy of the heavens and all the roles and the names and who you pray to who for and what they do for God and all that kind of stuff.

When was this written? What’s the time period? What are we thinking?

This is probably late 300s, more likely 200s BCE. So this is Greco-Roman period Judaism.

Similar in timeframe to when Daniel was written?

Probably a little before Daniel. Oh, okay. But you do have, notice you do have Michael listed as the chief prince in the book of Daniel . So the tradition is related. Okay. But yeah, I think this is probably slightly before, at least when Daniel reaches its final form, the apocalyptic chapters. There might be some parts of Daniel that are roughly contemporaneous with this.

But most of the Hebrew Bible was written before this. This is very late literature in terms of Hebrew Bible.

Yes, but there are scholars out there who think that at least parts of the Book of Enoch might actually predate what’s going on in Genesis, or there might be traditions from before the finalization of the Pentateuch that, you know, were part of the text before they, for whatever reason, they fell out of favor but are preserved in 1 Enoch. So that’s an ongoing debate.

But interesting.

But we do know that like this was not a a niche book. I believe I remember you saying that this— that there are bits of 1 Enoch that was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is that correct?

There were more copies of 1 Enoch discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls than there were of any other books of the Bible, apart from Psalms, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, Genesis, and Exodus. I think those are the 5 that outnumber Enoch. But there were like 12 to 14 copies of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So yes, it was very clearly a popular text.

And we get down in chapter 9, verse 6. They said to the Lord of Ages, you are the God of gods, Lord of lords, blah, blah, blah. You see what Asael has done, who has taught all iniquity on the earth, and he has revealed the eternal mysteries that are in heaven, which the sons of men were striving to learn, and what Shemyhaza has done, to whom you gave authority to rule over them who are with him. And so this is— a lot of scholars would suggest this is a theory of the origin of evil. So you’ve got the Garden of Eden story and the fall, and then you’ve got Enoch and the angels coming down and teaching evil to humanity. So evil either came from eating a piece of fruit, or it came from angels teaching women how to wear makeup and men how to have—.

How to make swords, right?

So then, then we get down to chapter 10, and this is where the Most High responds. Then the Most High declared, and the Great Holy One spoke, and he sent Sariel/Uriel to the son of Lamech, saying, go to Noah and say to him in my name, hide yourself. And reveal to him that the end is coming, that the whole earth will perish, and tell him that a deluge is about to come on the whole earth and destroy everything on the earth. Teach the righteous one— now, by the way, later on there’s a story about how when Noah was born, like, he was shiny and had white hair and all this kind of stuff. So teach the righteous one what he should do, the son of Lamech, how he may preserve himself alive and escape forever. And it’s a great story because Lamech goes to, uh, Methuselah— I think it’s Methuselah— and is like, hey, what’s going on with this weird kid? And Methuselah’s like, oh yeah, this is cool. From him a plant will be planted and his seed will endure for all the generations of eternity.

And then God turns to Raphael and says, go Raphael and bind Asael hand and foot. And cast him into the darkness and make an opening in the wilderness that is in— and then Dudael or something like that is some weird name that we don’t know what that means— throw him there and lay beneath him sharp and jagged stones and cover him with darkness and let him dwell there for an exceedingly long time. Cover up his face and let him not see the light. And on the day of the great judgment, he will be led away to the burning conflagration. And then we have a little heal the earth discussion.

We should mention that this continually talks about the Watchers.

And those are the bad angels. The bad angels that came down are nicknamed the Watchers.

Yes. They were supposed to watch over things, and instead they inserted themselves in the story.

Literally, they watched as the ladies of humanity got hot and decided, okay, well, I’m gonna have to get me some of that.

And here’s a weird, um, here’s a weird part of this particular passage. And to Gabriel he said, go, Gabriel, to the bastards, to the half-breeds, to the sons of miscegenation, and destroy the sons of the Watchers from among the sons of men. Send them against one another in a war of destruction. Length of days they will not have, and no petition will be granted to their fathers in their behalf that they should expect to live an everlasting life, nor even that each of them should live 500 years.

Like, it’s very clear that Jude is talking about angelic/human intercourse since it was angels that they wanted to sexually assault in Genesis 19 .

Right.

And then, and then to Michael he said, go, Michael, bind Shemihaza and the others with him who have mated with the daughters of men so that they were defiled by them in their uncleanness. And then talks about how their sons will perish. They’ll see the destruction of their beloved ones. But, but this is the origin of the notion that there are angels that are bound in darkness for eternity, right? And I think the story is actually the spark, the catalyst for the notion of postmortem divine punishment, because they’re being kept. And later on in the story, it’s going to talk about how they are kept in the— but is this— yeah, it’s still in chapter 10. Bind them for 70 generations in the valleys of the earth until the day of their judgment and consummation, until the everlasting judgment is consummated. Consummated. And later on, the valleys of the earth are going to kind of conceptually merge with the idea of the Valley of Hinnom, which is the valley on the south of Jerusalem, which becomes the location of postmortem divine punishment.

