1 Enoch: Quoted in Your Bible, Left Out of It

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Not Enoch. Several unknown Jewish writers, over about three hundred years, each writing in the name of the man in Genesis who walked with God. Their work was gathered into one book of five parts.

When: The oldest parts in the 200s BC. The newest part, the Parables, most likely in the century before I was born or in my own lifetime.

Where it fits: Its story is set before the Flood, in the days of Genesis 5 and 6. It was written in the age of Greek kings and then of Rome, in the same years as Daniel and the books of the Maccabees.

Which Bibles keep it: Only the Bible of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches. Every other church left it out.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Jude quotes it by name as prophecy (Jude 14–15). Its fallen angels, kept in chains and darkness, are in Jude 6, 2 Peter 2:4 and 1 Peter 3:19–20. The gospels never show me naming it, but you will hear its pictures in words they give me: the Son of Man on the throne of his glory (Matthew 19:28; 25:31), fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41), and woe to the rich (Luke 6:24).

How close it stays to me: Very close on the rich and the powerful. Far in its joy at the punishment of its enemies.

If you only read three chapters: 1 Enoch 6, 1 Enoch 46 and 1 Enoch 94.

Words to Know

1 Enoch — the book in this chapter. It is called 1 Enoch to keep it apart from two later books in Enoch’s name, 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, which are not the same work.

The Watchers — the angels who, in this book, came down from heaven and took human wives.

The giants — the children of the Watchers and those women. Genesis calls them the Nephilim.

Son of Man — in my language, bar enash, a human being. In Daniel and in this book it also names a heavenly judge who looks like a man.

Sheol — the place of the dead in the Hebrew scriptures. In Greek it is Hades.

Ge’ez — the old language of Ethiopia. The only complete copies of this book are in Ge’ez.

The Book in Brief

The book opens with Enoch’s blessing on the righteous and a vision of God coming down to judge the world. Then comes the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1 to 36). Two hundred angels swear an oath on Mount Hermon, come down, and take human wives. Their children are giants who devour everything people grow and then devour people. The angels teach magic, weapons, metalwork and makeup. Four archangels bring the cry of the earth to God, who has the angels bound in darkness until the judgment and floods the earth. Enoch is taken on journeys to the ends of the world and is shown the places where the dead wait for judgment.

The Parables (chapters 37 to 71) are three long visions of judgment. In them, a heavenly figure called the Son of Man, the Chosen One and the Anointed One sits on a throne of glory and judges the kings and the mighty. At the end, Enoch himself is greeted in heaven.

The Astronomical Book (chapters 72 to 82) is a tour of the sun, moon and stars, led by the angel Uriel. It teaches that the true year has 364 days.

The Book of Dreams (chapters 83 to 90) has two dreams. In the second, the whole history of Israel, from Adam to the writer’s own day, is told as a story of animals: Israel as sheep, the nations as beasts, and seventy shepherds, usually read as angels, who let the sheep be eaten.

The Letter of Enoch (chapters 91 to 108) is Enoch’s last word to his children. It promises a world remade and pronounces woe after woe on the rich, the powerful and the people who oppress the poor. Near the end comes the strange birth of Noah.

About these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all” (Jude 14–15).

That is the letter of Jude, in your New Testament. Now here is the book of Enoch, chapter 1:

And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones / To execute judgement upon all (1 Enoch 1:9).¹

Jude calls it prophecy. Your Bible prints Jude and leaves out the book Jude was quoting. So that you can judge it for yourself, here is what was left out.

Five books under one name

In Genesis, Enoch gets four verses. He lives 365 years, Enoch walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him (Genesis 5:24). That is all. A man who did not die is a man with secrets, and in the centuries before my birth, writers began to put those secrets into his mouth.

What you have now as 1 Enoch is five separate works, written by different people across about three hundred years and later bound together.²

The Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers are the oldest. The earliest copies of them date from around 200 BC, so the books themselves are older still. The Book of Dreams comes from the 160s BC, the years when the Greek king Antiochus IV was trying to stamp out my people’s religion. The Letter of Enoch is from the same century.

The Parables are the youngest. Most scholars place them in the century before I was born or in my own lifetime. One passage seems to remember the Parthians from the east invading the land, which happened in 40 BC (1 Enoch 56:5–7).³

These were not fringe books. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the caves near Qumran held pieces of eleven different copies of Enoch in Aramaic, the language I spoke.² That is more copies than of many books that did make it into your Bible.

