The Book of Enoch

If you feel inclined to start conspiracy theories based on this book, get on with your bad self. You’re just giving Dan fodder for his TikToks.

It’s just job security at this point. That’s right. That’s right.

You should. You should be embracing this, Dan. I don’t know why you’re fighting it.

I don’t know why you did this to me. Hey, Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same.

Sure do.

Sure do indeed do. And. And how goes the thing?

Stuff’s good, man. I’m. I’m. I’m stoked. This week, you and I, Dan, are going to be talking about a thing that you have mentioned many times on this show. You even maybe explained to me what it is, and it’s never really sunk in. I don’t get it. I don’t know why. Yeah. So I am very excited to have all of this cleared up. We’re going to be talking about a book that. That has been shunted aside, that has been left out of the canon. And we’re gonna call this segment Left Behind.

Not to be confused with the book series that has been probably, I think, like one of the most successful book series of. Of the history of books. No, this is. This is a series all about texts that were considered authoritative, historical, important at some time or another, but for whatever reason were left out of the canon. And today it’s a big one. It’s First Enoch. The first Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch, if you will. And something you do. You.

It’s funny that the first Book of Enoch and Enoch can be used interchangeably because, yeah, you would think that if there’s multiple books of Enoch, you have to say the. The first thing, but. Yeah, you kind of don’t. Right.

So it’s not like First and Second Corinthians or First and Second Samuel, where they’re written by the same authors and they. They, you know, are consecutive. The one follows after the other. You do have a First, a Second and a Third Enoch and then other pretenders, but they’re written in vastly different time periods. And really, when people are talking about the Book of Enoch, they’re talking about First Enoch. When. When somebody wants to refer to Second Enoch or Third Enoch, they’re going to say Second or Third Enoch if they know what they’re talking about. But this is a phenomenally influential piece of pseudepigrapha, which means false writing, which means it’s. It’s something that was attributed to some towering figure from Jewish or Christian history that was very clearly not written by that person.

Which is funny because I think a lot of people might consider that reason enough to dismiss it from the canon of the Bible. But plenty of Bible books that are part of the canon are. Are pseudepigrapha as well.

Exactly. And additionally, some of the texts that are in the Bible considered Enoch to be authoritative and historical. For instance, the Epistle of Jude that we find in the New Testament directly quotes from First Enoch. And it says Enoch the seventh from Adam said, and then directly quotes a passage from First Enoch. And so at least the author of the Epistle of Jude considered to. Considered it to be authoritative, considered it to be historical. But it fell out of favor a couple centuries after that. And we’re going to talk about how that happened, I think toward the end of the show. But I wanted to start by talking about where this text comes from and then go through a brief outline of the text and then we’ll talk about how we came about discovering it and all that kind of stuff.

So by where it comes from, you mean it comes from the seventh descendant of Adam, Right?

Well, this was one of the concerns with some of the early Christians who were as. As a concern for what was canonical and what was not began to grow. This book purports to come from before the flood. And so actual manuscripts of this book would have to come, have been preserved since before the flood. But Enoch is. Is mentioned. And I think we have, I think we have Enoch in both the genealogy in Genesis 4 and the genealogy in Genesis 5 . Because in Genesis you mean the person.

Enoch, not the book.

Correct, the person Enoch. Let’s just lay the. The canonical foundation first. In Genesis 4 we have in verse 15, the Lord set a mark upon Cain lest. Oh, that’s the KJV. I don’t want to read that crap.

You almost made a cardinal mistake. A cardinal sin.

almost made a cardinal mistake. A cardinal sin. I’m being facetious, Everybody. In Genesis 4:15 , Adonai put a mark on Cain so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of Adonai and settled in the land of Nod and east of Eden. And again in, in Genesis 4 , this narrative is not written from a perspective that understands Adam and Eve and their children to be the only people on Earth. Genesis 4 is written from the perspective of the Earth is already populated, right? And then in verse 17, Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he built a city and named it Enoch after his son Enoch.

Wait, after his son Enoch.

So, no, I, I think, I think Cain built a city, okay. And named it Enoch after his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad. And Irad was the father of Mehujael and Mehujael the father of Methushael and Methushael the father of Lamech. And then Lamech, we get Adah and Zillah and blah, blah, blah, and we go on. And then in Genesis—and we talked a bit about these genealogies a long, long time ago, how these are two different genealogies. And, and we tend to try to conflate them. And so if we go to Genesis 5 , we get Adam bore Seth, Seth bore Enosh, Enosh bore Kenan, Kenan bore Ivory Wayans, and no, Kenan, where we go bore Mahalalel, Mahalalel bore Jared, Jared bore Enoch.

And then, wow, that is a very different. Well, it could just be a different Enoch.

