Enoch is a patriarch mentioned in many religious scriptures as having played an important role for humanity in his time.
Enoch (Hebrew "Hanokh") was the seventh generation of Adama (where Adam and Eve are the first generation) and lived for 365 years.
He is the father of Methuselah and the great-grandfather of Noah, who later became known for the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible.
Who is Enoch ?
Enoch is a patriarch mentioned in many religious scriptures as having played an important role for humanity in his time.
Enoch (Hebrew "Hanokh") was the seventh generation of Adama (where Adam and Eve are the first generation) and lived for 365 years.
He is the father of Methuselah and the great-grandfather of Noah, who later became known for the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible.
Enoch's father Jared became a father at the age of 162 and lived 800 years longer.
Enoch, on the other hand, fathered Methuselah (Methusalem) at the age of 65, and then lived only 300 more years, while Noah lived to be 950 years old.
So Enoch's life must have ended suddenly, since Genesis 5:24 says that he "walked with God, and was no more, because God took him.
It is suggested that Enoch became the archangel Metatron.
The Books of Enoch
Enoch actually left us two books:
- I Enoch, also known as the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, a long composite work of 108 chapters apparently divided into five sections or "books".
- II Enoch, known as the Slavonic Book of Enoch or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch.
The First Book of Enoch, or Ethiopic Enoch, is actually a compilation of several books, each of which appears with its own title and usually its own conclusion.
These books, known as the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1-36), the Similitudes (also known as Parables, chapters 37-71), the Book of the Luminaries (chapters 72-82), the Book of Dreams (chapters 83-90), and the Epistle of Enoch (chapters 92-105), are combined in the Ethiopic version into a single work in which only the whole is preserved.
In its 108 chapters, the Book of Enoch (I Enoch) recounts the life and death of the 7th patriarch of the Book of Genesis, Enoch.
The Watchers
In the Book of the Watchers (Aramaic עִירִין, iyrin) explain there are angels dispatched to Earth to watch over the humans after their creation of mankind.
They soon begin to lust for human women and, at the prodding of their leader Samyaza (Semjâzâ), defect en masse to illicitly instruct humanity and procreate among them.
1 Enoch 6:
1 And when the sons of men had multiplied, in those days, beautiful and comely daughters were born to them.
2 And the watchers, the sons of heaven, saw them and desired them. And they said to one another, “Come, let us choose for ourselves wives from the daughters of men, and let us beget for ourselves children.”…
5 Then they all swore together and bound one another with a curse.
6 And they were, all of them, two hundred, who descended in the days of Jared onto the peak of Mount Hermon.[ 53]…
1 Enoch 7:
1 These and all the others with them took for themselves wives from among them such as they chose. And they began to go in to them, and to defile themselves through them, and to teach them sorcery and charms, and to reveal to them the cutting of roots and plants.
2 And they conceived from them and bore to them great giants. And the giants begat Nephilim…
Thus, according to the Book of Enoch, the Watchers ("the sons of God" of Genesis) are "celestial (nonhuman) beings whose actions are considered not only morally evil, but spiritually destructive.
The Book of the Watchers describes the rebellion of the celestial Watchers that leads to evil on earth. The Watchers produce giants on earth through their union with human women, and these giants are evil.
Enoch essentially becomes the intermediary between the Watchers on earth and the Sky Father (Lord of Lords, God of Gods, King of Kings, and God of Ages) above.
These Watchers are imprisoned beneath the earth as punishment for associating with human women who gave birth to the Nephilim, the giants who became corrupted and evil man-eaters who, in turn, took a good portion of humanity with them.
The punishment for the Watchers for essentially mating with human women was life imprisonment until the time of the Ascension of the human population.
All of this is told to Enoch in a "white castle floating in space".
Samyaza, along with 18 other chieftains and a group of 200 angels, were banished from the heavens after they began lusting after the daughters of men and teaching them knowledge such as reading the stars, magic, the use of cosmetics, but also "corrupt knowledge" such as weaponry and the art of war.
After that, the Lord of Lords (God) ordered the archangels Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel and others to imprison Samyaza, as he had given knowledge to humans with corrupt intentions.
