Welcome, curious minds! Do you know the mysterious Book of Enoch? Why did they decide not to include it in the Bible?
And what relationship is there between Enoch and the powerful angel Metatron? When God created the world, the Messiah already existed, the angels who watched over humanity came down to Earth to engender gigantic beings with human women and, in the future, when the Apocalypse arrives, all the righteous will be given weapons to punish the oppressors. Wait.
. . What is all this that we are telling you?
Angels, giants, Apocalypse. . .
It seems like something biblical. It certainly sounds biblical. But no, it is not biblical.
This is what is told in the Book of Enoch, an ancient religious text that was left out of the biblical canon – that is, an apocryphal text – and that is not accepted by the majority of Christian or Jewish denominations. It is only part of the Bible in the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Book of Enoch contains, among other things, descriptions of the origins of the scheming Nephilim, as well as the reasons why some angels fell from heaven, an explanation of why the Genesis flood was morally necessary, and a prophetic exposition of the reign of the Messiah.
Many of you have long asked us to dedicate a video to the Book of Enoch, because you hear a lot about it on the internet and you want to know better what it is about. And the truth is that, regardless of each person's religious beliefs, from a purely cultural point of view, we believe that it could be interesting. But before recounting its content in greater detail, let's learn a little more about this work and its context.
The Book of Enoch is made up of various fragments compiled and rewritten at different times and places, probably between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. C. , although some scholars expand the time frame to the 3rd centuries BC.
C. and I d. C.
And who wrote the parts that compose it? It was not the biblical Enoch, of course: the role of narrator is simply attributed to him. They are believed to have been written in Hebrew and Aramaic by Jews of the Orthodox Pharisee or Hasidic schools.
Although there are several versions of the Book of Enoch, the most complete, of which a translation is preserved in the Old Testament of the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, is the one known as 'Book of the Secrets of Enoch' or '1 Enoch'. That version is written in Ge'ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Church, but throughout history fragments have been found in Greek, Latin and Coptic. In addition, multiple fragments of the Book of Enoch in Aramaic and one in Hebrew were identified among the famous Dead Sea scrolls – you know, those thousand manuscripts found in caves near the town of Qumran, in the West Bank, on the shores of the Dead Sea– .
The Dead Sea Scrolls, by the way, were discovered in 1947 in a rather curious way. Some Bedouin shepherds who had lost one of their goats began throwing stones into the caves to see if the animal was hiding in one of them and reacting to the sound. But one of those stones did not make the noise they expected, but rather the sound of having collided with some ceramic object.
Thus they found some vessels that contained seven manuscripts on papyrus rolls. Over the next decade, archaeologists found another 965 manuscripts in caves in the area. Apart from the aforementioned fragments of the Book of Enoch, other apocryphal books of the Old Testament were found among the Dead Sea scrolls , such as the Testaments of the Patriarchs or the Book of Jubilees, which we will talk about later, because it also mentions Enoch.
The Book of Enoch covers topics such as the fall of rebellious angels known as the Watchers, apocalyptic prophecies or descriptions of the Last Judgment. And today, some religious or spiritual movements highly value it and exalt it as a source of teachings and revelations that the founders of the different Christian Churches tried to hide from their faithful by excluding it from the different Bibles. The first question that usually comes to mind when we are told about the Book of Enoch is, of course, who was this Enoch guy?
In the biblical Genesis it is mentioned several characters named Enoch. One of them is the firstborn of Cain; another, a grandson of Abraham. But the one who is related to the Book of Enoch is the father of Methuselah, grandfather of Lamech and, therefore, great-grandfather of Noah, you know, the one of the Ark and the Flood.
In the Bible, we find it in chapter 5 of Genesis, specifically in verses 18 to 24. In the last two we can read: “The total of Enoch's days was 365 years. And Enoch walked with God, and disappeared, because God took him away.
” These words are interpreted by many enthusiasts of the Book of Enoch as proof that Enoch was special, since it is not said that he died, but that God took him with him, which could be related to his testimonies about heavenly events that They escaped the knowledge of the other members of their lineage or of any other man. We also find a mention of Enoch in the New Testament, in the Epistle of Jude. In it, in verses 14 and 15, referring to men who choose to follow the path of evil, we read the following words: “Of these also Enoch prophesied, in the seventh generation from Adam, saying: 'The Lord came with many thousands of His saints to execute judgment on all, and to condemn all the wicked of all their ungodly works, which they have done ungodly, and of all the offensive things that ungodly sinners said against Him.