And that’s, that’s the rationalization. But this is the, this is the idea of the seventh from Adam, right? So, and it’s not Cain’s line, it’s Seth’s line, because this is the, the more righteous line. And then Enoch became the father of Methuselah. And so Methuselah was the longest living, right, of the patriarchs according to the book of Genesis . And then in Genesis 5:22 , it says Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God. Then he was no more because God took him. And, and the Hebrew is lakach, which is the verbal root that means to take—ki lakach Elohim, because God took him. So Enoch is one of the patriarchs who doesn’t die.

So that, that wording is unusual. That wording is not used for any, for, for people that, like, you know, when, when we say God took grandma, we mean that she just died.

Right? Here it is. Yeah, it doesn’t seem to, to indicate that. And, and the tradition is, is that this is someone who was snatched up, right, in some way. And it doesn’t say, it doesn’t say this about anybody else. Okay, so we’re dealing with somebody who’s supposed to come from very early in the, the primeval history.

And he lived fewer than 400 years, which for that time among these Patriarchs, that’s. That’s actually paltry. He must, he must have gotten in a car accident or something, because something like that, his son lived 960 some odd years. So.

And it says 365 years, which would be a year of years. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, sure.

And we talked about the significance of some of these numbers in that, in that episode, which was. Oh, gosh, I forget the name of the episode, but if anybody wants to go check it out, it was. Oh, I, I knew a man who was so old.

Yeah.

Something like the name of the episode. So anyway, the Book of Enoch is purporting to tell a story from the perspective of Enoch. And scholars agree that the earliest layer of it—it came together over a long period of time—the earliest portions of it probably date to around 300 BCE and probably originally written in Aramaic and then later translated into Greek. But the earliest portions are coming from the beginning of the Hellenistic period. So Alexander the Great has already conquered everything and then drank himself to death. And so now we have the Diadochi, the wars of succession afterwards. And Greek is becoming the lingua franca. And we’re also starting to see the influence of Greek literature, Greek myth and Greek philosophy on things. But we take up, we lay our scene around 300 BCE and the latest part of the Book of Enoch, the very last chapter, which is called the final Book of Enoch, chapter 108, was probably written around the time of some of the New Testament, toward the end of the first century CE.

Oh. And so it’s coming together over the course of several centuries, but in, in pretty large chunks, although portions of it, scholars think, have been edited and redacted as it’s coming together.

I would hope so. If you’ve got 300 years, you better get some edits done.

Yeah, but we’ve got. We’ve got seven different scholars, generally divided into five to seven different segments. And the first segment is known as the Book of Watchers. And this is a reference to the angels who descended from heaven as, as the Watchers. And one thing I should probably make clear that I should have made clear earlier. This is basically taking the story from Genesis 6 regarding the bene Elohim, the children of God who come down and they have children with human women. And those children are, you know, the. What does it say? The warrior, the mighty men of old. And there were Nephilim in the earth in those days and afterwards as well. So we got that story and Enoch is basically taking that and then just blowing it up into 108 chapters where we’re talking about what happened, why it happened, what was the outcome, and it’s basically trying to count.

This is fan fiction is what we’re talking about.

It’s fanfic. Yeah. And with. With just as much sex. Nice. The. But it’s. It’s looking down on it. Not. Not as in from above, but as in it is, uh.

It condemns.

Disapproving of it.

Yes. Yes.

Okay.

And so this isn’t 50 Shades of Enoch.

No, no, there’s no Mr. Gray. And. But what happens is it is using this as a lens for contemplating the problem of evil. Where does evil come from? Well, it comes from these angels who make this decision. In fact, they make a pact, a covenant to go descend to Earth, and they end up coming down, hundreds of them, on Mount Hermon. And then everything goes from there. And that story is told a couple times over. And then it explains that these angels, they taught humanity about weapons of war, in fact, go in a little bit into the Book of Watchers. The first few chapters are an intro, and then chapter six through eleven retell Genesis six through nine. So starting with these. These angels. And in Genesis six, they’re bene Elohim. They’re gods. Children of gods. They’re gods. They get renegotiated, the pantheon gets reduced, gets renegotiated, and they become angels.

And in chapter six through 11, Asael is the head malevolent angel. Now, this head malevolent angel is going to later turn into what the New Testament knows as Satan. So. But in the Book of Enoch, they go by different names. And at least at the. At the beginning, it’s Asael is the head angel. And then chapters 12 through 16 reinterpret chapter 6 through 11. So basically, we tell the story in 6 through 11. 12, 16, are like, hang on, I’m going to tell that again. And they tell it all over again.

Which never happens in. In old texts. In ancient texts.

And so now we have evil spirits in the Greco Roman world. And so the watchers, when they die, their spirits leave their corpses and become the evil spirits that possess people, that compel people to do bad things.

Oh.

Now in chapters 17 through 32, we get a bit of a. A travel log. Here’s where Enoch is being taken on this tour of this eschatological tour where an angel is. Is acting as Enoch’s psychopomp. We’ve used that word before on the show. And.