Is that Gehenna?

Gehenna, right.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, which becomes a word that in the New Testament gets translated hell.

So, and later on when Enoch is having these visions of this punishment, it’s kind of funny because the vision— well, not funny, not funny, haha, anyway, but the visions kind of toggle back and forth between eternal conscious torment being in darkness versus eternal conscious torment being in fire.

I was wondering about that because I saw the great conflagration. You just read that a few verses ago, and I wondered if that meant burning for eternity or if it just meant, okay, judgment has been given and now we’re going to burn you and then you’re gone.

Like, yeah, you know, the temporary conscious torment followed by annihilation, right? Yeah, I think that’s probably what’s understood by the great conflagration because I don’t think I don’t think you have this notion of eternal conscious torment yet. At least it’s certainly not systematic at this point. And again, we’ve got the punishment of the angels versus the punishment of humans. And there’s definitely a parallel going on, but these are the results of two very different sets of circumstances, even though the punishments seem to be quite parallel. So it’s like it’s cold and dark versus hot and fiery. But, and again, because you have multiple different tellings of this story and the details change from time to time, that might have to do with why you have that distinction between the types of punishment. And I don’t think it’s as simple as just saying, well, one is where they’re being kept until the final judgment, and then the other is what happens for eternity after the final judgment.

I don’t think the punishment is that systematic. I think we’ve got some inconsistency going on here.

Well, speaking of punishment, I’m going to take us to chapter 53 of 1 Enoch, where it says— and on the PDF, it’s page 67, just to get you there.

I can find chapter 53.

Okay. Anyway, it was hard for me to track down the different chapters. Anyway, that’s where we get the valley of punishment for the kings and the mighty. And you get down a little bit in there to 54, and it says, “And I asked the angel of peace who went with me, ‘For whom are these chains being prepared?’” Apparently, they were building chains, they were making chains. And that’s when, uh, and he said to me, these are being prepared for the host of Azazel, which I had to ask you, is Azazel the same as Azrael or Asael? Asael, whatever, because that’s a different name. Yes, but we’ve been doing a lot of that lately, different names.

Yeah, yeah, well, and the, and the angels are different as well. Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Phanuel.

Oh, that’s right, that’s right, the archangels have switched up too.

Yeah, so, so this is a different— this is a different telling of the story. But yeah, the— I think we have here kind of the merging of the, of the two different punishments. We got a different telling of the story. And, and yeah, I think if we get to— is it 54? Oh shoot, I think when we get to like 64, it talks about the, uh, the punishment even more and the, and the fact that they are, uh, kept in chains. Yeah, the other figures I saw hidden in that place, I heard the voice of the angel saying, these are the angels who descended upon the earth, and what was hidden they revealed to human beings, and they led human beings astray so that they committed sin. And then, um, yeah, they get, they get the chains.

Yeah, well, back in, in, in chapter 54, they get— it says these are being prepared for the host of Azazel, that they might take them and throw them into the, the abyss of complete judgment. And with jagged rocks they will cover their jaws. Presumably that means that they’re just buried up to their, up to their nose or something. And the Lord of Spirits, as the Lord of Spirits commanded. Yeah, yeah, it’s very interesting, the different forms that the punishment of these angels takes.

Yeah, and there’s a lot of back and forth about the punishment of the angels, because you even have conversations between Michael and Raphael with, “On that day, Michael answered and said to Raphael, ‘The power of the Spirit seizes me and aggravates me.’” Because of the harshness of the judgment of the secrets, the judgment of the angels. For who can endure the harshness of the judgment that has been executed, before which they melt? And Michael answered and said to Raphael, who is there who would not soften his heart over it, and whose kidneys would not be troubled by his word? Judgment has gone forth against them who have led them out thus. And they— when they stood before the Lord of Spirits, Michael spoke thus to Raphael, I will not take their part under the eye of the Lord, because the Lord of Spirits is angry with them because they act ‘as if they were like the Lord.’ And so we do have some, a bit of friction going on between the archangels here.

Yeah, that’s interesting. It does seem like everything— and they’re even sort of questioning God’s judgment on this point. They’re not going to do it to his face, but they’re questioning it behind their back. Yeah.

And then I think there’s And the, the Book of Enoch is divided up into different books. I think it’s 5 different books. And, uh, you’ve got the Book of the Watchers, you’ve got the Parables of Enoch, which is what I think 54 is a part of, uh, then you get the Book of Luminaries. And I— and it’s, uh, I want to say it’s chapter 86. I’m pretty sure it’s chapter 86. Let me just scroll on down here and make sure. Yes, chapter 86. And this is what’s called the Animal Apocalypse. Apocalypse. Have you heard of the Animal Apocalypse?

