Enoch

The book called 1 Enoch is not one book. It is five works of different dates gathered under one name: the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Parables, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dreams and the Epistle of Enoch.

The Book of the Watchers expands the two obscure verses of Genesis 6 about the sons of God and the daughters of men into a full account. Two hundred angels bind themselves by oath on Mount Hermon, take human wives, and beget giants who consume everything and turn on humanity. Worse than the marriages is the teaching: the Watchers hand over metalwork and weapons, cosmetics and dyes, root cutting, astrology and the reading of signs. Corruption enters the world as illicitly disclosed technique. Enoch is asked by the fallen angels to carry a petition on their behalf, writes it, and brings back the refusal.

The Astronomical Book sets out a solar calendar of 364 days in twelve months, with the sun passing through gates in the east and west. That scheme divides evenly into 52 weeks, so every festival falls on the same weekday every year, and it is irreconcilable with the lunar reckoning that governed the Jerusalem temple. Communities that held it were therefore keeping different holy days from the priesthood.

Aramaic fragments of every part except the Parables were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which established that the material is genuinely ancient and pre-Christian, and made the absence of the Parables, the section that speaks most of a heavenly Son of Man, one of the standing questions of the field.

Genesis 5 is a list of men who lived, begot and died. Enoch gets the same formula with the last term replaced: he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Every other name in the chapter is closed off with the words and he died. The gap is small, and almost the whole later literature grows in it.

The Epistle to the Hebrews reads the clause as a translation without death. The Epistle of Jude quotes 1 Enoch by name, attributing the prophecy to Enoch the seventh from Adam, which is why the book's status mattered to early Christian writers. It remains canonical scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and Eritrean Orthodox churches, the only place where it survived complete, in Ge'ez, until the Aramaic fragments were recovered.

A separate Slavonic work, 2 Enoch, takes him through a graded series of heavens. The most far reaching development is in 3 Enoch, a Hebrew text of the palace mysticism tradition, where the man who was taken is transformed into Metatron, seated, robed, crowned, given seventy names and called the lesser divine name, and set as prince over the heavenly household.

Rabbinic tradition treats that elevation as dangerous. In a famous Talmudic passage a sage entering the heavenly realm sees Metatron seated and concludes there may be two powers in heaven, and Metatron is punished to establish that there are not. The trajectory is complete: four verses in a genealogy produce a book, a canon dispute and finally an angel the tradition has to discipline.