But. But define it again. No, don’t define it.

I.

You’ll. You’ll kill me if I say that. But what. What are we talking. What’s a psychopomp again?

Psychopomp is like the angelic or divine guide that explains what the eschatological visions mean and represented. All that kind of stuff.

It’s. It’s the. The. The dragon in Mulan something.

Something like that. And. Oh, now I’m Jiminy Cricket.

Yeah.

Could be represented that way. There are some. Yeah, there are. There are other examples.

But anyway, every Disney movie’s got a psychopomp.

But. But Enoch is shown a bunch of weird places, and he’s. And kind of like, spirit. What does this mean? He’s shown all these smooth places. Three smooth places. And one of them is the place where the. These are the souls of the. Of the righteous, and they’re. They’re waiting upon judgment, and these are the souls of the sinners who did not receive judgment during their life, and they’re going to go on to another place. And then there’s another smooth place where these are the. The souls of the sinners who did not or who did receive judgment in life. So there he’s basically seeing the postmortem divine punishment and reward that is going to be set up for people as well as wicked angels.

What does smooth mean in this case?

It just says smooth.

No.

Okay. Yeah, it’s just like. It’s not a rocky terrain. It’s just like a big hollow bowl, and everybody’s just hanging out in the bowl.

People in their. In their smooth place, waiting to go to hell or whatever.

And. But the. The angels, The. The wicked angels are also to be punished, and Enoch witnesses like Asael being commanded or not Asael, but Raphael being commanded to go bind the four head angels and. And throw them into darkness and put them in, you know, put jagged rocks underneath them and throw them into this cursed valley. Valley, and all this kind of stuff. And a lot of this imagery, whether it’s they’re going to be in a fiery place or they’re going to be in a smooth place, or they’re going to be in a dark place or they’re going to be covered in jagged rocks. Like, this imagery gets picked up in imagery about hell as these concepts further develop. So Enoch is where we get a lot of the imagery that gets picked up in the New Testament related to hell. And then books 33 through 36 summarize parts of the Book of Luminaries, and we’re going to talk a little bit about those a little later on. The next book, though, is the Book of Parables I guess I should just list all the books in the, in the seven.

So George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam are scholars who wrote the two volumes of the Hermeneia commentary on the Book of Enoch. And if you want a very detailed, very technical discussion, I would highly recommend that. But they divided into the Book of Watchers, the Book of Parables, the Book of Luminaries, the Dream Visions, the Epistle of Enoch, the Birth of Noah, and then the final Book of Enoch. So we talked a little bit about the Watchers in the Book of Parables. We’ve got a series of journeys. Again, we have similar structure to the Book of Watchers where we have all these wicked angels who have covenanted to come down and they’re going to teach evil things to humanity. And by the way, one of the evil things that the angels teach to humanity is eyeshadow.

Oh, really?

Yes. So when you go into chapter, I believe it’s chapter eight. Yeah, Chapter eight. Asael taught men to make sword, swords, swords of iron and weapons and shields and breastplates in 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 bracelets and ornaments for women. Satan created jewelry, okay. And he showed them concerning antimony and eye paint and all manner of precious stones and dyes. And the sons of men made them for themselves and for their daughters, and they transgressed and led the holy ones astray.

That’s just so weird. Why, what do you people have against looking pretty? I, I, I like a bit of good fashion. I’m, I, I, I enjoy a bit of, you know, a nice, a nice shirt every now and then, a nice piece of jewelry. Who knows? I just think that’s a, that’s a very funny thing. But apparently it’s from those evil scamps. Yeah, the, the angels.

Yeah. And, and so in, in one of the first parables, I think there are two main, main parables. But the unrighteousness that was let loose on the world by, by the watchers drove wisdom back to heaven. So wisdom is personified as, as one of the works of God. And wisdom is like, this party’s dead. I’m out, and goes back to heaven. And then they’re all wearing eye paint.

I’m out of here.

And we also have visions related to Daniel. We talk about the Son of Man, we talk about Wisdom. There are, we’re pulling from the Book of Isaiah some of the, some of the frameworks. We see a great judgment the flood is kind of the outcome of the Great Judgment. So the, the deluge. Noah’s flood is interpreted as God’s judgment on the angels and humanity, which, you know, decided they were just gonna get fully out of pocket and wear eyeshadow. And then Enoch is taken from the earth. Enoch summarizes his ascent to heaven and presentation as the Son of Man. Now we, we’ve talked about this Son of Man title before because Jesus picks up the Son of Man title in the New Testament. And this is in Daniel, the apocalyptic parts of Daniel where Daniel sees the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days. And this is kind of this mediator figure of some kind who in at least one translation…

one version in the Old Greek, the. It says the Son of Man came to the Ancient of Days. Well, that preposition is altered by one letter, heos, so that it says in one version of the Old Greek, the Son of Man came as the Ancient of Days. And suddenly it’s like, oh, the Son of Man is the Ancient of Days.