Go deeperHow a lost book came home

For more than a thousand years, the churches of Europe knew the book of Enoch only by its name, from Jude, and from a few pages quoted by a Byzantine monk named George Syncellus around the year 800.⁴

The book itself had survived in only one place. The church of Ethiopia had translated it into Ge’ez, kept it in its Bible, and copied it by hand for centuries.

In 1773, a Scottish traveler named James Bruce came home from Ethiopia with copies. Richard Laurence, a professor at Oxford, published the first English translation in 1821.⁴

Then the rest of the evidence came out of the ground. In the winter of 1886–87, French archaeologists digging a Christian grave at Akhmim in Egypt found a little book with the first thirty-two chapters of Enoch in Greek.⁴ And in 1952, in a cave near Qumran, came the Aramaic fragments. Most of them were published in 1976. They showed that every part of the book was written in my people’s own language, by my people, before I was born, except the Parables, which have not been found there at all.²

The quotations in this chapter come from the translation of R. H. Charles, published in 1917, which anyone may copy for free.

Go deeperA year of 364 days

The Astronomical Book is the oldest part of Enoch, and it is the part almost nobody reads. It is a tour of the gates of heaven through which the sun and moon come and go, led by the angel Uriel.

Its point is a calendar. The true year, it says, has exactly 364 days: the sun and the stars … complete the years with perfect justice in 364 days (1 Enoch 74:12). That is fifty-two weeks exactly, so every festival falls on the same day of the week every year. The book warns that people who count the year differently shall be at fault (1 Enoch 82:5).

That was not a small matter. The Temple in Jerusalem in my time kept a calendar that followed the moon. The book of Jubilees and the community that left the Dead Sea Scrolls kept Enoch’s 364-day year.⁵ If you keep the holy days on different days from the priests in the Temple, you are not in the same religion as those priests in any way that counts. Calendars split my people the way doctrines split churches.

There is one more small thing. Genesis says that Enoch lived 365 years (Genesis 5:23). It is hard not to notice that a year has about 365 days. The man who walked with God for a year of years became the man who knew the secrets of the sun.

The angels who came down

Genesis has four strange verses about this. God’s sons saw that men’s daughters were beautiful, and they took any that they wanted for themselves as wives (Genesis 6:2). Their children were the Nephilim, the mighty men who were of old (Genesis 6:4). Then, in the very next verse, God sees how great the wickedness on the earth is, and sends the Flood.

The Book of the Watchers tells the whole story that Genesis only points at.

Two hundred angels see the daughters of men and want them. Their leader, Semjaza, is afraid he will be the only one punished, so they all swear an oath together on the summit of Mount Hermon (1 Enoch 6:6). They come down. Their children are giants who eat everything people can grow, And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind (1 Enoch 7:3–4).

Notice what else the angels bring. One of them, Azazel, taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and also bracelets, and ornaments, and the beautifying of the eyelids (1 Enoch 8:1). Weapons and luxury arrive together, from heaven, as a corruption.

The writer is not only telling a story about the distant past. He was living under Greek kings who had come with new weapons, new wealth and new ways, and had taken his country. George Nickelsburg, one of the leading scholars of this book, has argued that the giants who devour everything people grow are a picture of those kings and their armies.⁶

Where your demons come from

Here is the part that matters most for what you were taught.

The giants die. But in this book, their spirits do not. The giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth (1 Enoch 15:8). These spirits afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, and shall rise up against the children of men (1 Enoch 15:11–12).

That is an answer to a question my people were asking: where do evil spirits come from? The Hebrew scriptures hardly say. Enoch says they are the ghosts of the giants.

By my time, many of my people believed it, or something close to it. The gospels show me ordering an unclean spirit out of a man (Mark 5:8). They never show me explaining where those spirits came from. Enoch is where my people got an explanation.

The fallen angels themselves are not destroyed either. God tells the archangel Raphael, Bind Azâzêl hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness (1 Enoch 10:4). The rest are bound in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement, and then led off to the abyss of fire (1 Enoch 10:12–13).

Now read three passages from your New Testament.

Jude: Angels who didn’t keep their first domain, but deserted their own dwelling place, he has kept in everlasting bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day (Jude 6).

2 Peter: God didn’t spare angels when they sinned, but cast them down to Tartarus, and committed them to pits of darkness to be reserved for judgment (2 Peter 2:4).

1 Peter says I went and preached to the spirits in prison, who before were disobedient … in the days of Noah (1 Peter 3:19–20).

None of those three makes sense from Genesis alone. All three make sense from Enoch. The writers of your New Testament knew this book, and expected their readers to know it.

