The Book of Enoch

The Book of Enoch, also called 1 Enoch, is a collection of ancient Jewish writings attributed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, who "walked with God, and was not, for God took him." It describes the descent of the Watchers, angels who took human wives and taught humanity forbidden arts, the birth of the giants, Enoch’s journeys through the heavens, and detailed visions of the coming judgment.

The book was cited by early Christian writers and is quoted directly in the New Testament epistle of Jude, yet it was excluded from most biblical canons. Only the Ethiopian Orthodox Church preserved it complete, in the ancient liturgical language Geʿez. European scholarship recovered it in the eighteenth century, and fragments later found among the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed its antiquity.

Enoch sits at the junction of several questions SOL investigates: how ideas about rebellious heavenly beings, hidden knowledge, and world ages moved between cultures; why some texts were kept inside the canon and others pushed out; and what the earliest layers of apocalyptic writing claim about the structure of the cosmos. Its calendar chapters also preserve one of the oldest surviving astronomical systems in religious literature.