In Genesis, Chapter 5, a written account of the family line of Adam is given. This genealogy states, in every major translation and in no uncertain terms, that Adam lived for 930 years. His son Seth lived 912 years, and Seth’s son Enosh lived 905. Enosh’s son Kenan lived to 910, his son Mahalalel lived to 895, and his son Jared lived to 962. The oldest was Jared’s grandson, Methuselah, who it’s said reached the astonishing old age of 969. Those who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible must therefore explain why early mankind enjoyed such extreme longevity while we, today, who enjoy far longer lifespans than many in the past, still have an average life expectancy of only seventy years and change. According to one obsolete explanation, there had once been a solid dome around the earth, referred to as the “firmament” in Genesis, which somehow enabled such longevity, perhaps by shielding us from ultraviolet radiation? Apart from outmoded cosmological notions, there is the rather simpler, faith-based explanation that, since it was sin that took from us our immortality, shorter lifespans simply reflect the greater influence of sin in the world. That would seem to suggest that, since we live longer today, there is actually less sin today than there was in, say, the Victorian era, known for its strict morality and religiosity, or even the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church’s power was at its height. I’m not sure many Christians would actually agree with that. Luckily, the very next chapter of Genesis offers a handy explanation, right before acquainting the reader with the Nephilim, giants that issued from an unholy union with fallen angels, according to most understandings. In verse three of Chapter 6, God, seeing that angels were marrying human women, declares that his “Spirit” will not always be with mankind, and since people are made of flesh and are therefore corrupt, our “days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” So it would seem people only lived to such advanced age because of God’s Spirit, which somehow was present and lengthening our lives at least through the flood, when Methuselah’s grandson, Noah, lived to 800 years. Only over the next dozen or so generations did the longevity fade, until Moses reached only a paltry 120 years old. Again, does our increase in lifespan today mean God’s Spirit has returned? Or is it more likely that these unbelievably great ages are the result of an error, as some religious scholars defending the scriptures have claimed. It has been argued that their real ages had simply been multiplied by ten, but Genesis 5 also shares what age these men were at when they fathered children, and though most seem far too old to be fathering children, this solution would mean some of them were fathering children at only 6 years old! Another has suggested that the great longevity of the first patriarchs was a mistranslation, counting months as years, which does seem reasonable, making Methuselah more like 80 years old rather than almost a thousand. Further rational explanations are that generation gaps existed in the record, requiring ages to be lengthened to account for a greater passage of time, or that each patriarch listed was actually just the most prominent figure of their epoch, making of the chapter less a genealogy and more a who’s who of those millennia. Being no apologist, I would offer the additional explanation that Genesis is mythology and should not be defended as a legitimate historical record. But there is one entry in this list of long-lived patriarchs that bears further scrutiny. Great-grandfather of Noah, and father of Methuselah, Enoch, he who was said in magical traditions to have received the hidden knowledge of the world from angels and to have preserved it from the Flood’s destruction, is revealed in verses 23 and 24 to have only lived 365 years before “he was not; for God took him.” If one wants to learn more about Enoch, and his being taken by God, one must look beyond the canonical books of Judaism and Christianity, to the apocryphal book that bears his name, a book steeped numerous mysteries.