” This mention in the New Testament, of course, also gives rise to another debate among scholars. Was Judas referring to the Book of Enoch or had he simply had access to the same ancient source from which the author or authors of the Book of Enoch drew? It is not known.
There is not even consensus about who exactly this Judas was: Thaddeus, to whom it has been traditionally attributed? Or someone else? In any case, his mention of the prophecy of Enoch was accepted as canonical while the Book of Enoch was left out.
This mention of Enoch in the Epistle of Judas is joined by the quote that we find in a well-known Christian treatise, the Epistle of Barnabas, which in chapter 4 verse 3 says the following: “The finished scandal is near, the one of which it is written, as Enoch says, for the Lord has shortened the times and the days so that his beloved may hasten and come to his inheritance. ” If we go to the Book of Enoch, in chapter 80, verse 2 begins with these words: “And in the days of sinners the years will be shortened. ” It seems quite clear, therefore, that the Epistle of Barnabas is indeed quoting the Book of Enoch.
Although the Epistle of Barnabas is not considered canonical, due to quotes like this and many other mentions in the works of prominent Christian thinkers, such as Tatian, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Lactantius, Irenaeus or Justin Martyr, it is believed that the Book of Enoch was appreciated by the first Christians. Many ask the question why the Book of Enoch was eliminated from the Old Testament, and there are those who say that the person who left it out was Saint Jerome, father of the Church, by order of Pope Damasus I, when the supreme pontiff commissioned him to translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek – Saint Jerome used almost the entire Septuagint, the Greek Bible – to a common and non-classical Latin so that it would be easier to understand by the people and a more accurate translation than its predecessor, the Vetus Latina. But we cannot say that Saint Jerome removed the Book of Enoch from the Old Testament because.
. . this text was never part of the Old Testament; and, therefore, it was not included in the Septuagint either.
Because it was never accepted by the Jewish canon; and the situation was similar in Christianity, although Christians valued it enough to find references to it in New Testament texts such as Jude. In fact, there is no evidence that at any time its inclusion in the Old Testament canon was seriously considered, since they did not believe that it was inspired by God. Believers believe that the Holy Scriptures teach the truth because God himself is their author: the men who wrote the biblical texts did so by divine inspiration, so that the Lord's message would be revealed to men.
The Book of Enoch was among the books that circulated among Christians but They had been discarded as sacred writing, that is, as a text inspired by God; and if a text was not inspired by God it was fallible, that is, it could be wrong. A requirement for accepting a book into the canon was that the date of writing coincided with the life of the author to whom it was attributed, and that does not happen with that of Enoch, as we have seen; Those who wrote it attributed it to the recognized biblical character to, with his name, give prestige and support his writing, and they supported that legend with the biblical statement that we have mentioned before: “And Enoch walked with God, and disappeared, because God took”, so that he would have had the opportunity to later write his book. Another reason that could have left it out of the canon is that it contains information that conflicts with what the Bible offers.
So, in chapter 2, verse 3, Enoch says that it rains – “See the summer and the winter, how the whole earth is full of water, and the clouds and the dew and the rain rest in it – but this biblical character It belongs to the time before the flood, and before the flood, according to the Old Testament, it never rained on Earth. And in chapter 13, verses 4 to 5, the demons, including Azazel, ask Enoch to intercede on their behalf before God, since they cannot speak directly with him – “And they asked me to write them a formula of prayer so that a remission would be granted to them and that the formula of their prayer would be brought up before the Lord of heaven. Because since then they cannot speak (to God), and lift their eyes towards heaven, out of shame for the crime for which they have been condemned; However, in the book of Job, which is in the biblical canon, it is said that demons could speak directly with the Lord: Satan himself does so.
The decision to set aside the book of Enoch could also be explained by the fact that, unlike the Bible, where there is a lot of moral advice about how to be better in daily life, how to be a better person, in the book of Enoch There is talk of angels, the heavens, destiny and almost nothing about how to correct the world day by day through our actions. Perhaps they thought that if you talk a lot to believers about what happens in heaven, they stop paying attention to what happens on Earth, which is what they really can and should worry about. For an early Christian text, being left out of the Bible was practically a sentence to oblivion.