And this was the cuckoo clock part of the.

Right of the.

Yeah, firmament theology.

Yeah. So just like in the ride Pirates of the Caribbean where you see the people who are on a track come out. I think it’s a woman with like a… A rolling pin chasing one of the pirates or something like that.

Or the glockenspiel, if you want to get… If, if you want to get all nasty. Sure.

If you want to get Teutonic about things. But Enoch is with another angel, the angel Uriel, who reveals details of the calendar and the four ruling luminaries. So we’ve got a 364 day year that is laid out here. That’s the solar year or 364 day solar year. And then we also have a 354 day lunar year. So we’ve got two different years.

Yeah.

And it’s divided up into 12 months of exactly 30 days for each month. And then we have extra days in the 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th month, adding up to 364 days in the year. And then the 354 day lunar year that divides into 12. Sun moves through six gates in the east, starts in the east, settles in the west. Not to… To intentionally quote the great poet that is the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but… And then there’s a part about the… The luminaries kind of breaking down. I’ve been on the Pirates of the Caribbean when it has broken down.

And we have all been on the Pirates of the Caribbean. If you’ve been on the Pirates of the Caribbean.

But did they walk you outside to the back lot where you had to walk around? Oh, yeah.

I just had to sit and wait for 45 minutes and then… And then finally go again.

They turned all the lights on and they’re like, everybody up. And we had to go like across a catwalk above the thing and then out to some back lot. And it was like a bunch of the boats were like turned over and just sitting.

How dare they? They’ve broken the magic.

Yeah, broken. I was like, I can’t deal with this anymore. I need a churro. But there’s a… There’s a part where things seem to malfunction, and this is in chapter 80. And some scholars think this is like a later interpolation because the whole point of this book is everything works perfectly. Nothing breaks down but that. And that’s also the only eschatological part of that book. So the point is, oh, things are breaking down. It’s all coming to an end. Luckily, that’s not what happened when we had to leave the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

But that wasn’t particularly eschatological.

No, no. I mean, seeing… Coming outside to the, you know, the bright sunshine of…

It does.

It can feel like Orange County, California. Yeah, it was a little… A little jarring. Okay. And then we move on to the dream visions, which are chapters 83 through 90. And we have two main floods… Two main visions here. One has to do with the flood, the other has to do with what’s called the Animal Apocalypse. And that’s the cool one because that’s basically retelling the same story all over again about the angels and everything, only now everybody’s animals. So. Yeah. And this starts in the… The one part that I think is cool is not the one part, but the main part that I think is cool… The chapter 86. Oh, and by the way, if you want a good translation, you can find all kinds of cheap translations of First Enoch. Most of them are from the 19th century or are garbage. But I mentioned Nickelsburg and VanderKam. They… Part of their commentary was a translation, and so they took the translation and just published it separately.

This is like 14 bucks. Okay, so First Enoch, the Hermeneia translation. Good deal. And that’s the most academic translation that’s available today, because this isn’t going to…

Be found in, like, if you buy a copy of the NRSV or whatever.

This is not a part of the Apocrypha, but we’ll get to the… the whole canon issue in a bit. Okay, so 1 Enoch 86:1. This is Enoch talking. 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 the cattle.

That’s… wow. I did not see that coming for a fallen star.

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 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. And so we’ve got… we’ve got calves and we’ve got bulls starting off.

And I am so confused about what you just read like.

So this is the head angel. So Asael in 1 Enoch 6. Elsewhere, they’re referred to as Shemihazah. If you… if you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, I just appeared on a podcast called Escape Hatch where we talked all about this, and they are actually basing a lot of that on 1 Enoch and the story of the Watchers. So Semyaza is… is the name there. There Asael is another name for the head angel. So they got a few different names, but that head angel is a falling star. And then if you go look in the Book of Revelation , it says, “I saw the great dragon fall from heaven like a star,” and then with their tail, they swept with them a third of the stars of heaven, which also fell to earth with them. So Book of Revelation is drawing directly from what we’re seeing in the Book of Enoch, where the head malevolent angel falls, and then all the other angels go tagging along after.

Do they also become cows in… in Revelation?

So Adam through Noah are all represented as bulls in the Animal Apocalypse. And then Ham…

And it feels like there’s going to be another section that’s going to be the VeggieTales. But okay, we’re… well, so now every… now all of the… the patriarchs are…

Are…

Are cattle.

Well, up through Noah, because Noah is… Noah survives the flood, but Noah had three sons, according to the… the tradition: Ham, Japheth, and Shem. Yeah, Ham and Japheth, their offspring are all kinds of different animals and birds.

Oh, wow.