I am happy to finally be making another entry in this thematic series after a couple years. Anyone who has not listened to the first Apocryphal Catechism, called Gnostic Genesis, may want to go look for it and listen first. In it, I discuss the concept of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha as well as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which is somewhat required knowledge for this episode. I have been wanting to discuss the apocryphal Book of Enoch for a while now, ever since my episode about Hermes Trismegistus, in which the character of Enoch figures prominently, as Hermetic tradition conflates the two. Furthermore, after my episodes about Giants, in which I discussed the Nephilim of Genesis 6 as well as ideas about Flood myths and the lineage of Noah, previously discussed in my episodes on the Lost Tribes of Israel as well, it seemed the perfect time to tackle the topic, as Enochic traditions are deeply connected to these topics. To start a conversation about The Book of Enoch, though, we must first clarify which books of Enoch we mean, as there are several. The book most think of when one says The Book of Enoch, which is now called 1 Enoch, is a text that was long believed lost. The prophecies of Enoch were referenced in Jude, but no written source for them had ever been turned up. Some manuscripts, Ethiopian in origin, appear to have circulated during the Renaissance, but still the book remained legendary, with many not believing the rumors of its existence. Not until the 18th century were authentic copies of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch discovered and brought back to Europe by Scottish adventurer James Bruce, during his expedition to find the source of the Nile, and these were not translated into English and properly recognized until 1821. Some fragments of 1 Enoch were found in Greek and Latin, but its great antiquity was not confirmed until 11 fragments of it, written in Aramaic, and three in Hebrew, turned up in caves in Qumran in 1948, as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. But even within this first Book of Enoch, there are several different works, The Book of the Watchers, The Book of Parables, The Astronomical Book, and The Dream Visions, each of which scholars believe originated from a different time period, with different authorship, making 1 Enoch more of an anthology than a coherent work. To further confuse matters, there are also a 2 Enoch, which is the work more specifically called the Secrets of Enoch, a 3 Enoch, and a Book of the Giants, which is often lumped together with the others because of its subject matter. Like the different sections of 1 Enoch, these other three works appear to have been composed in different eras, though there is no firm scholarly consensus on the origins of certain of them. To simplify, we will speak more generally in this study of Enochic tradition, taking all the literature as a corpus, in the sense of a group of works on the same subject instead of works by the same author, since all of them are doubtless pseudepigraphal.

James Bruce, a Scottish explorer who found the source of the Blue Nile and rediscovered the Book of Enoch.

Of course, the principal reason why I’ve chosen to discuss Enochic traditions now is that they offer retellings of the story of the Nephilim from Genesis 6, about which I spoke in some detail in Part One of my recent series on giants. I spoke of the few places in which the word Nephilim had been used and why it was translated as giants, and I also gave some alternative views on who the bene Elohim or “sons of God,” who fathered the Nephilim, may have been, other than angels have sexual intercourse with human women. Some, however, may look at the same story, as told in Enochic tradition, as a disproof of any rationalist interpretation of Genesis 6. In the Book of the Watchers, by far the oldest of the Enochic texts, as well as in other texts in the corpus, it is made explicitly clear that the sires of the Nephilim were indeed angels, called “Watchers” here. In fact, these rebel angels are even named, chief among them Shemihazah and Asa’el, and their crimes were more than just lusting after women. They are said to have taught mankind the evils of sorcery, thus providing a separate origin myth for magic, different from that which blamed Zoroaster and the Magi, as I spoke about in a previous episode. The evil magical practices taught by the Watchers were such abominable traditions as metalworking and using cosmetics. I can almost hear the gasps of horror. With these and other variations on the story of Genesis 6, it becomes the story of the origin of all evil, a kind of demonology. The offspring of the Watchers with human women are clearly said to be not only giants, but murderers who drink blood and practice cannibalism and bestiality. The fallen Watchers, in the end, are bound and imprisoned in a pit, and their evil offspring are wiped out by the Flood God sends as punishment, although in this tradition, it seems rather a punitive act against these Watchers and giants that drown the rest of humanity rather collaterally. And even then, it didn’t do the trick, as it’s said that, though the evil giants’ bodies were destroyed in the Flood, their spirits were not, and this was the origin of demons, who resented, oppressed, and even occasionally possessed surviving humans.

Just to nip in the bud any argument that the Enochic corpus represents evidence of the truth of the Nephilim story in Genesis 6, it should be noted that even the oldest of the works, The Book of the Watchers, is believed to be no older than the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Whereas Genesis, although supposed to have been written by Moses, who is sometimes believed to have lived in the 13th century BCE, has been shown by scholars to have actually been written in the 5th or 6th century BCE. This means The Book of the Watchers was written hundreds of years after, clearly as a kind of expansion on the mythology that was already out there. Some scholars assert that the early chapters of Genesis were not composed until the 3rd century BCE, but even if that minority position were proven accurate, it would still only mean that both accounts were writing about events that had supposedly occurred about 2000 years earlier. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of the accounts. Moreover, the story of the Watchers fathering Nephilim with human women is told over and over in the Enochic corpus, varying with each telling, and in some cases appearing to be midrashes, or rabbinic interpretations, of the story. In other words, it is clear from the Enochic literature alone that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim was a mythological tradition that had been and continued to be retold in innumerable variations, as the basis for differing philosophical and doctrinal positions. It is even told as an allegory in 1 Enoch verses 83-90, in what is called the Animal Apocalypse, which uses animals to tell the story much like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In this passage, it recounts how certain stars fell from the heavens and then had sex with cattle, producing offspring that were entirely different species, including donkeys, camels, and elephants, which then devoured the cattle. If the story is treated in such a clearly metaphorical manner here, could it not have served some metaphorical purpose in every iteration?

