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1 Enoch (The Book of Enoch)

← Ancient texts · Jewish — Second Temple & after

Ge'ez (Ethiopic), from a lost Aramaic and Greek original · Composed in stages, c. 300–100 BC. Aramaic copies were among the Dead Sea Scrolls; the complete text survives only in the Ethiopian Church's Bible.

Translation: Richard Laurence, 1821 — Richard Laurence, The Book of Enoch the Prophet, translated from an Ethiopic MS in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1821; text of the 1883 edition). Public domain.

The most important Jewish book outside the Bible for reading the New Testament. Jude 14–15 quotes it by name — "Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these" — the only place the NT cites a non-canonical book as prophecy. It is scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon and nowhere else.

Its heart is the Book of the Watchers (chapters 6–16): two hundred angels under Samyaza and Azazyel descend on Mount Hermon, take human wives, teach metalworking, weapons, sorcery and cosmetics, and father the giants — who devour the earth until God sends the flood and binds the Watchers "till the day of judgement". This is the expansion of Genesis 6:1–4 that stands behind 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6, and 1 Enoch 15's teaching that the giants' spirits became the earth's demons shapes the Gospels' world of unclean spirits.

The later Book of Parables (chs. 37–71) describes a pre-existent heavenly "Son of Man" / Elect One seated on a throne of glory to judge kings and the mighty — imagery the Gospels apply to Jesus (Matthew 25:31; 26:64). Laurence's 1821 translation is the one that introduced Enoch to the English-speaking world; R. H. Charles's 1912 version is the modern scholarly standard.

(There is no public-domain translation of the Book of Giants — a separate, related work found in fragments at Qumran and among the Manichaean texts. Its story of the giants Ohya and Ahya is an offshoot of the Watchers material in chapters 6–16 here.)

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