An 8th century Byzantine monk named George Sincellus was the last to mention passages from the Book of Enoch translated into Greek, which at some point was lost forever . Had it not been for the translation of the Book of Enoch into Ge'ez, possibly in the 6th century, thanks to the initiative of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, no one would have ever been able to read it. It is believed that this manuscript in the Ethiopian dialect is the translation of a Latin work translated from Greek which, in turn, had been translated from Aramaic or Hebrew.
And why is the oldest manuscript we preserve written in that Ethiopian language and we do not preserve any of the previous translations? Perhaps it is because the Ethiopian Church did consider it a sacred text and therefore took care to preserve it. Since it was not included in the canon in Judaism, they did not care to protect the Hebrew versions.
And in Christianity, for the same reason, they did not take care of the first versions in Greek or Latin. A clarification, in case you have any doubts: before we have said that the Book of Enoch is also known as '1 Enoch'. Why “one”?
To differentiate it from two other apocryphal texts, known as '2 Enoch' (or Second Book of Enoch) and '3 Enoch' (or Third Book of Enoch). These were written later by various authors but are not related to '1 Enoch'. The numbering was set by scholars to avoid confusion when talking about them, but the oldest and most relevant is by far '1 Enoch'.
Scholars estimate that '2 Enoch' could have been made around the year 70 AD. C. in Egypt, probably in Alexandria, by some Hellenistic Jew who was inspired by the first Book of Enoch.
In this work, which has survived only in Old Slavonic, Enoch first recounts person his journey through the ten Heavens, which concludes with a meeting between Enoch and God, with whom he talks about the creation of the world. God sends Enoch back to Earth to spread what he has learned and, a month later, he returns to Heaven. For its part, the Third Book of Enoch is a Jewish apocryphal book that tells of Enoch's return to Heaven riding a chariot of fire and his transformation into the angel Metatron.
No, nothing to do with the Transformers villain; That's Megatron. Metatron is an angel mentioned in rabbinic Judaism, where he is identified as the most powerful angel in the celestial kingdom, only surpassed in hierarchy by Yahweh himself. Metatron appears in the Talmud – a book that contains the oral tradition, doctrines, ceremonies and precepts of the Jewish religion – but not in the Torah, the Bible or the Koran.
Although the Third Book of Enoch is supposedly narrated by Rabbi Ishmael, a prominent figure in Jewish Kabbalistic literature who lived between the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, it is estimated that it was actually written in the 5th or 6th century in Babylon or its surroundings. But let's focus now on the Book of Enoch, the first, the one that was close to being included in the Bible. It consists of five main parts: the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Parables, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dram Visions and, finally, the Epistle of Enoch.
In general, experts believe that these five parts were written independently on different dates and were brought together later. The first part, the Book of the Watchers, begins with a parable by Enoch about the fate that awaits the wicked and the righteous. It mentions the coming of God to Earth on Mount Sinai with his hosts to judge humanity.
He then describes the fall of a group of 200 angels, with these words: “And it came to pass, when the sons of men multiplied, in those days beautiful daughters were born to them. And the angels, the sons of heaven, saw them and desired them, and said to each other: 'Come, let us choose wives for ourselves from among the daughters of men and have children. ' And Semjâzâ, who was their leader, said to them: 'I am afraid that you will not truly agree to do this act, and I will only have to pay the penalty of a great sin.
' And they all answered him and said: 'Let us all take an oath, and let us all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan, but to do this thing. ' Then they all swore together and were bound by it. And there were in all two hundred who descended in the days of Jared – the father of Enoch – on the top of Mount Hermon.
” By the way, Jared lived, according to Genesis, 962 years, so he was the second oldest man, only behind his grandson Methuselah, who is said, in the same book of the Bible, to have been on the face of the earth. Earth 969 years old, seven more than his grandfather. Let's return to that first part of the Book of Enoch, that of the watchers.
It also mentions a long list of names of the leaders of that group of angels: Araquiel, Kokabiel, Tamiel, Chazaquiel, Baraquiel, Batariel, Ananiel, Zaquiel, Turiel. . .
