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ENOCH: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

You will live poorly if you do not know how to die well.

—SENECA

On one thing the record is clear: He never died.

Both the Old Testament and New Testament say so. The historian Josephus and the philosopher Philo agree, as do the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with such books as the Wisdom of Sirach and Jubilees, among many others. And just in case there was any doubt, he tells us so himself.

As modern readers, we are, therefore, hardly surprised that he was so famous in antiquity or that his work influenced so many Jewish and Christian books, among them the Gospels. We are surprised, though, that he has become so obscure in modernity, particularly in light of the extraordinary way in which the Bible describes him.

His name is Enoch—chanoch in Hebrew—and we first encounter him in Genesis 5:18, as Jared’s son, descended from Adam through Seth, Enosh, Cainen, and Mahalalel.

The family tree is complicated, though, less like a single tree and more like two trees of the same species whose branches are intertwined. Another passage in Genesis 4 lists different people, including an Enoch descended from Adam through Cain. And though this is not the same Enoch, it’s interesting to note the similarity between the lists in Genesis 4 and Genesis 5: Cain in the first and Cainen in the second, Enoch in both, Irad and Jared, and Mehujael and Mehalalel; then we have Methusael and Methuselah, and Lamech in both lists. But because Cain’s descendants will not survive the flood, it is the line of Seth that ends up being more important. That’s why Seth’s descendant Enoch is “the” Enoch.

Genesis 5 gives us the genealogy and life spans of these people, using a standard fourfold formula for each successive generation. First we get the age at which each man became a father. Then we get the name of the first son. After that comes the number of years during which the man “fathered more sons and daughters.” The fourth bit of information is the age at which the man died.

For example, Adam, according to Genesis, lived 130 years and fathered Seth; after Seth, Adam lived 800 years, fathering sons and daughters; the days of Adam’s life came to 930 years; then he died. The four parts are: 130 years, Seth, 800 years of “sons and daughters,” and death. Similarly, Seth lived 105 years and fathered Enosh (Enosh is not the same as Enoch); after Enosh, Seth lived 707 years, fathering sons and daughters; the days of Seth’s life came to 912 years; he died. Again, the key parts are 105 years, Enosh, 707 years, and death. For Enosh we have 90 years, Cainen, 815 years, and death. For Cainen, 70 years, Mahalalel, 840 years, and death. And so forth.

But when we get to Enoch, we find two fascinating variations.

Enoch lived 65 years and fathered Methuselah. So far, his life follows the pattern. But then, instead of just living out the rest of life “fathering sons and daughters,” Enoch “walked with God for 300 years, fathering sons and daughters.” That’s the first departure. The more significant surprise comes right at the end. The days of Enoch’s life came to 365 years and then …

… “God took him.”

He didn’t die.

What he did do is lend his name to the Book of Enoch, which was among the most well-known religious writings throughout the ancient world, even though it isn’t in our Bible today. Jude in the New Testament, though, quotes the book directly (in verse 1:14), and the theology and general worldview from the Book of Enoch permeate other parts of the New Testament.

Enoch himself appears in genealogies in 1 Chronicles and Luke, along with his ancestors and descendants. Hebrews (11:5) expands on Genesis 5, explicitly telling the reader that Enoch was taken so that he would not see death and adding, in the context of what faith means, that Enoch was taken up “by faith.”

These are only some of the reasons that such influential church fathers as Origen (an early Christian scholar and theologian born in the second century A.D. in Alexandria) thought so highly of Enoch and why we are not surprised that fragments from Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yet for all its fame, popularity, and influence, the Book of Enoch moved into near obscurity after it fell out of favor around the fourth century A.D. The Book of Enoch was rejected by Saint Jerome (the influential Christian theologian of the third and fourth centuries A.D. who translated the Bible into the Latin version called the Vulgate), for example, and by Saint Augustine (another influential Christian thinker from about the same time period), as well as by great rabbis who wrote the Talmud and shaped rabbinic Judaism.

In fact, we might not even have the Book on Enoch had it not been preserved in Ethiopia, where it remained central to religious thought. (Though the Ethiopian church is tiny in the United States, and equally marginal in most Western nations, Ethiopian Christianity, like Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, is a mainstream church with a rich history and its own traditions and theology. It is also one of the six major denominations that control the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem—the others being Roman Catholic, Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, and Coptic.)

Our most complete texts of the Book of Enoch, then, come from Ethiopia, in the form of manuscripts from the fifteenth century onward. These are, naturally, in the local language, variously called Ethiopic or Ge’ez. We also have some fragments in Greek and some Dead Sea Scroll fragments in Aramaic. The Aramaic texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls are almost certainly the original. These were probably translated into Greek, then into Ethiopic.

There are actually three books called the Book of Enoch. Scholars number them one through three. Our topic here is the first, that is, 1 Enoch, parts of which date back probably to the third century B.C. The second book, 2 Enoch, was probably composed later and deals with similar themes, while 3 Enoch is only vaguely related to the first two and comes from the middle of the first millennium A.D. But it’s 1 Enoch that was so influential, so we focus on that book.