Shem is the only one whose offspring are all bulls. So now we start to notice a theme. The Semites, the fathers of… of the people of Israel, are staying in that lane of bulls. But Ham and Japheth, because they deviated, they’re all different kinds of animals. Okay? And then we go all the way down to Isaac, and then Isaac produces a wild boar.

Okay.

And this is Esau. And then Isaac produces sheep, or a sheep. And this is Jacob. And then Jacob has all of Jacob’s 12 offspring are all sheep. And so this is the 12 tribes of Israel. And so they’re sheep. And sometimes they go astray, sometimes they’re blinded, sometimes they’re killed by wild beasts. And so the wild beasts are obviously all of the offspring of the children of Ham and Japheth. In other words, these are the Gentiles. So the Gentiles are causing problems. And this is… this is kind of political commentary because they’re in a period after Alexander the Great has died. You’ve got the Seleucid Empire, you’ve got the Ptolemies. They’re fighting over this land, and the Judeans are stuck in the middle of it, and they’re getting the short end of the stick, and they’re being oppressed heavily. And this is probably… this vision is probably written during the Maccabean period, when Antiochus IV Epiphanes was pushing hard on the Judeans, trying to stamp out Judean traditions—you know, things like circumcision, things like whatever they were using to…

To try to as… as identity markers. He’s trying to stamp them out. Right? So the Animal Apocalypse is all about this. And then it’s all going to come to a head right around the same time that Antiochus IV Epiphanes is hopefully going to be defeated. So it’s very similar to the Book of Daniel in that regard. Unfortunately, things don’t work out that well.

Other than, like, it’s… it’s the same as Daniel, other than the fact that everyone in Daniel stays people.

Yeah, yeah. It’s. It’s. It’s got to have a hook somehow. It’s got to have a hook. Right? Some. You can. You can imagine these people sitting around a table. What if it was Daniel but animals, but.

But critters.

Yeah.

Somebody called Julie Taymor or whoever did the Lion King musical. I.

We need.

We need to. We need to do a version of this.

And then the next book is the Epistle of Enoch from chapters 91 to 105. And this is Enoch warning his sons, writing these. These epistles, as you know, the epistolary warning to your offspring. As you know, that old canard.

If you haven’t written an epistle to your offspring yet, warning them of whatever, get on that.

And it’s primarily being written to Methuselah. And here we have another apocalyptic text, only this is called the Apocalypse of Weeks. And this is where we have 10 periods. Like the whole existence is divided into 10 periods of weeks. So this is sounding kind of like Daniel and also sounding kind of like different kinds of apocalyptic imaginings that, you know, there are 6,000 years and so there are six dispensations and all that kind of stuff. Only here, the weeks are not all of the same length of time. So we can. It’s. There’s a bit of an accordion thing going on.

Those are less useful weeks. When you don’t know exactly. When you don’t know how long a week’s gonna end up being, it’s. It’s hard to. To rely on that. I’ll see you in a week. Doesn’t necessarily. I mean, I have friends for whom I’ll see you in a week can mean anything from tomorrow to, you know, six months from now. So I guess it makes sense.

I mean, put it in the dictionary, because. That’s right. You know, a couple of days used to mean two days. Now it’s like a week or two.

Yeah.

At least from an academic point of view. That’s. That’s how we communicate. And then in the Epistle, we have two sets of woes. One of them is. Is woeing, or lamenting idolatry, consuming blood, blasphemy, cursing, perverting, or disregarding the divine law.

Whoa.

Whoa. Indeed. The second woe is woeing rich and powerful, abusing the righteous big houses, banqueting in luxury, hoarding food and wealth, and wearing expensive clothing and jewelry, and also.

Lying that this is why Bezos and. And his ilk have really gotten, like, tried to get Enoch out of everything.

Yeah. So. But this is interesting, because dividing it into two is kind of similar to later ideas that we see about the two great commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. And these two woes happen to do with ways that you sin against God and then ways, again that you sin against your neighbor. And, you know, there’s a real kind of social justice vibe to the second woe that is probably being pulled from Isaiah, but also is a reflection of their. Their perspective under the boot of the. The Greek. Well, not even Greek. The Hellenistic empires that are. That are oppressing them. And then it ends with a warning and then an instruction to pass these things on. So later generations have it. And then we have this awesome story. The next book is the Birth of Noah, which is just chapters 106 and 107.

And basically, Noah was Methuselah’s son.

Right, Lamech?

So there’s somebody between them.

Yes. So Methuselah is Noah’s grandfather. And that’s relevant here. So when Noah’s born, he’s born with white. His body is all white and red.

Oh, okay. He’s got a candy cane.

He’s got white, curly hair. Exactly. Pepperminty flavor. But when he opens his eyes, his eyes shone like the sun. And then immediately after being born, he stood up and praised the Lord.

Wow, that’s a precocious kid.

Yes. At which point, Lamech or Lemech freaks.

Out, as you might in that situation.

