Book of Enoch (1 Enoch)

The work runs to 108 chapters in the Ethiopic text, and scholars divide it into five compositions of different date and different concerns, joined because all of them speak in the voice of Enoch.

Chapters 1 to 36 are the Book of the Watchers. Two hundred angels descend, take human wives, and father the giants of Genesis 6; their leaders are Shemihazah, who organises the oath and the descent, and Azazel, who teaches metalwork, weapons, and the cosmetics of seduction. The giants devour the earth, the archangels bring the cry of the dead before God, and Enoch is sent to the Watchers with a judgement they cannot appeal. Chapters 17 to 36 send him on a tour of the ends of the earth, the places of punishment and the chambers of the dead.

Chapters 37 to 71 are the Book of Parables, or Similitudes, three visions dominated by a heavenly figure called variously the Chosen One, the Righteous One, the Anointed One and that Son of Man, who sits on a throne of glory to judge kings.

Chapters 72 to 82 are the Astronomical Book, a technical account of the movements of sun and moon, the gates of the winds, and a year of 364 days. Chapters 83 to 90 are the Book of Dreams, containing the Animal Apocalypse, which retells Israel's history with the nations as animals and the patriarchs as bulls and sheep. Chapters 91 to 108 are the Epistle of Enoch, including the Apocalypse of Weeks, which divides all history into ten weeks with the writer's own generation near the end. The moral temperature of the Epistle is different again: sustained, furious address to the rich.

No manuscript anywhere preserves the whole of 1 Enoch except in Geez, the classical liturgical language of Ethiopia, where it survives in more than a hundred copies in two recensions, the earliest from around the fifteenth century. Everything older is fragmentary, and the fragments are what fix the dating.

Eleven Aramaic manuscripts from Qumran Cave 4 carry parts of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Dreams and the Epistle. The oldest palaeographically belong to the early second century BCE and one astronomical copy may be older still, which puts the composition of those sections in the third or early second century BCE and makes them among the earliest Jewish apocalyptic writing known. Their existence also settled a long argument: the Ethiopic text, however late its manuscripts, descends from a genuinely ancient Jewish work rather than a Christian confection.

Greek survives in substantial pieces. The Akhmim manuscript, also called Codex Panopolitanus, was recovered from a grave in Egypt in the winter of 1886 to 1887 and carries most of chapters 1 to 32. A Chester Beatty papyrus preserves much of the Epistle. The Byzantine chronographer George Syncellus quotes further passages.

What is conspicuously missing shapes the scholarship. No fragment of the Parables has been identified at Qumran, and the Parables are absent from the Greek witnesses too. Jozef Milik took this as evidence for a Christian composition of the third century CE, a position most scholars have rejected; the current range runs from the late first century BCE to the early second century CE. The date is not a technicality, because it decides whether the Son of Man language of the Parables is background to the Gospels, contemporary with them, or later.

The Epistle of Jude, at verses 14 and 15, quotes a prophecy of the Lord coming with his holy myriads to execute judgement, attributes it to Enoch the seventh from Adam, and thereby quotes what stands at 1 Enoch 1:9. This is the clearest case in the New Testament of a canonical letter citing a book that no major church would later canonise, and it is a plain textual fact rather than an inference. Jude's angels kept in chains, and the parallel in 2 Peter, draw on the same Watchers material.

Early Christian writers used the book freely. Tertullian defended its authority and blamed the Jews for rejecting it. Others were less comfortable, and from the fourth century onward it disappeared from Greek and Latin use. Rabbinic Judaism gave it no standing at all. By the medieval period the West knew it only through quotations, and its survival was assumed to be a rumour.

Recovery came through Ethiopia. The Scottish traveller James Bruce returned from Ethiopia in 1773 with Geez copies: one went to the royal library in France, one to the Bodleian at Oxford, one he kept, and a further manuscript reached Rome and is now in the Vatican. Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821.

In the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, 1 Enoch was never lost and is not an object of curiosity: it is canonical scripture, read and cited as such, part of a canon wider than the Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant Old Testaments. Beta Israel tradition holds it in the same regard. Elsewhere it is classed as pseudepigrapha, which describes its status in those communities accurately without describing its status in Ethiopia at all.

The Book of the Watchers, the oldest layer of 1 Enoch, takes a few verses of Genesis, the sons of God who saw the daughters of men were beautiful and the Nephilim who resulted, and expands them into a full narrative. Two hundred angelic Watchers, led by Shemihazah, descend on Mount Hermon and bind themselves by mutual oath to take human wives, a conspiracy the text sets at that named mountain deliberately: the Hermeneia commentator George Nickelsburg reads the place name, close to what was then Upper Galilee, as anchoring an already old story to a real, identifiable landscape rather than to an unlocated myth.

Among the Watchers, Azazel receives his own separate charge: he teaches humanity metalworking and weapon making, and the arts of cosmetics and adornment, transmitting what the text calls eternal secrets that were never meant to reach mortals. The children born of the Watchers and their human wives are giants whose violence and hunger devastate the earth. Nickelsburg reads this half of the story as a myth of illegitimate knowledge and illegitimate power together, technology and beauty both arriving by transgression rather than by right.

The suffering earth's own cry reaches heaven, and four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Sariel, carry the complaint to God. Azazel is bound and thrown into darkness at Dudael; Shemihazah and the rest are bound beneath the earth to await final judgment; and the flood is sent to end what the Watchers began, a judgment on the corruption their teaching and their offspring had spread rather than on humanity's sin alone.