Because it survives primarily in Ethiopic, some people prefer to call it Ethiopic Enoch or the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch instead of 1 Enoch. Following the same pattern, 2 Enoch, which survives in a language called Slavonic, is sometimes called Slavonic Enoch, while 3 Enoch is Hebrew Enoch.

Just to confuse the terminology further, our Book of Enoch here—1 Enoch—actually contains five books: the Book of the Watchers; the Book of the Similitudes, also more conveniently called the Parables of Enoch; the Book of Astronomical Writings; the Book of Dream Visions; and the Book of the Epistle of Enoch. We use the word “book” to mean any complete set of writing, so a book can contain lots of smaller books. 1 Enoch contains five books in exactly the same way that the Bible contains lots of books.

These five subbooks were not all composed at the same time, and even within books we find passages from different time periods. The earliest parts date to the third century B.C., and the latest parts were apparently written before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70.

So in many ways the contents are diverse, ranging from the fascinating account of the mysterious Watchers to details of the ancient calendar, from allegorical history to the coming of the Messiah, the Son of Man. But, as we’ll see, the accounts, questions, and answers point the reader in a unified and bold direction.

Even before the book begins, we know from Genesis that Enoch was a most extraordinary man, because he didn’t die. Genesis also tells us that he was a good man who walked with God. But Genesis is curiously silent on the details. What was it like to walk with God? What does that even mean? Why was Enoch chosen? Why didn’t he die? Is he still alive? What did he learn from his time with God? And why should we, as readers, care?

Against this background, the Book of Enoch begins.

Enoch has composed blessings for the righteous people, who will be present at the difficult time when the wicked and ungodly people are removed. But his message—based on a holy vision that the angels in heaven showed him—is not for his own generation. It’s for generations yet to come.

Having taunted the reader in this way, Enoch explains the distant future in familiar biblical terms. The Eternal God will appear on Mount Sinai. All will be afraid, and the Watchers will shake. The high mountains, too, will shake, and the high hills will be made low, melting like honeycombs. The earth will sink, and everything upon earth will perish. The Lord will arrive with ten thousand holy ones in order to execute judgment upon everyone, with reward coming to the righteous and destruction to the wicked.

Ancient readers would have recognized the themes, and even much of the language, from Numbers, Micah, Isaiah, Daniel, and Jude, all of which appear in the Bible, as well as from the Psalms of Solomon, Ascension of Moses, and the Wisdom of Solomon, which ended up on the cutting room floor.

Then Enoch turns to his view of the universe. The luminaries in the sky follow their paths with predictable precision, rising and setting at the right times, never straying from their appointed order. So, too, on earth, with God’s work manifest in the unchanging order of the seasons and in the way that the trees’ behavior matches the seasons. In the winter the trees lose their leaves, and in the summer they grow them back.

Furthermore, Enoch notes, the leaves show up just when we need them, because in summer we need shade from the sun. God has planned everything out, from the paths of the sun, moon, and stars to automatic seasonal parasols. (Enoch actually goes into more detail, correctly limiting his observations to some kinds of deciduous trees.)

Yet even as all parts of the natural world follow their proper paths, there are people who have strayed, deviating from God’s commandments and ignoring God’s will. These are wicked people, and in the end they will be punished, while only the righteous shall prosper with their happiness multiplied forever.

It was in this context, after the children of humans had multiplied, that they produced beautiful women who caught the attention of the children of heaven, the angels. These angels decided to go down to earth to choose wives for themselves from among the human women.

Their leader was named Semyaza. The idea was his, but he was afraid that he alone would dare to go down to earth and take a human wife, so that he alone might be blamed for committing this grave sin. He convinced the others that they should all swear an oath to join him, which they did—swearing upon a curse instead of a blessing.

Then, two hundred strong, they descended to Ardis at the peak of Mount Hermon, a mountain located one hundred miles north of Jerusalem between Damascus and the Mediterranean Sea and known from various mentions in the Bible. Enoch connects the name of the mountain to the curse, or herem in Hebrew, that they swore. The angels Ramiel, Kokahiel, Daniel, Ezekiel, and others each took one wife apiece and mated with her. The angels also taught the women magical medicine, spells, and the nature of roots and plants.

The women got pregnant and gave birth to giants nearly five hundred feet tall. These giants devoured everything humans had created, then the humans themselves, then birds, reptiles, fish, and other animals. Finally the giants turned on one another, drinking each other’s blood, until things got so bad that the very earth itself filed a complaint against these lawless ones.

While this was going on, the (evil) angel Azazel taught people how to make swords and daggers, shields and breastplates, as well as bracelets, ornaments, makeup, and jewelry. This changed the world, bringing about evil behavior such as adultery and other corrupt conduct. The angel Amezarak taught people how to cast spells and cut roots. The angel Armaros taught people how to resolve those spells. The angel Barakiel taught astrology; the angel Kokabel, portents; the angel Tamiel, more astrology; and the angel Asradel, the path of the moon and human deception.

Amid this massive destruction, the people of the earth cried out, and their voice reached heaven.

The angels Michael, Gabriel, Suriel, and Uriel looked down from heaven and saw the earthly bloodshed, lamenting to one another about the sorry state of the earth and the way human voices had reached the gates of heaven. And they didn’t know what to do.