He says, this ain’t my son. This looks like one of the sons of angels. He’s afraid that his wife has been knocked up by one of.

He turns to his wife and is.

Like.

How angelic does the milkman look? Because I don’t look like this.

So he goes to Methuselah and is like, dad, I don’t know what’s going on here. And Methuselah goes to Enoch, and Enoch says, no, no, it’s your son.

It’s gold.

You can see it in the eyes. And Enoch tells him that he’s gonna survive the flood, but that great evil will return to the earth afterwards. So it.

I like. I like that. A, they know that the flood is coming, because it doesn’t seem like that was common in the other things. It doesn’t seem like that was common knowledge.

Well, no, God announces it to Noah, like, shortly beforehand.

Right. So, A, they know that the flood is coming, and B, they. Oh, it doesn’t work. Yeah, it’s not like it works. Don’t worry.

And then the. The final book of Enoch, which, again, was probably written around the same time as the New Testament. So the, so these, this text is kind of coming together cumulatively. It’s accreting more and more chapters, but it’s still in circulation. Sure. As it’s accreting these chapters. The final book is a summary, an interpretive conclusion of the whole book. And then it promises this eschaton, the end times. The believers will be delivered, the sinners will be eradicated. And you have a. You have a few different perspectives on postmortem divine punishment. There’s some like, oh, they’re going to be destroyed as if they never existed. And then you’ve got. They’re going to be punished and then they’re either going to be destroyed or they’re going to achieve some kind of salvation or you’ve got the idea of eternal conscious torments. So you. Because there are many different people contributing to the book, you’ve got many different perspectives on postmortem divine reward and punishment, which then get taken up in the New Testament and they don’t really get systematized until afterwards.

So I. What, sorry, one of the things that I’m picking up on here, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve been doing this show for over a year now and I have learned a couple things. Not a lot, but I’ve learned a couple things. And one of the things that I’m picking up on is though this book purports to have been written from before the flood, it’s got a lot of ideas that weren’t that were very late ideas like, like all of this eschaton, eschaton stuff, all of the, like I, I remember you talking about. Those are, those are late BCE ideas.

Correct? Yeah, yeah. These are, these are conceptual packages that get put together comparatively late. So they’re coming Persian period, perhaps influenced by Zoroastrianism. Certainly the afterlife concepts are being influenced by, by Greek and Roman mythology in the Greco Roman period. So this is all pretty late stuff. And, and as you pointed out, if you’ve got Enoch saying, hey, remember the flood thing that’s going to come up? Like, that’s very clearly someone writing from the perspective of, well, after all of that, it’s basically assuming the knowledge of someone who is coming after. Almost the entire Hebrew Bible has already been been composed. And so, yeah, it has a bunch of giveaways that it is quite late. And this is what worried some of the early Christians. So again, Jude quotes from. From First Enoch. We have 11 different manuscripts, fragmentary manuscripts, just, just shards and fragments, but different manuscripts that were found at Qumran.

Meaning of all the books of the Bible, the only books that were better represented than the Book of Enoch. First Enoch, by the way, would be like Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Psalms.

Oh, wow.

So First Enoch is big time at Qumran. It’s big time for the early Christians.

And I’m just going to remind people that when we say at Qumran, we’re talking Dead Sea Scrolls here.

Dead Sea Scrolls, right. This little outpost, northwest shores of the Dead Sea, right where they, where they hid the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so within early Christianity, this very influential text. But I think that one of the most pivotal things that happened within early Christianity as it relates to the biblical text is in the second century you had people who were either raised Christian or converts to Christianity who were embedded in the Greco Roman intelligentsia. They were part of the elite, they were educated, they were literate, they were familiar with philosophy. And we generally refer to these folks as the apologists because their main, their main project was basically to convince the Greco Roman intelligentsia that the Christian Gospel merited their consideration, merited taking seriously. So they’re basically trying to intellectualize, philosophize, systematize the Gospel and the Scriptures.

And they’re largely responsible for kind of figuring out where things are going to go with which texts. And probably between the third and the fourth century, you get the. Well, it probably starts in the second century, but in the third and the fourth century you get these concerns for, hey, this book has a lot of internal contradictions. Like, you know, it. It tells the same story a bunch of different ways. And they’re also concerned for the fact that this book would have had to have survived from before the flood. And that just doesn’t pass muster for a lot of them. And so, I mean, he could have.

Been on the boat. Why not?

Yeah, it. As long as we’re just ginning up scenarios that are not in evidence. Yeah, it could have been.

I mean, you know, Noah would want to keep his great grandpa’s writings. It feels I. That makes sense to me.

But, you know, his baby pictures are in there, right, where he’s all white and red and looks like a candy cane.

It’s got that, that lock of bright.