A symbolic painting by George Frederick Watts (depicting the ideas of Love and Life and unrelated to the subject at hand) that some think illustrates well the story of the Watchers taking human wives.

With the suggestion that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim may be allegorical, we are led to a variety of interpretations that reveal what meaning, other than literal, that the myth may have always had. For example, an astrological meaning has been found in the story. The names of the Watchers, it is pointed out, correspond with those of meteorological phenomena and identifiable heavenly bodies, such that it is really a story about the ill omens of irregular astronomical phenomena or of stars that alter their paths. The example from the Animal Apocalypse perfectly illustrates this interpretation, as the Watchers are depicted as stars that left their proper place and cause all kinds of trouble. Other interpretations require some further discussion of historical context. As discussed in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, in the 8th century BCE, Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel, during which ten tribes were lost. After that, during the 6th century BCE, the Kingdom of Judah saw their temple destroyed and their people placed in captivity by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Cyrus the Great allowed their return and the reconstruction of their temple, and it was later in this Second Temple period, after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Mediterranean and the age of Hellenism that followed his death, that Enochic literature became popular. One theory is that the story of the Watchers actually represent the Diadochi, Alexander’s generals, who defied Alexander’s wishes after his death to seize control over parts of his kingdom. The allegory works well, as the Watchers are described in decidedly martial terms as the generals of their own armies of angels, and they rebel to seize power for themselves, going native, as it were, on the Earth. Presenting the intermarriage of the Watchers and human women as an evil that results in corruption may also be seen as a lesson for the Jews not to mix with outsiders, and especially not to breed with them. Another interpretation suggests, rather convincingly, that the story of the Watchers was really a criticism or satire of all the neighbors and enemies of the Jews, whether Assyrian or Babylonian or Persian or Greek. The very nature of the Watchers as heavenly beings that lust after human women can be seen as a spoof of polytheist religions popular among their enemies in which deities were known to father children with human women. Think, for example, of the comparison I drew between Heracles and the Nephilim in a recent patron exclusive. If this were the purpose of the story, it would seem to have been an effort to subordinate the gods of their neighbors, suggesting their lustful deities were actually nothing more than the disobedient servants of the most high Jewish god.