They petitioned God, who, after all, knows everything before it happens and before whom everyone and everything is naked, with nothing hidden. Surely God has seen how Azazel had taught humans every form of oppression and had revealed heaven’s eternal secrets, just as God has seen how Semyaza had taught people how to cast spells. The same Semyaza to whom God had given the power of angelic leadership had led the angels to take human wives and defile them, fathering giants who had caused the whole earth to be filled with blood and sin so that the cries of the souls of the suffering humans had ascended to heaven, where surely God could hear their misery. “O God,” demanded Michael, Gabriel, Suriel, and Uriel. “What should we do?”

God sent the angel Arsyalalyur to Lamech’s son Noah with instructions to tell Noah to hide because the world was going to come to an end in a great flood that would destroy everything. God also directed Arsyalalyur to teach Noah how to escape so that he would save himself and his children.

And God sent the angel Raphael to bind the angel Azazel by his hands and feet and throw him into darkness. Raphael made a hole in the desert and threw Azazel into it, covering him with rocks. Raphael covered Azazel’s face so that he could no longer see any light and so that he would eventually be sent into the fire on the great day of judgment. God also tasked Raphael with restoring the earth that the angels had ruined and with announcing the restoration of the earth, because God planned to restore the earth, not letting humanity be destroyed by the mystery of everything that the Watchers had taught. “The whole earth has been ruined by what Azazel taught,” God lamented. “Record all sin as coming from him,” God told Raphael.

God told the angel Gabriel to destroy the adulterous children and to expel the children of the Watchers from humanity, setting them against each other so that they destroy each other. God warned Gabriel that the Watchers would plead for their lives—which would have been eternal because angels never die—but Gabriel was forbidden to listen to them.

God told the angel Michael to deal with Semyaza similarly, locking him away in darkness until he and the angels he convinced to join him are ultimately punished. Then good would replace evil, with the earth producing plentiful food and the heavenly storehouses of blessing descending to earth to spread peace and truth forever.

We met Enoch right at the beginning of the book, when he told the reader that he had a message for the future, explaining that everything in the world followed its set path, except for people, who sometimes strayed. But Enoch has remained hidden from view since the beginning of the saga with the Watchers.

Based on its style and content, and because Enoch doesn’t play a role in it, some people suspect that the passage about the Watchers is either based on or even a direct copy of a now-lost Book of Noah, rather than an original composition. Either way, it meshes seamlessly with the biblical narrative. Starting in Genesis 6:1, we read about the time when “people multiplied … and daughters were born to them, and the sons of angels took wives for themselves” from among the humans. That’s why, in those days, there were “the nephilim upon the earth … when the sons of angels entered the daughters of humans, who in turn bore children to them.”

The “sons of angels” are sometimes translated “sons of gods,” and, in addition, we find various renderings of things like “sons of humans.” The Septuagint translates the Hebrew nephilim as the Greek gigantes, that is, “giants.” Whatever the terminology, the point is clear: Male divine beings mated with female humans, the result of which were the giants.

The phrasing in Genesis—and, in particular, the use of “the” in “the giants”—suggests that the ancient reader was expected to be familiar with the story and that Genesis was just providing a summary to remind people of what they already knew. With Enoch, we, too, have access to that prerequisite information.

We now call the angels that mated with people the “fallen angels,” a nomenclature that matches the literal meaning of the Hebrew nephilim (“fallen ones”) but only partially accords with the text. The Hebrew “fallen ones” are the giants themselves, while the English “fallen angels” are their angelic parents.

Interestingly, Enoch spends more time on what the fallen angels teach humans than on their misguided procreation. We get detailed lists of which angels taught what, and toward the end God tells Raphael that “the whole earth has been ruined by what Azazel taught,” not by who Semyaza chose for a wife.

In passages that people often skip over, Genesis also sometimes indicates who taught people what. For example, Genesis 4:21 tells us that Jubal invented music, and the next verse indicates that Zillah’s son Tubal-cain was the first metalsmith. Similarly, we saw in the Life of Adam and Eve that the angels had to teach Eve about childbirth and, later, Seth how to dress Eve’s body. This kind of information answers the implicit general question, How did humans ever figure that out?

(A much later rabbinic tradition, continuing in the theme of metalworking, wonders about the metal tongs used in forging metal. The tongs are used to move metal into and back out of fire. But those tongs have to be annealed, a process that involves pushing the tongs themselves into fire and pulling them back out. It’s easy to make new tongs with the help of old tongs, but how, the Rabbis wonder, were the first tongs made? They must have come directly from God.)

The inventions in Genesis are presented neutrally. They are neither specifically beneficial nor detrimental. But the etymology of many music words in Hebrew suggests that people were suspicious of this new artistic technology. The Hebrew word for “harp” (or something like it) is nevel, and the related n’vala means “disgrace” or “disgust.” The Hebrew for word “flute” (or, again, something like it) is chalil, whose root we also find in the word chalila, which means roughly “God forbid!” This pattern may reflect a specific suspicion of the power of music, or more generally a fear of new things. (As modern people, we may find it hard to think of music as something that could once have been considered “newfangled technology.” But it was.)