White hair or whatever, but they get suspicious about this. And so by the 4th century, most everybody is like, yeah, we probably don’t need to keep doing this. We. However, when some Syrian missionaries took the Septuagint, so the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures. And at the time, it wasn’t just one volume, it was a bunch of different scrolls. And First Enoch had been translated into Greek. So was a part of this collection probably beginning to the middle of the 4th century CE. Some Syrian missionaries take Septuagint manuscripts and they go down to what was then known as the Kingdom of Aksum, now Ethiopia, and they bring the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, a similar production from mainly the middle of the second century BCE. That’s, that’s riffing on. It’s fan fiction of both Genesis and Exodus. But they take those books down there and Christianity takes root in what we now know as Ethiopia.

And so all of the canon debates that are going on up north in Northern Africa, in Syria, in Rome and all, and everywhere in between, they’re having these canon debates. And the Kingdom of Aksum is just happy to do. Keep on doing their thing.

Right.

And, and be left alone. And so the Ethiopian.

So are they’re not sending delegates to the, to the various things or whatever?

Yeah, like, not, they’re not at Nicaea and stuff like that. In fact, Nicaea probably happened right around the time those, those missionaries are, are first getting down there. But, but yeah, there, there’s contact back and forth, but for the most part they’re like, we’re doing fine all by ourselves. And so the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has the most expansive canon within Christendom, and it includes the Book of Enoch. In fact, our earliest copies of the entire Book of Enoch are all in what, a language that we refer to as Ethiopic or that we refer to as Geez, which is. They’re both references to different periods of the same language. But these medieval copies of Enoch are our oldest versions of this until. Except for a handful of old Greek manuscripts that some of the patristic authors seem to have been aware of and some Aramaic copies, those, those that we found at Qumran.

Now the, the stuff we found at Qumran makes up, you know, 1% of, if that of the entire, all 108 chapters of the Book of Enoch. And, and just in case you’re wondering, is roughly the same size of the Book of Isaiah . So, you know, the chapters are a lot shorter. I think there are chapters with like six verses in, in the Book of Enoch, but it was largely unknown to the world until 17th, 18th century. We start to, to have these references bubble to the surface. So Sir Walter Raleigh, you remember that guy?

Brave explorer, pirate, or whatever he was.

Yeah. So in 1616 he wrote a history of the world while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London as, as one does.

Yeah, sure, you got, you got time.

And he told about how Origen and Tertullian, two very influential early Christian authors, wrote about the Book of Enoch, which contained the course of the stars, their names and motions. So that’s that Book of Luminaries. So he seems to have some knowledge of this, but we don’t have anything by Origen that mentions any such thing at all. And then in the 17th century we have some explorers who come back from, from Ethiopia saying, hey, I saw this weird manuscript down there where they got some, they got some stuff that sounds like it might be what, you know, Jude was quoting from or something like that. And then there’s a Scottish traveler named James Bruce, came back to Europe in 1773 and had three copies of a Geez or Ethiopic version of the Book of Enoch with him.

They’re not very trustworthy manuscripts, but people start making translations from these. We get a German translation in 1801, and then the first English translation comes out in 1821, and then we get revisions in later years. And then 1838 was when we have the first Ethiopic text of First Enoch that is published in Europe and it’s divided into 105 chapters. And then later on it gets redivided into 108. And then the first critical edition comes out in 1851. So critical edition would be like an academic edition. We’re trying to reproduce as accurately as we can what the manuscript says, and then there was a German translation that was released in 1853. And then most people today who go to a bookstore or go online to try and find a version of the Book of Enoch are going to find R. H. Charles’s translation, which was originally published in 1912.

And then in the early fifties we have the first Aramaic fragments that were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls that were published. And then you can actually see all of those fragments if you go pick up a copy of the. There’s a multi-volume set called Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, which is the critical editions of all the Dead Sea scrolls. And a 1976 volume edited by Jozef Milik is the one that contains all of the Enoch fragments. And yeah, and then we’ve had a number of other translations have appeared, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, French and other languages. And then the 2001 Nickelsburg and VanderKam Hermeneia commentary, I think, is the most up to date. But scholars are still trying to pick apart the significance of all of this. But, yeah, this was originally written in Aramaic, then translated into Greek, then translated into Ethiopic. And so our best witnesses are in Ethiopic. But we can go back to some Greek fragments that we’ve got scattered around, as well as these Aramaic fragments to compare what we have.

And it’s. I think it’s just one of the most fascinating kind of mysteries, puzzles that is still being put together by scholars today. And it’s one of the most interesting things is it is so significant to the discussion of, like, early Christology because of the Son of Man character. Right. But to, like, really dig deep into it, you have to learn Geez. You have to learn. It’s a. It’s a Semitic language.

Okay.

It’s closer, more closely related to, like, Hebrew and Arabic than it is to Egyptian.

Interesting.