Interestingly, just as the apocryphal Enochic corpus greatly expands on the tradition of the Nephilim, it also greatly expands the mythology surrounding the cataclysm that destroys them, the Deluge, and especially the lore surrounding Noah. According to the Enochic traditions, Noah was not necessarily a regular man. It is reported in 1 Enoch that, when Noah was born, his father Lamech was concerned about some unusual features of his appearance. His skin was unusually white, with platinum hair and eyes that shined. Lamech took the child to his grandfather, Enoch, was known to be wise. As we know from elsewhere in the Enochic corpus and from alchemical lore, Enoch had come into possession of divine knowledge, either from visions bestowed upon him by angels and written down in a book, or from the mysterious emerald tablet he discovered in a cave. Regardless of the source of his wisdom, it is clear why Lamech would come to him with his concerns, for Lamech believed his infant son’s strange appearance meant that he was actually the offspring of a Watcher, and Enoch knew all about the Watchers. It is striking here that whiteness and blondeness and bright eyes, features that Nazis and other white supremacists would later claim make one pure or superior, are here seen as an indication that Noah was of corrupt or mixed blood, the progeny of fallen spirits, and thus a demon like the other Nephilim. It may be the first indication of someone being viewed as a white devil. Enoch, however, says that is not the case, and that rather, these features are a sign that Noah had been chosen by God. As it turns out, Enoch already knows that the Deluge is coming as a judgment on the corruption of the Watchers and Nephilim, and he asserts that his great-grandson has been chosen for deliverance from this flood. This is a remarkable straying from the Biblical story of the Flood, in which Noah is chosen because of his righteousness and learns of the Flood directly from God. In the Enochic tradition, he was chosen before he could really display righteousness, and his family had known about the coming destruction for generations. As the story unfolds, Enoch bestows his divine wisdom on Noah before his ascension and transfiguration, either in the form of a book or the Emerald Tablet, and Noah becomes a magician and a healer, specifically an exorcist, able to expel the spirits of the demonic Nephilim when they enter people. Interestingly, Noah’s whiteness corresponds with insidious ideas about race after the Flood, with people of color having descended from one of his sons, Ham, who was supposedly cursed with dark skin. However, according to the Enochic tradition, it seems pretty clear that the strange whiteness of Noah, which may have passed to some but not all of his sons, appears to be something of an aberration, like albinism. I’m sure a white supremacist will look at this story and argue that it confirms whites are God’s chosen people, but an alternative interpretation is that it depicts whiteness as an inherited disorder and shows the earliest whites believing themselves superior to all others, such that they believed God wanted them to live and everyone else to die off.

The Enochic corpus and other Second Temple apocrypha seem to refer at times to a Book of Noah that some scholars doubt ever existed. If it did exist, then the palimpsest that is Enochic apocrypha is further important in that it may be reproducing passages of a lost work. The simple fact that lost books of scripture exist cannot be denied. 1 Enoch itself had been a lost book outside of Ethiopia for centuries. Moreover, there are numerous proposed lost books, such as a proto-gospel that preceded the others, a certain “Severe Letter” written by the Apostle Paul, and the “Ascents of James,” said to be a heretical text. These are just some of the lost texts of Christianity. There are numerous Judaic texts that are believed to have been lost, and several Manichean texts. Moreover, we know the custom of Jewish pseudepigrapha to attribute works to major biblical patriarchs, and it would seem unusual if there had never been a pseudepigraphon attributed to so major a figure as Noah. Finally, there are explicit references to Noah writing a book, or to the “writing of the words of Noah,” in various apocryphal works and fragments. However, skeptics find it suspicious that content said to be from these writings of Noah seems to vary from work to work. On the other hand, when the content of other books is alluded to, it is usually pretty faithfully rendered. This has led some doubters to suggest that references to a Book of Noah are only literary devices, such as when the trope of the Book of Life is used in scriptures, with the metaphor of being blotted out of it. If there is no literal Book of Life for one’s name to be blotted out of, it has been suggested that references to a Book of Noah may only refer metaphorically to the wisdom of Noah or the lessons to be learned from his story. Others have suggested that the Book of Noah is merely folkloric, much like the Emerald Tablet or the book containing the wisdom of Enoch, which certainly doesn’t seem to be the same as the pseudepigraphal works of the Second Temple period that I am discussing in this episode. By this view, it is as ridiculous to theorize about a real Book of Noah as it is to entertain the literal existence of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon, a book that only exists in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