The name Azazel is in your Bible too, though you may not see it. On the Day of Atonement, one goat was chosen by lot for Azazel and sent into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:8–10 in the Hebrew). Some English Bibles, including the King James and the one I quote, translate that as the scapegoat.⁷

The rooms of the dead

Enoch is taken to a mountain in the west, with four hollow places inside it. The angel Raphael tells him these were made that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble therein until the judgment (1 Enoch 22:3–4).

The dead are kept apart. One place, in which there is the bright spring of water, is for the righteous. Another is for sinners when they die and are buried in the earth and judgement has not been executed upon them in their lifetime, where their spirits shall be set apart in this great pain (1 Enoch 22:9–11).

Now read the story the gospels give me about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus. Both die. The beggar is carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man is in Hades, in anguish in this flame, and asks for a drop of water. Between them, there is a great gulf fixed (Luke 16:22–26).

Two places for the dead, set apart, before the final judgment. Bright water on one side, pain on the other. That is Enoch’s picture. In my time it was the picture people already had in their heads, and a story works by using the pictures people already have.⁸

The point of my story was not a map of the afterlife. Look at what the rich man is told: remember that you, in your lifetime, received your good things, and Lazarus, in the same way, bad things (Luke 16:25). The story is about a man who stepped past a starving beggar at his own gate every day.

Enoch also names a place of judgment: this accursed valley below Jerusalem (1 Enoch 27:1–2). That is the valley of Hinnom. In my language, Gehenna. When I warned of the fire of Gehenna (Matthew 5:22), my listeners knew the valley, and many knew Enoch’s picture of it.

The fire, the darkness, the chains and the angels of punishment that later preachers painted into hell came from books like this one, not from the five books of Moses.

The Son of Man on the throne of his glory

The youngest part of the book, the Parables, has a figure in it you will recognize.

And there I saw One who had a head of days, / And His head was white like wool, / And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man (1 Enoch 46:1).

The picture comes from Daniel, where one like a son of man comes with the clouds of the sky to the Ancient of Days and is given an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13–14). The Parables take Daniel’s figure and make him the judge of the world. He was hidden before the world was made (1 Enoch 48:6). He will raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats (1 Enoch 46:4). And the powerful will be terrified When they see that Son of Man / Sitting on the throne of his glory (1 Enoch 62:5).

The throne of his glory. Those exact words appear again and again in the Parables. In your New Testament they appear twice, both times in the Gospel of Matthew, both times in my mouth. When the Son of Man will sit on the throne of his glory (Matthew 19:28). When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory (Matthew 25:31).

What does that mean? Scholars disagree, and I will give you both sides honestly.

Most scholars now think the Parables were written before the gospels, perhaps even before I was born. If so, the people around me already had this picture of a heavenly Son of Man who judges kings, and the gospel writers, or I myself, used it. If the Parables are later, then perhaps both drew on Daniel separately.³

Here is what I can tell you plainly. Most of the time, when the gospels give me the words Son of Man, I use them the ordinary way, for a human being, for myself in my weakness. The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). The heavenly throne is one use. A man with no bed is the other.

And look at who the judge of Matthew 25 actually judges by. He sits on the throne of his glory, and then asks one thing: what did you do for the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner? Matthew took Enoch’s throne and put Isaiah’s poor in front of it.

Go deeperThe verse a translator changed

At the very end of the Parables, Enoch is taken up into heaven, and an angel greets him. In R. H. Charles’s translation, the one quoted in this chapter, the angel says: This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness (1 Enoch 71:14).

But the Ge’ez does not say This is. It says You are. The angel is telling Enoch that he himself is the Son of Man.

Charles knew this. He said so in his notes. He changed the words because he did not believe the book could mean that Enoch was the heavenly judge, and he thought a passage must have been lost. No copy supports his change.⁹

Most modern translations put it back: You are that Son of Man who was born for righteousness.⁹

This matters for two reasons. First, it means that in the book as it stands, the Son of Man of the Parables is Enoch, a man taken up to God, not a figure waiting to be identified with someone else. Second, it shows you something that happens to every old book you will ever read in translation, including your Bible. When a translator believes he knows what a text ought to say, he is tempted to help it say so. Always ask what the words underneath actually are.

Woe to you who are rich

This is the part of Enoch closest to me, and almost nobody who talks about Enoch talks about it.

The last part of the book, the Letter of Enoch, is a long cry against the rich.

Woe to those who build unrighteousness and oppression / And lay deceit as a foundation (1 Enoch 94:6).