But the script is entirely different. It is a different language. But scholars are trying to learn Geez and Ethiopic so that they can delve a little deeper. Now, also, there’s also Slavonic versions of this text that are, you know, another language, another tradition that scholars are also looking at.

What’s Slavonic? Where is that?

So it is a Slavic language. Okay. So Old Church Slavonic is.

I was gonna guess that, but I. I didn’t know. Okay. Slavonic.

And so it’s this interesting little kind of outlier. It was considered authoritative for a long time among early Jewish folks as well as early Christian folks. It was phenomenally influential. Our concept of Satan, our concept of hell, our concepts of angels, our concepts of. Of so many different things that we find in the New Testament are concepts of demons, Asmodeus. It’s all deriving in some way or another from this Enochic tradition. It’s at least playing a role in how these things are developing. And it was totally unknown to the vast majority of Christendom for, you know, 1700 years. And we’re just now getting back to the point where we’re taking it seriously and where scholars are digging into it to see what it can tell us about early Judaism as well as early Christianity.

Yeah.

But a caveat. It’s not historical. Like, Right. One of the things I deal with every day on social media are videos from people who are like, they’ve been hiding the Book of Enoch from us, and now we have all the answers. And it’s like aliens visited Earth and.

And turn people into cows, and they.

had spaceships and they had this and that and the other. And, like, you can’t prove that they’re wrong. So now we’re back to Russell’s Teapot. Why do I always find myself at Russell’s Teapot? It’s a.

It’s a useful metaphor.

Yeah, it is. And so it is a fascinating text. It is a weird text.

Yeah.

It is a phenomenally influential text.

But.

But it is not a historical text. So for folks who. Who want to go into Enoch, you’re going to find a lot of stuff that inspired what was going. The discussions that were going on related to eschatology, related to early Christology, related to salvation and damnation and Satan and all these things. It’s not about aliens. It’s not about spaceships.

I mean, it might be about those things. It’s just that they never happened. That’s. I mean.

Oh, and. And the giants as well.

Yeah.

The Kandahar Giant is not real.

Oh, how dare you, sir? How dare you.

So that.

What about Andre the Giant? He was real.

That is a myth. No such person. Cary Elwes was performing against a green screen.

That’s right. That’s right. It was a blue screen back then.

Because they hadn’t discovered the color green yet.

They hadn’t figured out green yet.

Yeah. But if you want a wonderful translation, I highly recommend the Hermeneia translation by Nickelsburg and VanderKam. If you wanted. If you just want to get elbow deep in the scholarship, go get the two volumes of the Hermeneia commentary. And. And, yeah, be amazed, friends, and confound enemies at your next party by. By.

Or do the opposite. You can. You can also confound your friends and amaze your enemies. You can do anything you want.

Yeah, there’s. And there’s a lot of semantic overlap between the concept of amazement and confounding, so.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah, we’re not. We’re not here to tell you how to amaze. We’re just here to give you the tools and the resources so that you can amaze and confound all at the same time. So that’s. That’s First Enoch and then we.

So fascinating. I think it’s really cool. I think that it’s, you know, it’s so. Because we’ve had, like, you have referenced it. Other, like, guests have referenced it as though. And I’ve been confused because those references have been as though it were almost treating it as though it’s just a book of the Bible.

Yeah.

Because influentially it kind of is like, it’s, it’s source material for a lot of ideas for a lot of, and, and, and, and as you say, like in Jude, apparently it’s treated as, as scriptural. They, you know, the, the author of Jude counts it as, as, as part of the canon, as part of the scripture, so. Yeah, fascinating.

Yeah, it’s, it’s a fascinating text, but please stop pretending it’s historical.

I, I mean, but you could say that about a lot of the canonical books.

Yeah, no, I’m, I’m just uniquely frustrated at how much misinformation I have to respond to that is related to the notion that the Book of Enoch is like the secret story that they’ve, everybody’s been hiding from us and that you suddenly can unlock all the keys to the universe because you have the book.

Well, I mean, I, yeah, I, I, I can see where you could come at that though, if, if you are to say, you know, that all of the Bible is to be taken literally if you’re a Bible literalist and this book was that influential within, you know, that framework and was touted as actual scripture by the authors of scripture. I could see, I could see the argument. It’s obviously silly, but I can see it, I can see why they do it. I, I, I say if you, if you feel inclined to start conspiracy theories based on this book, get on with your bad self. You’re just giving Dan ammunition for fodder for his TikToks.

It’s just job security at this point. That’s right, that’s right.

You should, you should be embracing this, Dan. I don’t know why you’re fighting it.

I don’t know why you did this to me.

All right, well, I, I, that is fascinating. I really, I’ve, I’ve enjoyed that. And you and I are going to talk about it a little bit more and we’re going to answer some patrons questions in our Patreon bonus episode, the after party that we do every week. If you friends at home would like to become a part of that or just help to make the show go or get access to an early and ad free version of every show.

Bye everybody.