Who were all those angels? In the Book of Jubilees, another apocryphal text that we have already mentioned and that was written around the second century BC. C.
by a Pharisee Jew, it is stated: “For three hundred years, Enoch learned all the secrets – of Heaven and Earth – from the 'bene Elohim'. Elohim is a Hebrew word that refers to a deity, generally the God of Israel. Since the Tanakh – the set of 24 canonical books of Judaism – uses the term Elohim to refer to Yahweh, it is usually translated as 'God', although there are debates about its correct use because it is a plural.
Some believe that it refers to a single entity using a majestic plural, as when in the past a monarch or a pope said things like: “We are happy with these gifts that you bring to our presence,” as if their single person represented a larger group. On the other hand, there are also those who argue that the ancient Semites believed that there were innumerable spiritual beings everywhere and that The word Elohim therefore referred to a group of gods. So.
. . were they referring to a single God?
To the Holy Trinity, perhaps? To a group of angels? There is no consensus on that point.
The fact is that the bene Elohim, the sons of Elohim who, according to the Book of Jubilees, taught their secrets to Enoch, were “the sons of God” or “the sons of the gods,” depending on how we want to translate it. In the Book of Enoch, they are called Watchers. In short, two hundred of those angels, of those Watchers, carry out their plan to go down to Earth to procreate with human women and, as a result, they give birth to giant beings , the Anakim, who also appear in the biblical Genesis.
, but with a more popular name: Nephilim, which is usually translated in the Bible simply as 'giants'. The Book of Enoch tells it this way: “They took wives for themselves, and each one chose one for himself, and they began to enter with them and defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms. And they became pregnant, and gave birth to great giants, whose height was three hundred cubits – about 137 meters – and who consumed all the acquisitions of men.
And when men could no longer support them, the giants turned against them and devoured humanity. And they began to sin against the birds, and the beasts, and the creeping things, and the fish, and to devour the flesh of others, and to drink the blood. ” In the biblical Genesis, chapter 6 verses 1 to 4, something similar is told: “It came to pass, when men began to multiply on the surface of the Earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves from all those whom they liked.
Then the Lord said: 'My spirit will not strive with man forever , for he is certainly flesh. Therefore his days will be 120 years. ' There were giants on Earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God joined themselves to the daughters of men and they bore them children.
These are the heroes of old, men of renown. ” In the Book of Watchers it is also said that the fallen angels, especially Azazel, taught many things to humans. On this topic, he indicates the following: “And Azazel taught men to make swords, knives, shields and breastplates, and made them know the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets and ornaments, and the use of antimony.
, and the embellishment of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring dyes. And much impiety arose, and they committed fornication, and went astray, and became corrupt in all their ways, Semjâzâ taught incantations, Armaros, the resolution of incantations, Baraquiel taught astrology, Kokabiel, the constellations, Ezekiel, the knowledge of the clouds, Araquiel , the signs of the Earth, Shamsiel, the signs of the Sun and Sariel, the course of the Moon. Contemplating the progressive corruption of men and fallen angels, the archangels Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel appeal to God to judge them all for their impiety.
God listens to them and entrusts a specific mission to each of them. He first sends Uriel to warn Noah about the coming cataclysm and what he must do. The Book of Enoch tells it in the following words: “Then the Most High, the Holy and the Great spoke, and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him, 'Go to Noah and say to him in my name: 'Hide yourself!
' and reveal to him the approaching end: that the whole earth will be destroyed, and a flood is about to fall on the whole Earth, and will destroy everything that is in it. And now instruct him so that he may escape and his descendants may be preserved for all generations of the world. ” Archangel Raphael is commissioned by God to punish Azazel.
It is told like this: “The Lord said to Raphael: 'Bind Azazel hand and foot and throw him into the darkness. Make an opening in the desert that is in Dudael and throw it there. Place rough and jagged rocks on him and cover him with darkness, and let him remain there forever, and cover his face so that he does not see the light.
And on the day of great judgment he will be thrown into the fire. Heal the land that the angels have corrupted and proclaim the healing of the land, that they may cure the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish because of all the secret things which the Watchers have revealed and taught their children. And the whole earth has been corrupted by the works that were taught by Azazel: attribute all sin to him.
” The third of the archangels, Gabriel, is entrusted by God to take care of the children of the Watchers, the Nephilim: “And to Gabriel the Lord said: 'Proceed against the biters and the reprobates, and against the children of fornication; and destroy them: send them against each other to destroy each other in battle. For they will not have length of days. ” Finally, he orders the archangel Michael to bind the fallen angels.