The way in which this question of whether there existed a pseudepigraphical Book of Noah butts up against the question of whether there ever existed writings penned by the man Noah, and whether Noah the man ever actually existed, is similar to one of the central mysteries of the Book of Enoch, which revolves around the chronology of when certain passages were written and what they refer to. This is because some parts of the Enochic corpus appear to refer to Christ, and since some portions of it predate Christianity, it is argued that these passages represent a pre-Christian prophecy that has been fulfilled. This mystery has to do with the cryptic phrase “the Son of Man,” a term that is used frequently in scriptures just to mean humanity, as in, the sons of man, but in some cases, with the definite article “the Son of Man,” has been interpreted to mean a specific heavenly being, one who is seen in certain visions, such as those of Daniel, as being in the presence of God and in a position of authority. Christians interpret this vision as depicting Christ, the son of God, who was given human form, “like a son of man,” as Daniel states, and who it is believed will stand at the right hand of God. Despite the fact that with this language Daniel only appears to be describing a a man, or someone who looked like a man, being in the presence of someone he calls the Ancient of Days, never actually calling him God, the Christian interpretation has led to many mentions of a “son of man” being interpretated as references to Christ. As it happens, in the Book of Parables, the second section of 1 Enoch, the protagonist is called “the Son of Man,” used as a proper noun. Now we may presume that this was an allegorical trope, like naming your protagonist John Everyman to indicate that he represents all mankind, but many Christians take it as evidence that the Book of Enoch foretold the coming of Christ. The problem with this interpretation is that most scholars see the Book of Parables as a later addition to the Enochic corpus, suggesting that these Christian themes and some veiled allusions to events in the 3rd century CE, indicate that it was actually written in Christian times, making these passages far less prophetic. Indeed, this section, the Book of Parables, was never found among the fragments of the Book of Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These references to the Son of Man, far from confirming the beliefs of Christians, should actually be rejected by those who adhere to an orthodox view of Christianity. Indeed, this aspect of the book begins to approach why Enochic literature was excluded from the canon, as it leads to the notion that there are two powers in heaven. The vision of Daniel told of multiple thrones, and spoke of this one who was like a son of man being given “authority, glory and sovereign power.” Likewise, in the Book of Parables, this Son of Man sits on God’s throne, in glory and judgment. The Christian doctrine of the trinity was promulgated to explain scriptures that appear to indicate that there may be two coequal powers, as these passages indicate, arguing that Jesus is one and the same as God, along with the Holy Spirit, so it’s all just one godhead. But the Enochic corpus suggests a different interpretation. In the lore of this tradition, prior to Christ, there was another man, or son of man, who had ascended to heaven. It was Enoch, who was taken up by God instead of dying. Thus, the most common interpretation of this passage is that Enoch is the Son of Man, and it is further developed in 3 Enoch, when Enoch’s transfiguration into an angel is described. Later traditions suggest that Enoch was transformed into an archangel named Metatron. The name Metatron, which sounds like a transformer, was never mentioned in the Enochic texts, and some argue that it is derived from phrases elsewhere used for the Angel of the Lord, and this accords well with the interpretation that Enoch, the Son of Man, who was raised above other sons of men and raptured into heaven, was transformed into an angel and given his own throne and power equal to that of god, an idea so dangerous that it would lead to the Book of Enoch being suppressed and lost for centuries.

While the doctrine of two powers in heaven was heresy to orthodox Judaism, since Christians applied their bit of sophistry to explain away these multiple gods as one, it shouldn’t have been so problematic to them. However, there was a further problem posed by the Enochic literature, that may explain its exclusion from Christian canon at the Council of Nicaea. This problem is that, the story of Christ, in several respects, appears to match in key regards, the story of Enoch. Let us consider these parallels. Like Enoch, Christ ascends and is transfigured and then sits enthroned in heaven in judgment on mankind. And just as, according to 1 Peter, Christ descends into Hell and condemns the rebel angels there, so too did Enoch visit the disobedient Watchers and declare their punishment to be eternal. While some of these similarities may be explained away if the Book of Parables is indeed a later, Christian-era addition, some elements originate in portions of the Enochic corpus that are considered definitely pre-Christian, which raises the question of how much of the story of Christ may actually have been recycled myth. Of course, to suggest the Council of Nicaea excluded Enochic texts to hide this may be something of a conspiracy theory. The Council of Nicaea may simply have excluded Enochic traditions because they had already been excluded from the Jewish canon or because they were pseudepigrapha, and thus, by definition, a kind of forgery. But knowing as we know now that 1 Peter and all the canonical gospels are widely considered pseudepigrapha as well, with the exception of John, whose author remains a mystery, it rather seems more like the church fathers just picked and chose among a variety of dubious texts falsely attributed to famous figures in order to best reinforce that creed they chose to adopt. Regardless of whether the story of Christ is really the story of Enoch, or vice versa, though, the lesson to be taken here is that all such doctrine and dogma should be viewed with skepticism, based as it is upon a hodgepodge of antiquated writings that, despite all the claims of the faithful, are clearly crafted by man.

The Secrets of Enoch (An Apocryphal Catechism)

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