This brings us back to Enoch’s criticism of what Azazel taught people how to do. The details of what Azazel taught and the consequences of humans having that knowledge are particularly interesting and astonishingly relevant. He taught people how to make bracelets, ornaments, and jewelry, but apparently the same technology could be used for swords, daggers, and shields.

More generally, Enoch expresses the sentiments that we were better off when we were ignorant and that knowledge will lead to evil. Though Enoch’s words date back over two thousand years, they are eerily reminiscent of the modern debate over such things as nuclear technology, which, it would seem, helps us power lights but which also led to horrific deaths in Japan. Even cell phones and other modern conveniences have earned a reputation as both helpful and harmful, with fears that they are corrupting young minds.

Going back a little further, in the 1800s the son of a European builder wanted to make it easier to perform such construction tasks as excavating rock and drilling tunnels. To this end, he tried to form a flexible, stable, easy-to-use explosive. Nitroglycerin was already around, but it was so volatile that it was considered too dangerous to produce and use. This particular man, Alfred Nobel, thought there must be a way of taming nitroglycerin. In 1864 he found it, calling his new invention dynamite. And it did make it easier and safer to excavate rock, drill tunnels, build canals, and much more. Nobel paved the way to success for untold numbers of public works projects. But Nobel’s invention, like Azazel’s craft millennia earlier, proved to be not only productive but also destructive, because the dynamite could be used to kill.

Enoch might say that Azazel taught Nobel how to blow things up.

Except that so far Enoch hasn’t been involved, save for his brief appearance in the introduction. The Book of Enoch picks up by recognizing this fact, even telling the reader that Enoch had hidden before the whole mess with the Watchers. No one knew where he was, though apparently in some unclear way he was actually with the Watchers and other holy ones. This is how it was possible for the good Watchers—the ones who didn’t go down to earth to take human wives—to petition him to send a message to the fallen angels.

Enoch complied, starting with Azazel, telling the archangel of evil that a grave judgment awaited him and that he would know no peace. He would be put in bonds and have no opportunity even to offer a prayer of supplication. Enoch sent a similar message to the rest of the fallen angels.

The angels begged Enoch to write prayers of remembrance and forgiveness on their behalf, because they would no longer be able to speak, and they would have no way of praying for themselves. Enoch did this, recording their prayers for forgiveness from sin and for long lives.

He took the prayers to the waters of the Dan River, to the southwest of Mount Hermon, and started reciting them. And there, by the Dan, not far from Mount Hermon, with prayers on behalf of the fallen Watchers in his mouth, he saw a vision.

Clouds and fog. Stars. Lightning. Winds hoisting Enoch high into heaven. Then higher. White marble. Frightening tongues of fire. Fiery cherubim. A house hot as fire yet cold as ice, and nothing inside. But wait! An inner opening leading to another house even greater than the first one. A floor of fire and a ceiling of fire, with stars and lightning beyond.

A throne! Crystal, and Wheels like the shining sun. The voice of the cherubim. Streams of flaming fire supporting the throne. Upon the throne His Great Glory, in clothes brighter than the sun, whiter than snow. The Lord!

The Lord called Enoch with his own voice: “Come near to me, and hear my holy word. Do not be afraid, Enoch, for you are a righteous man, a scribe of righteousness. Come near and hear my voice.

“Tell the Watchers that they should petition on behalf of humans, not humans on their behalf. Ask them why they abandoned the high, holy, and eternal heaven to become unclean with human women, emulating the behavior of humans of the earth. They used to be holy, spiritual creatures. They used to be immortal.

“Tell them that humans have wives and children because they are mortal. Immortal beings need no wives.

“Now,” God continued to Enoch, “the giants produced by the union of spirits and flesh will be called evil spirits. Spiritual beings live in heaven, but the evil spirits will live on earth, neither eating nor drinking, but eventually opposing each other, and wreaking havoc on Earth. They will rise up against the humans and in particular against the women, because they came from the women.

“And they will keep causing problems but not be punished, until the great conclusion, the great age.

“And tell the Watchers that they used to be in heaven, but even so, they were not aware of all of the mysteries of heaven. They only know the rejected mysteries. Those are the mysteries they broadcast to human women, and those are the mysteries that will cause women and men to multiply evil on the earth. Tell the Watchers they will never know peace.”

As with the Apocalypse of Abraham, Enoch’s vision involves the usual visual elements: fire, snow whiteness, and, in particular, seraphim, Wheels (which we called Creatures of the Wheels there), and a throne, and then God’s voice. These signal the reader that the important theology is coming up.

Here we see that it has a few particular claims. Perhaps the clearest is the point that mortals need marriage and children precisely because they don’t live forever, while angels, who live forever, don’t need marriage or children. This is in keeping with the opening theme. The world was constructed in just the right way so that everything works out. In the introduction, Enoch noted how the trees sprout leaves only in the summer, because people need shade in the summer. Now he learns that only mortals have sex, because only mortals need to have children.

But there’s a huge catch here. The immortal angels did have sex. And they did produce children. The universe was planned in a certain way, in fact, in a perfect way, but things have gone wrong.

Two mystical journeys continue this theme.