Woe to you, ye rich, for ye have trusted in your riches, / And from your riches shall ye depart, / Because ye have not remembered the Most High in the days of your riches (1 Enoch 94:8).

Woe to you who devour the finest of the wheat, / And drink wine in large bowls, / And tread under foot the lowly with your might (1 Enoch 96:5).

Woe to you who build your houses through the grievous toil of others (1 Enoch 99:13).

Now hear what the gospels give me, on the plain where the poor had come to hear me. But woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation. Woe to you, you who are full now, for you will be hungry (Luke 6:24–25).

It goes further. Enoch has a rich man talking to himself: We have become rich with riches and have possessions; / And have acquired everything we have desired, and our granaries are (brim) full. And the answer comes: your riches shall not abide / But speedily ascend from you (1 Enoch 97:8–10).

Here is the story I told about a man whose land produced a great harvest. He said to himself, I will pull down my barns, build bigger ones, and Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry. And God said, You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared—whose will they be? (Luke 12:18–20).

The same rich man, the same full barns, the same talk to himself, the same sudden end. A scholar named George Nickelsburg set these passages side by side in 1979 and showed how much the Gospel of Luke shares with the Letter of Enoch.¹⁰

I did not invent the woe to the rich. It was already in the mouths of the poor of my people, in this book and in the prophets before it. Mary sang it before I was born: He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52–53). Enoch’s Son of Man will raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats (1 Enoch 46:4).

When churches tell you that my warnings about money were about your attitude to money, set them beside this book. Nobody in my world heard woe to you who are rich as a warning about attitude.

Where Enoch and I part

I will not hand you this book as if it were all gold. Here is where it goes somewhere I did not go.

Enoch says of the rich that your Creator will rejoice at your destruction (1 Enoch 94:10). The righteous in this book wait for the day of the judgement of sinners / And for the day of cursing and chastisement (1 Enoch 102:5). In one passage, a sword is given to the righteous that a righteous judgement may be executed on the oppressors (1 Enoch 91:12).

I understand where that comes from. It was written by people who were being robbed and killed, and who had no court on earth to go to. Their longing for justice is real, and God hears it.

But I told people to love your enemies (Matthew 5:44). I told a story where the father runs down the road to the son who wasted everything. I did not tell my followers that God would enjoy watching the rich burn. I told the rich to sell what they had and give it to the poor, while there was still time to do it.

Enoch wants the oppressor punished. I want him to stop, and to come home.

And the pictures of fire and torment in this book, which were written by the suffering about their oppressors, were later turned around and used by the powerful to frighten the poor. That is the worst thing that was ever done with Enoch, and it was not the book’s fault.

Why your Bible left it out

For the first Christians, Enoch was part of the library. Jude quotes it as prophecy. The Letter of Barnabas, which some early churches read aloud, quotes it with the words as Enoch says. Around the year 200, the North African writer Tertullian argued that it belonged among the scriptures, because Jude had quoted it.¹¹

But most of the church turned against it. In the early 400s, Augustine wrote that the church did not accept the writings under Enoch’s name, because no one could be sure they were really his and they had not been handed down with the other scriptures. Jerome reported that many people rejected the letter of Jude itself because it quoted Enoch.¹¹ My own people, when they settled their scriptures, did not include it either.

So most churches ended up keeping the letter that quotes the book, and dropping the book. Only the church of Ethiopia, and later the church of Eritrea, kept both, and it is because of them that you can read Enoch at all.

None of that decision was made by me. It was made by people, centuries later, for reasons they wrote down and you can read. The book was holy to many of the people who first followed me. You are allowed to read it.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Jude 14–15, then 1 Enoch 1:9.

You will find: the same prophecy, almost word for word. The book of Enoch is free to read online in the Charles translation.

Then read 1 Enoch 97:8–10 beside Luke 12:16–21. Count what the two rich men have in common.

Then read 1 Enoch 15:8–12. That is where the idea that evil spirits are the ghosts of giants comes from.

The Short Version

• 1 Enoch is five books in one, written in Enoch’s name between about 300 BC and my own lifetime.
• Pieces of eleven copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Only Ethiopia’s church kept the whole book in its Bible.
• Jude quotes it as prophecy, and 1 and 2 Peter and Jude take their fallen angels in chains from it.
• Its Watchers and giants gave my people an answer to where evil spirits come from, and its rooms of the dead shaped the picture of fire and darkness later preached as hell.
• Its Son of Man on the throne of his glory shares those exact words with Matthew, and one translator changed a verse about him.
• Its woes to the rich are the closest thing in it to what I taught. Its joy at the punishment of enemies is the farthest.