In the Book of Enoch it can be read: “And when their children have killed each other, and have seen the destruction of their loved ones, bind them tightly for sixty generations in the valleys of the Earth, until the day of their judgment and their destruction. ” consummation, until the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated. In those days they will be taken to the abyss of fire: to torment and prison in which they will be confined forever.
And whoever is condemned and destroyed, from then on he will be bound together with them until the end of all generations. ” The second part of the Book of Enoch, known as the Book of Parables, is the one that provokes the most debate among scholars, since it uses the expression Son of Man to refer to the one who will sit on the throne of glory in the final judgment, a character who is also mentioned by the names of Just, Chosen and Messiah. Is it possible that he was anticipating the arrival of Jesus Christ?
If so, according to the Book of Enoch it was pre-existent, that is, it already existed before God created all things. Some scholars defend that this part of the Book of Enoch was written at the beginning of the 1st century BC; others, that it was actually written and incorporated into the Book of Enoch in the 3rd century after Christ, in order to reinforce the Christian beliefs of the New Testament by taking advantage of the authority and antiquity of the name of Enoch. However, there are also those who believe that, in reality, this Son of Man is none other than Enoch himself, who never died and was elevated to Heaven and enthroned, a line of thought that would connect with his supposed transformation into the angel Metatron.
, do you remember? Yes, the one spoken of in '3 Enoch'. The part of the Book of Enoch known as the Astronomical Book describes the movement of the celestial bodies and the firmament as revealed by the archangel Uriel to Enoch during one of his journeys to Heaven.
It also describes a solar calendar that also appears in the Book of Jubilees and, according to which, the years were divided into four seasons of exactly 13 weeks each, giving a total of 364 days per year. It does not seem like a very efficient system, since with that number of days, it would quickly become out of sync with the real seasons: in just 25 years, each station would arrive a month earlier. The fourth part of the Book of Enoch, the so-called Book of Dram Visions, is dated by most experts to the time of the Maccabees, that is, to the middle of the 2nd century BC.
C. This section mainly describes, in the form of dreams or visions, scenes from the history of the Israelite people, but there are also many links with the Book of the Watchers, for example in the first vision, the one referring to the Flood, when it says : “And now the angels of Your Heavens are guilty of transgression, and Your wrath remains on the flesh of men until the great day of judgment. ” The Book of Dram Visions concludes with what many interpret as the earthly birth of a Messiah within a powerful and feared people.
It goes like this: “And I saw that a white bull was born, with great horns, and all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air feared him and made supplications to him all the time. And I saw until all their generations were transformed, and they all became white bulls; and the first of them became a lamb, and that lamb became a great animal and had great black horns on its head; and the Lord of the sheep rejoiced over him and over all the oxen. ” The last part of the Book of Enoch is the Epistle of Enoch, which speaks, among other things, of the final judgment.
In the subsection known as the Apocalypse of Weeks, dated to the first half of the 2nd century BC. C. , Enoch narrates the history of the world, from the past until the day of judgment, dividing it into ten periods which he calls 'weeks'.
The first seven weeks refer to the past, and the last three to the future – that is, to events after the second century BC. C. –.
About those last three weeks, he says the following: “After this will come the eighth week, that of justice, in which a sword will be given to all the righteous so that they may fairly judge the oppressors, who will be delivered into their hands. And at the end of this week the righteous will honestly acquire riches and the temple of the kingship of the Great One will be built, in its eternal splendor, for all generations. “After this, in the ninth week justice and righteous judgment will be revealed to all the children of the entire earth and all oppressors will completely disappear from the earth and will be thrown into the eternal pit and all men will see the righteous path and eternal.
After this, in the tenth week, in its seventh part, the Eternal Judgment will take place. It will be the time of the Great Judgment and He will execute vengeance among the saints. Then the first heaven will pass away and a new heaven will appear and all the powers of the heavens will rise shining eternally seven times brighter.
And after this, there will be many weeks, the number of which will never end, in which good and justice will be done. Sin will never be mentioned again. ” And you?
What do you think of what the Book of Enoch tells? Do you think they should have included it in the Bible? I would like you to tell us below, in the comments.
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