The Lord of Lords ordered a great flood to kill the Nephilim, but humanity and the creatures of the world were to survive because of Noah's Ark.
The Original Sin
What is extraordinarily fascinating about this description is that angels, who are normally considered non-human and not physical, were apparently able to mate with physical human women in this case.
Either something supernatural happened or the definition of an angel has changed.
Another interesting issue is original sin.
The general idea is that Eve committed the original sin of eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which led to a patriarchal movement in religious systems where it is undesirable for women to show their beauty openly so as not to tempt men.
But in this book, the original sin is more about "evil genes" that are passed from "angels" to beautiful human women through DNA, first creating evil giants and containing codes that humanity has carried within itself ever since, and which we have been transforming for tens of thousands of years, eventually ascending to the divine version of the angelic beings.
To read the entire Book of Enoch, here is a link to the Book of Enoch
Here is a link to an audio version of The Book of Enoch 1-36 (The Book of Watchers)
Are the Anunnaki the fallen angels spoken of in the Book of Enoch?
There is some overlap between the biblical texts of Enoch and the ancient Sumerian texts, especially when it comes to the Watchers. Known as the Annunaki, or visitors from a planet called Nibiru, the Sumerians also considered these Watchers to be gods, showing a crossover between the two ancient cultures.
The Book of Enoch also mentions the great Sumerian ruler Gilgamesh, who often describes the Annunaki in much the same way as Enoch describes the Watchers.
One interesting similarity is that we always depict angels with wings, just as the Anunnaki depicted themselves in stone with wings.
Also, angels (such as Archangel Michael) are sometimes depicted with a sword, which we also see in depictions of the Anu.
But why would angels have the knowledge of the art of war and teach it to their own offspring with a human woman?
Something else that raises questions is the fact that the many skeletons of giants that have been found over the last few decades always seem to disappear after being unearthed, just as the Book of Enoch almost disappeared from our history.
As if we were dealing with a forbidden history.
What are your thoughts?
The antiquity and origin of the Book of Enoch
In Gen. v. 24 it is mentioned that
"Enoch was walking in close fellowship with God.
Then one day he disappeared, because God took him."
In fact, this is such a crucial part of who Enoch was that it's repeated twice: here, and in verse 22.
His case is unusual in all of Scripture and, possibly, in all of human history.
The only other event which seems similar is when God did something similar to Elijah, who was taken to heaven by a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:9–12).
What does it mean that Enoch "disappeared, because God took him."?
Apparently, in response to Enoch's walking with God, God prevented Enoch from dying. God just took him away, instead.
Hebrews 11:5 says this: "By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him.
Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God."
This life of faith pleased God so much that God prevented Enoch from leaving this life in the normal way.
These expressions were taken in later times to mean not only that he lived a godly life, but also that he was in favor with God and the recipient of superhuman knowledge.
In the present Book of Enoch, translated from the Ethiopian bible, there are large fragments of such literature, by various authors, and it is quite possible that in the coming years more portions of this literature will be discovered.
Just recently, two Slavic manuscripts were found in Russia that belong to this literature, but are separate from the present Book of Enoch.
The present Ethiopian book belongs to the second and first centuries before Christ.
All the writers of the New Testament knew of its existence and were more or less influenced by it in thought and diction.
It is quoted as a genuine production of Enoch by Apostle Saint Jude (Judas Thaddaeus, not Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus), and as scripture by Saint Barnabas.
The writers of the Book of Jubilees, the Apocalypse of Baruch and IV Ezra, laid it under contribution.
With the earlier Fathers and Apologists it already had the weight of a canonical book, but towards the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century it began to fall into disrepute, and finally it fell under the spell of the Church.
Almost the last reference to it in the Early Church is that of George Syncellus in his Chronography around 800 a.d., who has preserved for us some long passages in Greek.
Thereafter the book was lost from sight until 1773, when an Ethiopian version of it was found in Abyssinia by James Bruce.
This traveler brought home three copies, two old manuscripts and a copy of one of them.
From one of these copies Richard Laurence made the first modern translation of Enoch in 1831.
