The Book of Enoch: The Scripture Only Ethiopia Kept

Genesis says only this of Enoch, seventh from Adam: he "walked with God; and he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). From that one strange line grew an entire literature. By the third century BCE, Jewish writers were composing books in Enoch's name: visions of heaven, a history of the fallen angels, the secrets of the calendar, the end of days. The Letter of Jude in the New Testament quotes one of them as prophecy. Then, in most of the Christian world, the book disappeared. In 1773 the Scottish traveller James Bruce came home from Ethiopia with three manuscripts of it, written in Ge'ez, the classical language of the Ethiopian church, where it had been read as Scripture all along.

The book and its witnesses

What we call 1 Enoch is really five books gathered into one. The interactive codex above lists them:

1. The Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–36).
2. The Parables or Similitudes (37–71).
3. The Astronomical Book (72–82).
4. The Dream Visions (83–90).
5. The Epistle of Enoch (91–108).

The evidence comes in three languages:

• Aramaic: fragments of eleven manuscripts from Qumran Cave 4 (4Q201–212), the earliest from around 200 BCE. They cover every part except the Parables, perhaps a fifth of the whole text.
• Greek: substantial parts, including a sixth-century codex from Akhmim in Egypt.
• Ge'ez: the only complete text, translated in late antiquity. The surviving manuscripts date from the fourteenth or fifteenth century onwards, and there are many of them.

Richard Laurence published the first English translation from Bruce's manuscripts in 1821.

The Watchers

The book's most influential story expands Genesis 6:1–4, where "the sons of God" take human wives and "the Nephilim" are on the earth. In Enoch the sons of God are angels called Watchers, led by Shemihazah and Asael (Azazel). They descend on Mount Hermon, father giants, and teach humanity metallurgy, weapons, cosmetics, sorcery and astrology. The earth fills with violence; the Flood is God's answer. This became the root of Jewish and Christian ideas of fallen angels and demons as the spirits of the dead giants.

Canon: in and out

• Jude 14–15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9, and 2 Peter 2:4 alludes to its angels in chains. Several early Christian writers, such as Tertullian, valued it.
• By the fourth century most churches had rejected it. It is not in the Jewish Bible or in Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant Bibles.
• The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean church include it in their canon, and the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) also revered it.

Symbology and sacred encoding

364 days. The Astronomical Book describes a 364-day solar year: exactly 52 weeks, so that every festival falls on the same weekday each year. The Qumran community followed this calendar, in conflict with the Temple's lunar calendar.

Forbidden knowledge. The Watchers' teaching links technology and secret arts with corruption. The theme runs through later ideas of illicit magic and of knowledge as temptation.

The Son of Man. The Parables speak of a pre-existent heavenly judge called the Son of Man and the Chosen One. How this relates to the Gospels' use of the phrase for Jesus is a major, unresolved question, bound up with the dating of the Parables.

Connections

Second Temple Judaism (ch10), The End of Days (ch50) and Eastern Orthodoxy & Byzantium (ch60), which covers the Eastern churches. Compare the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02), the Great Isaiah Scroll (V48) and the Ark of the Covenant (V07) for Ethiopia's biblical traditions.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/book-of-enoch.html