Enoch’s vision took him next to a mountain of precious stones in the west. There was a pit inside, and atop the pit a place that lacked both the usual sky above and the usual earth or water below. It was empty, desolate, and terrible. Inside were seven stars like great, burning mountains. An angel told Enoch that the pit was a prison for fallen stars and that the seven stars were stars that had transgressed God’s commandments by not arriving punctually. God was furious with the stars, so he bound them in the pit-prison. And the angel Uriel told Enoch that the same pit would hold the fallen angels who had united with human women.

Then, after recounting a list of archangels, Enoch journeyed on, ending up (for unexplained reasons) at the same place, where he saw the same star prison with the fallen angels.

Next he saw another mountain, this one with four hollowed-out chambers, each one a way station for four different categories of human soul, a place where the souls would wait for the final day of judgment.

Enoch heard the voices of the souls, and, as it happened, the first one he heard was the voice of a soul lodging a complaint. “Whose voice is that?” Enoch wanted to know.

Rufael, the angel who was now with him, explained that it was the voice of Abel’s spirit, whom Cain had murdered, and that the voice would continue against Cain until all of Cain’s descendants perish. This is Enoch’s way of starting to address a familiar question: Why do good people suffer?

We already saw that the Apocalypse of Abraham addresses this question, coming to the not uncommon conclusion that good people get an eventual eternal reward, just as bad people are eventually punished. This is part of the equity that people demand from the universe.

Enoch notes that right off the bat, as it were, as soon as we are born, we find unfairness in the world. Did Abel do anything to deserve his suffering? No. In this sense, we all know an Abel—someone who, it would seem, did nothing wrong but nonetheless suffered.

One common modern answer is that everyone is a sinner, having been born with original sin from the original sinners Adam and Eve. Abel was their immediate child. You don’t get closer than that to inheriting original sin. Another common modern answer is the nonanswer: “God works in mysterious ways.”

Enoch’s answer is to probe the issue further, coming up with four categories of people, which he sees in his vision and which are explained to him by the angel Rufael.

The first category is righteous people. Enoch doesn’t make it clear if these are all righteous people, or just the righteous people that live happy lives, but the third category makes it pretty clear that this first category is just a subset of the righteous people.

So we jump to that third category: people who lodge complaints (or perhaps even “engage in lawsuits”). These are people, like Abel, who were unjustly wronged. Enoch here gives them a voice after their death, in the form of the cries that continue to complain against their assailants.

The second category is the flipside of the third: sinners who were not punished on earth. Taken together, these two categories of people—good people who get punished and bad people who don’t—epitomize the difficulties in the classical doctrine of reward and punishment, which insists that good things come to good people and bad things come to bad people.

Like Enoch here, parts of the Bible insist on this classical reward and punishment. Just for example, Deuteronomy 11 is clear that crop-nourishing rain is a reward for following God’s commandments. “If you listen to my commandments … then I [God] will grant timely rain.” But “be careful not to turn away and worship other gods,” for then “God will stop up the sky and there will be no rain.”

It’s a simple, compelling thesis, and one that most people believe at some level. It has amazingly broad appeal. We might summarize this theology—prevalent in the Bible as well as among believers and apparent nonbelievers to this day—as “fairness.”

This demand of the world seems almost hardwired into the brains of children, which is why children repeatedly complain, bitterly, that “it’s not fair.” Children don’t like to be punished, but they usually accept punishment as part of life. On the other hand, they hate it when adults dole out undeserved punishment. And, curiously, they also can’t abide people who get away with evil. The world should be fair.

Most adults remain children in this regard. When tragedy strikes, even people who don’t believe in God usually find themselves wondering what they did to earn God’s wrath. And these same people sometimes ask of good fortune, What did I do to deserve this?—bypassing the inconvenient facts that they don’t believe in a God who might answer the question any more than they believe in good fortune coming as a reward.

The problem with this intuitive and pervasive theology, of course, is that it doesn’t work. The world is full of good people whose crops have failed, and it is equally full of despicable people who have, apparently, thrived.

The Bible does address this glaring problem, most notably in the book of Job, where the answer is that the question is beyond our comprehension. “You don’t even know how I created the ocean,” God chastises Job when he asks why he, a good man, is suffering. What makes you think you can understand something as complicated as suffering? is God’s point. But in a sense, this is a nonanswer answer.

Rufael tells Enoch that sometimes sinners die and are buried even though judgment hasn’t been executed upon them. These people will suffer in the end of days. This lets Enoch skip Job and return to the point, if not the details, of Deuteronomy. Sinners are always punished, just not always in this world. For Enoch, as for Abraham in his Apocalypse, final judgment seems to be a matter of rectifying the apparent lack of fairness in life.

This explanation took care of Enoch’s second category, sinners who escaped punishment. And Enoch was grateful, praising the “Lord of righteousness.” But what about the third category, people like Abel whose spirits’ voices continue to complain?

To find the answer, Enoch journeyed on.

He saw a mountain of fire and, as he approached, seven mountains, each different from the other, each made of unique beautiful stones. The mountains, situated among ravines, formed the shape of a throne surrounded by trees. And one of those trees was unlike anything Enoch had ever experienced: unique in fragrance, adorned with eternal leaves, and graced with beautiful fruit.

The angel Michael, who was now with Enoch, explained that the mountains did in fact form a throne, the throne on which God will sit when he comes to earth for good. And the tree—which was off-limits to humanity until the great judgment—was reserved for the righteous and the pious. Those select few would eat its fruit of life.

Above, Rufael explained that bad people eventually suffer. Here Michael completes the picture by adding that good people eventually earn eternal reward.

The basic questions are similar to what we saw in the Apocalypse of Abraham: Is there a reason to be good? Is virtue rewarded? Is evil punished? And the answers are similar: Life is fair, but—as it were—only because life doesn’t end at death. Rather, life after death eventually evens things out. But as we’ll see below, the superficial similarities mask fundamental differences. Enoch draws very different conclusions about the world than Abraham does, and has a very different lesson to teach us.

Additionally, Enoch insists on more detail regarding these matters. We get it in books 2–5.

But book 1 is not quite over. He takes one more mystical journey first, traveling to the center of the earth to a blessed place shaded with branches. There he finds a holy mountain. We know from the way it matches descriptions in Ezekiel (5:5, 38:12) that this is Jerusalem, and Enoch provides exquisite detail of what he sees, both there and in the surrounding areas. But we skip those details here to move on to book 2, the Book of the Similitudes, or the Parables of Enoch.

The Parables are so rich in imagery, and so detailed in content, that they deserve a book of their own. So rather than proceed chapter by chapter, we focus on the particularly relevant themes.

In addition to the judgment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous in general, Enoch now turns his attention to the details: Who is righteous? Who is wicked? And what will judgment look like?

We are hardly surprised to find believers listed among the righteous and nonbelievers among the wicked, even though that theme was practically missing from Book 1. God in Book 2 is frequently the “Lord of Spirits,” and nonbelievers are the ones who deny his name.

But there are other groups of evildoers, too, most notably the ruling class, which Enoch enumerates into categories that we might translate as, “governors, kings, officials, and landowners.” They are all evil. Enoch spends two full chapters on the pain these people will experience in the end of days and on the class reversal that will rectify the situation. For example, the downtrodden will wear garments of glory while the rulers will be stripped of their power, and kings of the earth and mighty landowners will be humiliated on account of what they did.

Much of the rhetoric comes in terms of what the upper class will finally learn: “We now know that we should glorify the Lord of kings, who rules over all kings.” “We had [wrongly] put our trust in our scepters.” “God’s judgment comes regardless of status.” And even, “We have gorged on financial exploitation.”

Enoch also rails against the Parthians and the Medes to his east, who had occupied Jerusalem. (The Parthians’ occupation of Jerusalem in the year 40 B.C. was in fact short-lived, but their reputation as a mighty force was not limited to the duration of that occupation.)

Though couched in language that is largely inaccessible to today’s readers, Enoch’s themes sound remarkably modern, representing not just lofty matters like belief in God but everyday practical matters like financial equality and political skirmishes.

Alongside these day-to-day realities, Enoch includes Azazel and the other fallen angels among those who will be punished. In this way he connects his mundane observations about the world’s woes to their cosmic solutions as he describes them.

According to Enoch, God existed even before time began—during the before-time. Enoch caught a glimpse of that before-time and saw the One to whom that before-time belonged (God, presumably), with a head white like snow. Enoch also saw another one there, with a human face: the Son of Man.

This Son of Man was, apparently, created by God and named before anything else came into being—before even the sun and the moon, before the stars. The Son of Man is the one who will bring about the final reckoning.

In particular—and reinforcing some of the themes we just saw—the Son of Man will dethrone kings, loosen the stranglehold the mighty have on the downtrodden, and crush the teeth of sinners. When that happens, everyone who dwells on earth will praise his name. He will be a staff for the righteous. He is the Messiah.

As it happens, the English phrase “Son of Man” is actually a pretty bad translation of the text here. “Human one” would be better, because “son of” was used in the original language of the text to indicate membership in a group, and the group was “humans,” not just “men.” But we keep “Son of Man” here both because it is so well known in connection with Enoch and because it reinforces the obvious connection to the “Son of Man” in the New Testament. (“Son of Man” is a bad translation there, too, for the same reasons.)

In fact, we find the phrase “son of man” frequently throughout both the Old Testament and the New Testament, but translations often hide that fact by using “human,” “human being,” or “mortal” in the Old Testament, and “son of man” (or, capitalized, “Son of Man”) only in the New. For example, in Isaiah (56:2), God commands people to maintain justice, noting the joy that doing so will bring “to a person,” that is “to the son of man.” And God frequently addresses the prophet Ezekiel as “son of man.”

Yet it’s only in the New Testament that the Son of Man is clearly identified with the Messiah, just as he is in the Parables of Enoch. This makes it tempting to equate the two.

But though they are similar, they are also different. Enoch’s Son of Man was waiting at the ready from before the universe was created, unlike Jesus. Even more to the point, Enoch’s “Son of Man,” Enoch tells us, is himself!

This Son of Man will be instrumental in bringing about the final judgment, which will include resurrection of the righteous in addition to everything that we’ve seen.

Though we’ve barely touched on the beauty and intricacy of the Parables of Enoch, the second of the five books in the Book of Enoch, we leave it for the moment and skip to the fourth book to continue the theme of politics that we saw just above.

The fourth book, the Book of Dream Visions, details two visions that Enoch sees. The first portrays how the sky literally fell onto the earth.

In the second vision, a snow-white bull emerged from the earth, soon to be followed by a female calf along with two other calves, one dark and the other red. The dark calf gored the red calf after pursuing it all over the earth, and then the red calf disappeared so that Enoch could no longer see it. By contrast, the dark calf grew up to be strong and took a female calf. After that, Enoch saw lots of calves that were similar to the dark calf.

The first female calf looked all over for the red calf but couldn’t find it. And she was distraught, but she kept looking. So Enoch helped her look, at the same time consoling the female calf. Thus quieted, the female calf bore another snow-white bull and, after that, many more cows, some of them dark.

That snow-white bull grew up to be big and strong, and from him came many more snow-white cows, all of which resembled him. Then those cows in turn gave birth to more cows, all resembling each other, each one following many others.

Then Enoch again saw a vision with his own eyes. From the lofty heaven a star fell down to earth but managed to rise and eat and pasture among the bulls. Then these big dark cows altered their pens (in some way that isn’t explained), their pastures, and even their calves. And they started to complain to one another. Then many more stars came down from heaven, joining the first star among the cows in their pasture. And the stars brought out their sexual organs and mounted the cows, so that the cows all became pregnant and bore elephants and camels and donkeys. The other bulls were terrified of them, because they bit with their teeth and swallowed and gored with their horns, eventually eating the cows. And all the children of the earth trembled and shook and fled before them.

Amid the violence of their goring and devouring each other, the earth itself began to cry aloud. And Enoch saw another vision: A snow-white creature descended from heaven in the form of a human, along with three others like it. They took Enoch by the hand and lofted him high above the earth, so he could see what would happen to the elephants, camels, and donkeys.

One of the four creatures from heaven took the first star, bound its hands and feet, and threw it into a deep, empty, dark abyss. Then the creatures turned to deal with the other stars.

Enoch’s vision progressed, with more animals joining the fray, everything from great cats like lions and leopards to farm hunters like wolves and foxes, along with sheep, raptors of various sorts, and more.

The wolves oversaw the sheep, an arrangement that, not surprisingly, led to trouble, but the sheep, with the help of the Lord of the Sheep, managed to escape, eventually building a glorious house in a beautiful land. Things were going so well for the sheep that their eyes were opened. With the help of a series of particularly strong rams, the sheep repelled various attacks by all manner of wild beasts.

But as time progressed, the sheep strayed, and attacks by the other animals grew more successful. The lions and the leopards feasted on the sheep. So did the wild boars. The sheep were evicted from their glorious home, and Enoch couldn’t see if the sheep would be let back in.

Eventually the sheep returned to their house, rebuilding it and repelling the wild boars.

Nonetheless, before long the sheep mixed in with the wild beasts. They were so intermingled that most of them could not be rescued from the onslaught of attacking animals.

Then the raptors came—eagles, vultures, kites, and ravens. The eagles led the pack and started devouring the sheep, gouging out their eyes and then feasting on their flesh.

The ravens would circle over the sheep, swooping down to snatch a lamb, throwing it back to the ground, and feasting on it. Some of the lambs grew horns, but the ravens ate the horns, too, until one day a particularly strong lamb grew an especially strong horn. The eagles, vultures, kites, and ravens kept attacking that one sheep. The ravens in particular turned their united attention to the sheep, now a grown ram, with the horn. A vicious battle ensued, but the ravens were unable to remove the ram’s horn.

Yet the animal violence continued.

Finally another snow-white cow was born with huge horns. This cow united all of the animals, transforming them, too, into snow-white cows. At this the Lord of the Sheep rejoiced, and, with him, Enoch.

We now understand this intriguing vision to be a detailed history of all time. White represents goodness, darkness sin, and redness innocent bloodshed. The first snow-white bull is Adam, who, as we saw, is followed by a female calf (Eve) and two other calves, one dark (Cain) and the other red (Abel). The dark calf kills the red calf, and the female calf scours the earth looking for it.

Our English rendition here is hindered by the paucity of animal terms available to us. We do have technical progressions like “calf, heifer, cow” and “calf, bullock, bull,” which, in the United States, represent three stages of the female’s life (weaning, before childbirth, and after childbirth) and three stages of the male’s life (weaning, young, and old). But these terms vary from place to place. Some communities use “bullock” not for a young bull but rather for an old one. More important, most nonfarmers call all of these a cow, not reserving “cow” only for female bovines that have given birth. Similarly, for the transition from young male sheep to adult male sheep, the best we can do is “sheep to ram.” So our text is of necessity a little awkward and vague.

Other translations prefer other terminology. Sometimes Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel are a bull, a heifer, and two bullocks. Other times they are all “bovids.”

If we use the English word “cow” to represent any sort of cow, bull, etcetera, then the cows are the line of Adam. The sheep are the people of the Lord.

In a scene we skipped before, Enoch sees one of the stars (the good angels) teach one of the cows how to make a boat. Then the cow becomes a person who uses the boat to survive a flood, while the other animals—the other cows along with the elephants, camels, and donkeys—perish. This is obviously the story of Noah’s ark.

The wolves, who ended up overseeing the sheep, are the Egyptians who enslaved the Israelites. In another scene we skipped, the sheep escape from the wolves as a great lake parts, letting the sheep through but drowning the wolves in the face of the Lord of the Sheep.

The sheep establish a great house (the Temple) in a beautiful land (Jerusalem), only to be expelled by the lions and leopards, or, in other translations, the lions and the hyenas, or the lions and the tigers, etcetera. These are the first conquerors of Israelite Jerusalem—probably the Babylonians and the Assyrians. And this matches the history of Jerusalem as we know it, as described in detail in chapter 1.

The sheep in Enoch’s vision reestablish their great house, just as we know that the Israelites returned to Jerusalem.

We also know how various peoples conquered Jerusalem over the next few centuries: including the Macedonians, sometimes called the Greeks (eagles); the Syrians, also sometimes called the Greeks or the Greek Syrians (crows); and the Egyptians, also more specifically called the Ptolemies (kites).

The great ram whose horn is so strong that the ravens cannot eat it is one of the Maccabees, and the battle is the one recorded by Josephus and in 1 and 2 Maccabees and celebrated by the Jewish holiday Hanukkah.

The end of Enoch’s vision is perhaps the most important. A snow-white cow (technically, a calf, then a bullock, then a bull) was born with great horns to unite all the animals. This is, of course, the Messiah, from the line of Adam.

Enoch’s intricate animal vision reinforces his understanding of history as starting with Adam and Eve and ending with the coming of the Messiah. He highlights the important events, including the fallen angels, the flood, Israelite slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, Israelite presence in the promised land, the building of the First Temple, the first exile, assimilation of the Jews, the Second Temple, the battles for Jerusalem, and the Messiah.

The most important part of this vision, though, is what’s missing. Enoch doesn’t include any sort of final judgment. And this omission epitomizes Enoch’s fundamental struggle.

On the one hand, he believes—or, at least, would like to believe—that God has established a perfect world, down to the tiniest detail. As we saw right at the outset of the book, even the trees sprout leaves only in summer, because that’s when people need shade. Similarly, humans have children because they are mortal, while angels, being immortal and therefore having no need of children, do not marry.

But Enoch’s world is one that has gone awry. Even God’s holy angels deviated from his perfect plan when they mated with human women and, it would seem, caused suffering that no one deserved and that he didn’t intend.

Similarly, the sheep (Israelites) in the animal history repeatedly suffer. In one particularly poignant passage, the Lord of the Sheep even rejoiced as he fed the sheep to the wild animals, remaining silent as the sheep were devoured.

Above we saw how Rufael taught Enoch that bad people eventually suffer and good people eventually earn eternal reward. And we saw how this seemed, at least superficially, to match Abraham in the Apocalypse. But the difference is that Enoch doesn’t seem to fully believe it.

Enoch—like many of us in modernity—seems unable to reconcile what he sees around him with his idea of what a universe with God in charge should look like. Enoch’s world is, in the end, not the perfect world of God but rather a world marred by unplanned circumstances and unforeseen events. According to Enoch, we are not living in the world destined for us but, rather, in a faulty and imperfect substitute.

A bold interpretation even suggests that Enoch feels a personal responsibility to make things better. After all, the only messiah coming to fix things, he sees, is himself.

Either way, Enoch is certainly skeptical of God’s power to deliver on an ultimate plan. At times Enoch even denies that we are living according to God’s will.

In light of the physical suffering and emotional angst that marked the final decades of the first millennium, we are not surprised that the Book of Enoch was so highly esteemed two thousand years ago. The book offered precisely what readers needed: affirmation that their suffering was undeserved and was not the will of the God they felt either had abandoned them or, worse, had never cared for them in the first place.

And we similarly understand why later generations of Jews and Christians wished to squash this seemingly heretical work. Their postexilic theology and worldview had no place for anything but God’s perfect plan. The reason to be Jewish was because it was God’s desire and because God favored those who believed in him. The reason to be Christian was, again, because it was God’s desire and because God not only favored those who believed in him but also severely punished those who did not. God had a perfect plan, in other words, and you either got on board or got left behind.

But Enoch had the audacity to suggest that our world was imperfect, in spite of God. Perhaps some people suffer for no reason at all. Perhaps sinners don’t get punished in life after death, or, in a more nuanced interpretation, perhaps they do but it doesn’t matter.

Enoch’s message is a timeless expression of the human condition.

We have all felt that something has gone awry in our lives: childhood dreams that never materialized or unforeseen nightmares for which we couldn’t even begin to plan. Like Enoch, we generally find that life is a mixed bag, and our daily existence consists of balancing the good and the bad, trying to appreciate and augment the former, hoping to endure and mitigate the latter.

And also like Enoch, we are often unconsoled and unconvinced by claims that our suffering—be it temporary or permanent, meager or substantial—is God’s will. Indeed, we are often infuriated by the suggestion.

We are, therefore, lucky that the cutting room floor has preserved this counterpoint to what has become traditional theology, just as we are fortunate that earlier attempts to erase the Book of Enoch were thwarted by a circuitous path from Hebrew and Aramaic through Greek and Latin to Ethiopic and now English, bolstered by fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Against all odds, the book, like Enoch himself, never died.