The Book of the Watchers, the oldest layer of 1 Enoch, takes a few verses of Genesis, the sons of God who saw the daughters of men were beautiful and the Nephilim who resulted, and expands them into a full narrative. Two hundred angelic Watchers, led by Shemihazah, descend on Mount Hermon and bind themselves by mutual oath to take human wives, a conspiracy the text sets at that named mountain deliberately: the Hermeneia commentator George Nickelsburg reads the place name, close to what was then Upper Galilee, as anchoring an already old story to a real, identifiable landscape rather than to an unlocated myth.
Among the Watchers, Azazel receives his own separate charge: he teaches humanity metalworking and weapon making, and the arts of cosmetics and adornment, transmitting what the text calls eternal secrets that were never meant to reach mortals. The children born of the Watchers and their human wives are giants whose violence and hunger devastate the earth. Nickelsburg reads this half of the story as a myth of illegitimate knowledge and illegitimate power together, technology and beauty both arriving by transgression rather than by right.
The suffering earth's own cry reaches heaven, and four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Sariel, carry the complaint to God. Azazel is bound and thrown into darkness at Dudael; Shemihazah and the rest are bound beneath the earth to await final judgment; and the flood is sent to end what the Watchers began, a judgment on the corruption their teaching and their offspring had spread rather than on humanity's sin alone.