No, but I love it. I don’t know what I’m— what I’m in for, but I like— I, I like hearing about it.

We’re, we’re basically telling the whole story of the history of the Earth and, and, uh, Israel in a very, very shortened form.

But all the characters are animals, so it’s VeggieTales or—.

No, yeah, Animal Farm.

Yeah, but, um, but 86:1, we got Enoch. He says, and again I saw with my eyes as I was sleeping, I saw the heaven above, and look, a star fell from heaven, and it arose and was eating and pasturing among those cattle. Then I saw those large and black cattle, and look, all of them exchanged their pens and their pastures and their calves, and they began to moan one after the other. And again I saw in the vision, and I looked to heaven, and look, I saw many many stars descend and cast themselves down from heaven to that first star. And in the midst of those calves, they became bulls, and they were pasturing with them in their midst. Uh, and I looked at them— here it gets a little blue here— I looked at them and I saw, and look, all of them let out their organs like horses, and they began to mount the cows of the bulls, and they all conceived and bore elephants and camels and asses.

Okay. Yes, this is the origin story of animals. Everything starts with cows and moves on from there.

And all the bulls feared them and were terrified before them, and they began to bite with their teeth and devour and gore with their horns, and they began to devour those bulls. And look, all the sons of the earth began to tremble and quake before them and to flee.

No, it’s not. This is the Animal Apocalypse. This is Enoch who sees the star fall to Earth. Um, so, so the—this story has a lot more influence on what’s going on, the traditions of the New Testament, than a lot of people are willing to give it credit for. Uh, and so when we look in Revelation, when we look in Jude, when we look elsewhere, and we see these weird—this weird imagery and all this stuff going on with angels, and sex always has something to do with it.

There’s a quotation in 2 Peter about the angels in judgment, which is—.

Oh, yeah. 2 Peter 2 . Uh-huh.

I’ve got it.

Is it 18? No.

Verse 4, where it says, for if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but for God If God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until judgment. Yeah, so like that, without this story in Enoch, that makes no sense. That’s just like, wait, what? What are we talking about? Yeah. Who did what now?

Yeah. And then Second Peter chapter 2 even brings up Sodom and Gomorrah again. Yeah, um, just like Jude does. Yeah, so yeah, there’s, there’s, uh, so much of the—and you know, if, if this idea of the punishment in these, in these valleys of the earth and everything like that, if, if that’s really the origin of the concept of, of hell and Gehenna, like a lot of Revelation, Second Peter, Jude, Luke, the concept of hell, like all—a lot of this seems to descend from the traditions that are—that we find in the Book of First Enoch, which—and, you know, I think once you get to Paul, Paul kind of pivots back to the fall of Eden as kind of the origin of evil. But I think there’s probably—there were probably competing traditions about where evil came from. Did angels teach evil?

Or did a piece of fruit cause evil to happen? I know which tradition I would have gone with. Sexy angels, like, 10 times out of 10.

I love it. I think it’s so interesting to realize that so, like, big important ideas that shaped how a lot of the authors of the New Testament think are all from a book that is largely excluded from the biblical canon. I think that’s fascinating. They’re quoting it, they’re talking about it, and yet it doesn’t—and, you know, they’re taking ideas from it, but didn’t make the cut.

Yeah. Well, except in Jude, because Jude directly quotes from it and calls—it says Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied, and then quotes Enoch chapter 1, verse 9.

There you go.

Yeah. And a lot of people—there’s a lot of hemming and hawing about why the author of the Epistle of Jude would call this prophecy. And in fact, even our friend Wes Huff made a big old video talking about—.

Let’s not call him our friend. We’ve never met that man.

No. Made a video trying to talk around what’s going on there. In fact, even got to the point where it was like, just because Jude quoted that one verse doesn’t mean Jude thought that the whole book was inspired. As if Jude was going through and being like, this is good, this is out, not you, ew. I want to see another text where Christians did that. Where they say verses 1 through 7 are inspired, verse 8 definitely not, verse 9 we’re on the fence about. Like, that’s not how any of this works. But people go to just twist themselves into pretzels to try to make it sound logical to reject the inspiration of the entire Book of Enoch when the text that they insist is inspired says it was prophecy. So Yeah.

All right, well, there you have it. Uh, it’s a fascinating book. It’s, it’s kind of fun to, to thumb through, uh, if, if you have a long time, because there’s many chapters. They’re short chapters, but there’s a lot. It’s, it’s a big book. Uh, but yeah, I, I, and, uh, if anyone mentions angels being chained up, ask them where they got that idea.

Bye, everybody.

In Chains: Slaves and Angels

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology