The Book of Enoch Explained

At a glance

Fifteen minutes, and it is the closest thing on YouTube to the opening lecture of a graduate seminar on 1 Enoch. Andrew Mark Henry has one frame and it carries the whole video: the Book of Enoch is spin-off literature. Genesis gives Enoch a single strange sentence and gives the Nephilim four verses, and out of those two scraps early Jewish writers built a book of over a hundred chapters full of fallen angels, giants, cosmic tours and end times judgment, a book so mainstream in its day that the New Testament quotes it by name.

The episode does three jobs, in order. First the text itself: there are three books called Enoch, "the Book of Enoch" is really a compilation with visible seams, and its road runs from Aramaic through Greek into Ge'ez, ending in roughly ninety manuscripts and a specific recommendation about which translation to actually read. Second the content: the Book of the Watchers, Shemihazah and Asael, the four archangels and their four commissions, and the apocalyptic furniture (messiah, Son of Man, final judgment, hell) that 1 Enoch was assembling before the Book of Daniel existed. Third the afterlife: what rabbinic Judaism did with it, what Christianity did with it and then undid, what survives inside the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, and where Enoch turns up in the Quran under the name Idris.

This page rebuilds the whole thing in the video's own order, keeps every date, manuscript, scholar and citation, and draws out properly the on-screen structure diagram Henry flashes past in about three seconds. The episode was co-written and researched by David Malamud, which Henry credits in the description and which is worth repeating here, because the bibliography behind fifteen minutes of video is longer than most of what gets published about this book.

Chapters

Click any timestamp and the floating player jumps there and keeps playing. These are the creator's own chapter markers. The first one is untitled on YouTube.

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:18 2 Enoch
• 3:05 90 Manuscripts
• 5:00 The Book of the Watchers
• 9:54 3 Enoch
• 10:43 Kabbalah Jewish mysticism
• 11:29 Book of Parables (Enoch 37 to 71)
• 11:50 Enoch = Scripture
• 12:12 81 books

The ultimate example of spin-off literature (0:06)

Henry opens with the thesis and never really leaves it. The Book of Enoch is over a hundred chapters long, thousands and thousands of words, and it is built off a fairly obscure biblical character. That is the joke and the argument at once.

The Hebrew Bible has almost nothing to say about Enoch. In Genesis he appears briefly, inside the genealogy of Adam, and after fathering Methuselah and a batch of other children the text says one thing and stops:

Enoch walked with God, then he was no more, because God took him.

That is it. Everyone else in that genealogy dies on schedule with a number attached. Enoch does not die. He gets taken. And the text offers exactly zero explanation of what "God took him" is supposed to mean.

Henry's point is that this is not a gap a reader in antiquity would tolerate. Early Jews and Christians were rarely satisfied with such vague biblical passages, and so the gap got filled. The result was popular enough that the New Testament itself cites it: the Epistle of Jude, second to last book in the New Testament, directly quotes 1 Enoch chapter 1 verse 9, and names Enoch as the one prophesying. A first century Christian letter, canonical scripture for every branch of Christianity, quotes a book that almost no modern Christian has ever opened. That gap between how big it was then and how invisible it is now is what the rest of the video sets out to close.

First problem: there is not one Book of Enoch (1:09)

Before any content, a bookkeeping problem. "The Book of Enoch" usually means 1 Enoch, but there are three.

2 Enoch probably dates back to the first century CE but is preserved in much later manuscripts written in Church Slavonic. 3 Enoch survives in Hebrew and was preserved by rabbinic Judaism, and it comes back later in the video for one of its best sections. Henry sets both aside: this video is about 1 Enoch.

Second problem: calling it a book is a misnomer (1:34)

The next consideration is that 1 Enoch is not a book in the way we normally use the word. It is a compilation of several texts stitched together, and you can see the stitching. There are obvious and abrupt seams between sections, and the cleanest explanation is that somebody, at some point in the past, brought a set of separate Enochic writings together into one collection.

Henry puts the structure on screen: five major sections and two appendices. He moves on in about three seconds. It is worth stopping on, because that structure is the single most useful thing to hold in your head when anyone starts talking about "what the Book of Enoch says." The five books are separated by centuries and they do not agree with each other about very much.

Aramaic, then Greek, then Ge'ez (1:56)

Now the dates, and they are the part most people get wrong in both directions.

The oldest sections of the text probably date back to the 4th or 3rd century BCE. The most complete manuscripts of the text date to the 15th or 16th centuries CE, and they are written in Ethiopic. That is a gap of roughly two thousand years between composition and our best surviving copies, and it is the reason textual criticism on this book is hard work.

Ethiopic, also known as Ge'ez, is a Semitic language, a cousin of Hebrew, Arabic and Amharic, the last of which is one of the main spoken languages in Ethiopia today. Ge'ez is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and Henry gives the analogy that lands fastest: it functions roughly the way Latin historically functioned in Catholic liturgy, or the way Coptic functions for Coptic Orthodox Christians. A language nobody speaks at home, kept alive because the service is in it.

So the book took a long journey from when it was first composed to when our most complete manuscripts were created. The route: Enoch was probably originally written in Aramaic, then translated into Greek, then finally into Ethiopic. Three languages, and every complete copy we have sits at the end of that chain.

The Aramaic is not a guess. Big chunks of the Aramaic version of Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at the site of Qumran. And Henry pulls out the specific detail that matters most: one Dead Sea Scroll fragment contains several sections of Enoch in one text, which shows that the different sections were already circulating as a single compilation by the first century BCE. That is the hinge. Without it you could argue the five books were assembled by Christians centuries later. With it, the compilation is demonstrably pre-Christian.

The manuscript that carries that weight is the one catalogued as 4Q204, one of seven Aramaic Enoch manuscripts recovered from Qumran Cave 4. It preserves pieces of the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Dream Visions and the end of the Epistle, all in a single copy. The full set was published by Józef Milik as The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4.

Ninety manuscripts, and which translation to actually buy (3:03)

In all, 90 different manuscripts of 1 Enoch exist in some form or another. That sounds like a comfortable number until Henry adds the complication: some of the manuscripts have big differences compared to earlier versions. The text moved, and not everywhere in the same direction.

Which produces the most practical thirty seconds in the video. If you are going to read it for yourself, it is really important to find a scholarly translation that tries to account for all of the manuscript variations. Henry's recommendation is specific:

I personally recommend the Hermeneia translation by George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam. It's published by Fortress Press. This is not an advertisement, it's literally just the best version I could find when I was researching this episode.

He is right about why it is the one to get. The Hermeneia translation by George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, from Fortress Press, is the only English version that works from all three streams at once: the Ethiopic manuscripts, the surviving Greek, and the Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea. It sits on top of the two volume Hermeneia commentary, which is where the argument for every choice actually lives. Free online texts of 1 Enoch are almost always the 1917 R. H. Charles translation, which predates the Dead Sea Scrolls entirely.

So: a compilation of several texts stitched into one, originally written in Aramaic, most complete manuscripts written in Ethiopic, parts dating to the 4th century BCE and other parts to a few centuries later. That is the text. Now the content.

The two tantalizing snippets (3:52)

The best way Henry can describe the Book of Enoch is that it is spin-off literature. It takes two tiny tantalizing snippets from Genesis and expands them into a whole book of fantastic visions and stories.

The first snippet we already have: a few short sentences saying God took Enoch.

The second is the one that inspires the entire opening section of 1 Enoch, and it is one of the strangest passages in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 6:1 to 4 is a story about divine beings having sex with humans. Genesis says that before Noah's flood, divine beings called bene elohim, which literally translates to children of God, come down to earth to have sex with human women, who then give birth to beings called the Nephilim. The text says these Nephilim were the mighty men of old, warriors of renown.

And then it stops. As Henry puts it: that's it, nothing else. No more mention of who these Nephilim were or their exploits. No backstory about these sons of God.

And you know what that means. It's a story ready for a spin-off.

The Book of the Watchers (4:55)

1 Enoch vastly expands those few verses into the Book of the Watchers, and the expansion is not subtle. The sons of God are no longer a vague category of heavenly beings. They are a whole society of fallen angels called the Watchers, led by their chief Shemihazah. Their children, the Nephilim, are giants, and the giants start to wreak havoc on earth.

Henry quotes 1 Enoch 7:3 and lets it sit:

The giants began to kill men and to devour them, and then kill all the beasts and drank their blood.

His own reaction, deadpan: "Sounds kind of like a horror film."

The section also describes the Watchers as devious angels skilled in evil supernatural arts, which they then taught to humanity. This is the piece that gives the Book of the Watchers its distinctive theology of evil: human wickedness is not only human. It was taught. Chapter 8 runs the curriculum. The Watcher Asael taught weapons of war to humanity. Shemihazah taught them sorcery. Others taught humans how to do astrology.

As the Watchers and Nephilim continue to devastate the earth and pollute humans with evil knowledge, the story culminates in humanity crying out to God for help. God's response is the set piece of the whole book: he dispatches his four archangels to set things right, and each gets a separate job.

Two details from this sequence are worth holding onto. The first is Gabriel's commission, which Henry calls downright chilling and reads out in full, telling Gabriel to go to the bastards, to the half-breeds, to the sons of miscegenation, and destroy the sons of the Watchers. His one word response is "yikes," and he leaves it there. It is a genocide order aimed at a hybrid population, written in the third or second century BCE, and it has had a long and ugly reception history in the centuries since.

The second is Enoch's own job. God sends Enoch as a prophet or emissary to the Watchers, to warn them that they will be destroyed. That is the reversal that makes Enoch interesting as a character. Every other biblical prophet is sent to humans. Enoch is sent upward, to deliver bad news to angels.

What the rest of the book does: apocalypse as a genre (6:32)

The remaining sections of Enoch contain mostly prophecy and visions, and rather than summarizing each and every section, Henry pivots to the themes running through them: the expectation of a messiah, final judgment, salvation, resurrection, and heavenly journeys.

All of these are hallmarks of the cultural context and genre of 1 Enoch, which is Jewish apocalypticism. Apocalyptic literature is the name scholars give a body of texts that became enormously popular among Jews during the Second Temple period. The genre has a recognizable shape: mystical visions of heaven, in which an angel reveals to a prophet the end times or a coming judgment of the world.

Then the claim that reorders most people's mental chronology. Enoch is one of the oldest Jewish apocalyptic texts, older than the Book of Daniel, the famous one. Henry is careful to attach the condition: that is to say, if we follow the scholarly consensus that Daniel was composed during the Hellenistic era of the 2nd century BCE. Under that consensus, the parts of 1 Enoch that date to the 4th or 3rd century BCE are older than Daniel by a hundred years or more.

Which means many of the terms commonly associated with Daniel can be found first in the Book of Enoch.

Son of Man, messiah, and getting there first (7:30)

The clearest case is the Son of Man. In one chapter Enoch sees a vision in which the Son of Man is commissioned:

He will be the staff for the righteous. He will be the light of the nations, and all who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship before him.

For anyone familiar with the New Testament, Henry notes, this sort of language should sound familiar, because it is all applied to Jesus as well. Staff of the righteous, light of the nations, universal worship. The vocabulary of Christology, sitting in a Jewish text, in a book about a patriarch from Genesis.

But 1 Enoch does something with the title that Christianity did not. In this text Enoch himself is named the Son of Man. Chapter 71:14 says:

You are that son of man who was born for righteousness.

The figure in the vision turns out to be the visionary. That is the punchline of the Book of Parables, and it is one reason the Parables have generated more argument than any other part of 1 Enoch.

Hell arrives (8:07)

The other big theological import is hell, and Henry points back to his own episode on its history for the full version. The short version, restated here: the concept of hell does not exist in the older texts of the Hebrew Bible, where the dead go to Sheol, a shadowy undifferentiated place with no moral sorting at all. Hell is a later innovation that gained popularity during the Second Temple period, especially in apocalyptic literature.

And you can watch it show up in 1 Enoch. In chapter 21:7 Enoch beholds a narrow chasm extending to the abyss, where he saw a great fire burning and flaming. The text says this place is a prison for the angels, and that here they will be confined forever.

Note who the first inmates are. Not sinful humans. Angels. The fiery prison in 1 Enoch is built for the Watchers, and only later does the architecture get repurposed for people.

That is the content in summary: basically an entire text that is intensely concerned that the current world is evil and needs to be judged and renewed. A new age is at hand. God's final judgment is coming.

Afterlife, part one: Judaism (8:57)

1 Enoch was enormously influential for later Jews, Christians and even Muslims, and Henry takes those three in turn.

Within Judaism, 1 Enoch influenced a whole cluster of non-canonical Jewish texts. Jubilees, another Second Temple Jewish text, shares a lot of details with Enoch, and it has an almost identical survival story: preserved in Ethiopic, and found at Qumran in Hebrew. Two books, both dropped by the tradition that produced them, both rescued by the same Ethiopian church at the far end of the world.

But although the Book of Enoch was a big deal for Second Temple Judaism, it plays almost no role in modern Judaism. Henry names the reason precisely: rabbinic Judaism rejected two major claims put forward by the Enoch spin-off literature.

1. That Enoch never died.
2. That rebellious angels came to earth at the time of the flood.

Because of this, Enoch does not formally appear in the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible, and only rarely in rabbinic literature. And even when he does appear, he appears in a negative light.

3 Enoch, and Enoch becomes Metatron (9:54)

One of the most important exceptions to the negative portrayal of Enoch in rabbinic literature is 3 Enoch. This is a rabbinic Hebrew story of Enoch transforming into the angel Metatron. And the transfigured Enoch is described in terms that are startling inside a monotheist tradition: he is even described as a second, or lesser, YHWH.

While Enoch is mentioned in 3 Enoch and some other mystical rabbinic texts, rabbinic Judaism does not consider them standard, and the Babylonian Talmud, second only to the Hebrew Bible in importance for traditional rabbinic Judaism, shows exactly how uncomfortable the idea was. The Talmud tells of a famous rabbi who became a heretic when he saw Metatron sitting in the presence of God and concluded that there are two powers in heaven. In the story, Metatron and the rabbi are both punished.

Henry's read is the right one: the point of the story is not the rabbi. The story reflects the Talmud's discomfort with the whole idea of Enoch becoming a divine being. The tradition kept the story specifically in order to shut the door on it. (The video does not name the rabbi. In the Talmud he is Elisha ben Abuyah, afterwards called Aher, "the Other," and Metatron is disciplined with sixty lashes of fire to prove that an angel who can be punished is not a god. The scholarship Henry cites here is P. S. Alexander's "3 Enoch and the Talmud" and Andrei Orlov on Metatron as lesser YHWH.)

Kabbalah reverses the verdict (10:43)

Curiously, this is not the case in Kabbalah, medieval Jewish mysticism. Kabbalistic texts such as the Zohar not only view Enoch positively but compare him to Adam, and they refer to the Book of Enoch to explain ambiguous biblical verses. Not tolerate. Not quietly preserve. Use, as an interpretive authority, to resolve difficulties in the Torah.

Henry attributes the explanation to Annette Yoshiko Reed, the scholar of late antique Judaism and Christianity, who suggests that this is a result of continuing cross-cultural Jewish and Christian dialogue throughout late antiquity. The book kept coming back into Jewish hands because it never stopped circulating on the Christian side of the conversation. Her book on precisely this is Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature.

Which is the transition into part two, because, as Henry puts it, apparently Christians really liked this text. At least at first.

Afterlife, part two: Christianity (11:04)

The book of Jude in the New Testament directly references 1 Enoch, and Enoch likely influenced the theology of the gospels and the Book of Revelation.

Two specific channels. The idea of the Son of Man, which appears in the Gospel of Mark, shares theological similarities with 1 Enoch. And the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, closely resembles the apocalypse of the Book of the Parables, since both describe a throne room apocalypse partnered with a final judgment, both in the heavens and on earth. Same furniture, same staging, same two tier judgment.

Initially, 1 Enoch was a big deal for Christians, and the roll call is impressive. Church fathers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus use and reference 1 Enoch. Tertullian even defends the book's authority outright. And the non-canonical Epistle of Barnabas refers to 1 Enoch as scripture, using the standard citation formula, which is about as strong a status claim as an early Christian text can make.

However, by the 4th century Enoch apparently fell out of favor. It is around this time that big name church fathers like Augustine and Jerome rejected it. Two of the most consequential figures in the formation of the Western canon, both saying no, at roughly the moment the canon was hardening into its final shape.

By the 7th and 8th centuries, 1 Enoch only remained popular in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia, and a canon of 81 books (12:12)

Which still remains true to this day. 1 Enoch is part of the biblical canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and Henry gives the number that puts the whole thing in perspective: with over 81 books, the biblical canon is much wider in Ethiopian Christianity compared to other branches of Christianity. For comparison, a Protestant Bible runs to 66 books and a Catholic one to 73.

And by including Enoch, the book has left a lasting legacy on Ethiopian Christians. This is the detail that reframes everything before it. 1 Enoch is not a lost book that archaeologists dug up. It is a book that has been read continuously, in liturgy, by a living church, for something like fifteen hundred years, in a language that church still uses. The rest of the world lost it. Ethiopia never did.

Afterlife, part three: Islam and the prophet Idris (12:23)

Enoch was not only a big deal in Judaism and Christianity. He also appears in early Islamic traditions.

The prophet Idris is mentioned twice in the Quran. The Quran commands its audience:

And remember Idris in the Book. Verily he was truthful and a prophet. We raised him to a sublime station.

Idris is typically associated with Enoch, although some also associate him with Elijah. And here is the pattern repeating itself perfectly: like what we see in the book of Genesis, his little blurb here is ambiguous. Two verses, one strange phrase, and no explanation. The same shaped hole that produced 1 Enoch in the first place.

Many Muslim commentators debate what is meant by raised to a sublime station, and the tradition supplies two main readings. In one hadith, which is one of the reported sayings, actions and approvals of the Prophet, the Prophet reports that he met Idris in the fourth heaven during his miraculous ascension through the seven heavens, typically rendered as the night journey in the West. Other commentators suggest that sublime station simply means that Idris was directly taken alive by God, which parallels the plain text of Genesis 5:24.

Henry's source for the Quranic material is The Study Quran, the Nasr, Dagli, Dakake, Lumbard and Rustom translation and commentary.

What one blurb built (13:22)

The closing argument is the opening argument, now with evidence behind it. Even though Enoch only earned a brief mention in his source text, that one tiny blurb inspired an entire book that continued to influence religious traditions for centuries to come. Henry lists them: the Qumran community, early Christians, early Muslims, Jewish kabbalists, and Ethiopian Christians today.

And then the line that is the actual payload of the video. Even though very few people today have read this book, the apocalyptic ideas introduced in Enoch, hell, salvation, the Son of Man, the coming of the messiah, laid the groundwork for the central themes of Christian theology.

Not bad for a work of spin-off literature.

That is the argument in nine words. A text nobody reads, dropped by the tradition that wrote it and by most of the tradition that quoted it, supplied a large share of the conceptual vocabulary that the largest religion on earth still uses every Sunday.

The seminar at the end (13:58)

The episode is sponsored by Speakeasy, pitched as access to the vibrancy of a university campus wherever you happen to be, and Henry gets the best segue in the video out of it:

And just like how the Watchers taught magic to humanity, I'll be teaching a two week seminar, Magic in the Ancient World, on Speakeasy.

The details, for the record, since this is 2020 and the seminar is long past: Saturdays September 5th and September 12th at 3pm, capped at 12 participants so everyone can actually engage and get questions answered. The syllabus he sketches is the real thing, not filler. Magical rituals the ancient Romans practiced, including curse tablets and healing spells. Roman laws enacted against magic. And what the archaeological evidence reveals about the religious lives of people living in the late Roman Empire.

The video ends on the question underneath all of it, which is also as good a one line summary of the whole channel as exists:

When you're looking at a pre-industrial society, a society before medicine, before the scientific method, what did it mean to practice magic? What did it mean to practice religion?

Best quotes

The Book of Enoch is the ultimate example of spin-off literature. Andrew Mark Henry, 0:06

Enoch walked with God, then he was no more, because God took him. Genesis 5:24, quoted at 0:29

Calling it the Book of Enoch is kind of a misnomer. First Enoch is a compilation of several texts stitched together. Andrew Mark Henry, 1:34

One Dead Sea Scroll fragment contains several sections of Enoch in one text, which shows that the different sections were already circulating as one compilation by the first century BCE. Andrew Mark Henry, 2:52

I personally recommend the Hermeneia translation by George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam. This is not an advertisement, it's literally just the best version I could find. Andrew Mark Henry, 3:22

The text says these Nephilim were the mighty men of old, warriors of renown. That's it. Nothing else. And you know what that means. It's a story ready for a spin-off. Andrew Mark Henry on Genesis 6, 4:40

The giants began to kill men and to devour them, and then kill all the beasts and drank their blood. Sounds kind of like a horror film. 1 Enoch 7:3, read at 5:18

Go to the bastards, to the half-breeds, to the sons of miscegenation, and destroy the sons of the Watchers. Yikes. God's commission to Gabriel in 1 Enoch 10, read at 6:11

He will be the staff for the righteous. He will be the light of the nations, and all who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship before him. 1 Enoch on the Son of Man, 7:41

You are that son of man who was born for righteousness. 1 Enoch 71:14, quoted at 8:03

Enoch beholds a narrow chasm extending to the abyss, where he saw a great fire burning and flaming. This place is a prison for the angels. Here they will be confined forever. 1 Enoch 21:7, quoted at 8:28

The transfigured Enoch is even described as a second, or lesser, YHWH. Andrew Mark Henry on 3 Enoch, 10:06

And remember Idris in the Book. Verily he was truthful and a prophet. We raised him to a sublime station. Quran 19:56 to 57, quoted at 12:36

Not bad for a work of spin-off literature. Andrew Mark Henry, 13:56

Where it stands

Everything above is the video's own case, and on the mainline claims it is squarely inside the scholarly consensus. The Aramaic origin, the Qumran fragments, the Ge'ez transmission, the rabbinic rejection, the patristic enthusiasm followed by the fourth century turn, the Ethiopian canon, the Idris identification: all of that is standard, and all of it is footnoted in the bibliography Henry published with the episode. What follows is not a correction. It is the three places where a fifteen minute runtime forced a compression that a reader following this up should know about.

The dating of the Book of Parables is the live argument in Enoch studies, and the video does not flag it. Henry says many terms associated with Daniel, like Son of Man and messiah, can be found first in the Book of Enoch. That is true for 1 Enoch as a whole and it is genuinely important. But the Son of Man material specifically lives in the Book of Parables, chapters 37 to 71, and the Parables are the one section of 1 Enoch that turned up nowhere at Qumran. That absence is why Józef Milik argued in 1976 that the Parables were a Christian composition from around 270 CE, which would flip the arrow of influence completely. Milik lost that argument. Most scholars now date the Parables to somewhere after 40 BCE, largely on the strength of the reference to the Parthians and Medes in chapter 56:5, and read them as a Jewish text of the late Second Temple period. So the video's claim holds up on the current consensus, but it rests on a dating question that took thirty years of specialist argument to settle rather than on a fragment you can point at.

"Spin-off literature" is a superb teaching device and a contested historical claim. Framing 1 Enoch as an expansion of two Genesis snippets makes the book instantly legible, which is exactly what fifteen minutes needs. But an influential line of scholarship, associated with Gabriele Boccaccini and the Enoch Seminar, argues the reverse dependency is not established: that Enochic Judaism was a distinct priestly movement with its own myth of the origin of evil, centred on neither temple nor Torah, and that the Watchers material may be parallel to Genesis 6 rather than derived from it. Under that reading, Genesis 6:1 to 4 is not the seed of 1 Enoch. It is a compressed remnant of a tradition 1 Enoch preserves at greater length. Reasonable specialists disagree, and the video picks the simpler frame without saying so.

The Enochic corpus is bigger than 1 Enoch. The Book of Giants, which expands the same Watchers story, was found at Qumran in Aramaic and is not part of 1 Enoch as we have it. It travelled a different road: Mani had access to an Aramaic version, and Manichaean fragments of it were later recovered at Turfan in western China. So the fallen angel story reached further east than the video has time to follow, into a fourth religion.

One last piece of context worth stating plainly, since this is the academic entry in a cluster of very different Enoch videos: nothing in this video is fringe. Henry is a religious studies scholar with a doctorate from Boston University, the episode was co-researched with David Malamud, and the description carries a real bibliography with Nickelsburg, VanderKam, Reed, Milik's successors, Alexander, Orlov, Baynes, Asale, Hanneken and The Study Quran. The Watchers, the Nephilim, the giants and the fiery prison in this video are not evidence of anything. They are what a specific set of Jewish writers wrote in the third and second centuries BCE, why they wrote it, and what happened to the text afterwards. That is a smaller claim than the internet usually makes about this book, and a far more durable one.

Resources

The video and the channel

• The Book of Enoch Explained, ReligionForBreakfast, published 27 August 2020.
• ReligionForBreakfast on YouTube, the channel, run by Dr. Andrew Mark Henry.
• The History of Hell, the earlier episode Henry points back to at 8:13.
• Episode co-written and researched by David Malamud.
• Support links from the description: Patreon, PayPal, and Henry's religious studies reading list.
• Sponsor: Speakeasy, where Henry taught the "Magic in the Ancient World" seminar in September 2020.

Primary texts

• 1 Enoch, the compilation this episode is about. Free English text online is usually the 1917 R. H. Charles translation, collected at Early Jewish Writings, which predates the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, the other two books that carry the name.
• Genesis 5:24 and Genesis 6:1 to 4, the two snippets the whole book grows from.
• Jude 1:14 to 15, the New Testament quotation of 1 Enoch 1:9.
• Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 15a, the Metatron and "two powers in heaven" passage.
• Quran 19:56 to 57 and Quran 21:85, the two mentions of Idris.
• The Book of Jubilees, the other Second Temple text preserved in Ge'ez and found at Qumran.
• The Book of Giants, the Watchers spin-off that went east into Manichaeism.

Manuscripts and editions

• 1 Enoch: A New Translation, Based on the Hermeneia Commentary, George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, Fortress Press, 2004. The translation Henry recommends by name.
• 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Nickelsburg, Hermeneia series, Fortress Press, 2001.
• The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4, Józef T. Milik, Oxford, 1976. The editio princeps of the Aramaic.
• 4Q204 at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, the manuscript carrying several sections of Enoch in one copy.
• Qumran Cave 4: The Aramaic Books of Enoch, the modern re-edition of the seven Aramaic manuscripts, and the Handbook of the Aramaic Scrolls from the Qumran Caves manuscript profiles.

The bibliography Henry published with the episode

• P. S. Alexander, "3 Enoch and The Talmud", Journal for the Study of Judaism 18.1.
• Bruk Ayele Asale, "The Legacy of 1 Enoch on Ethiopian Literature", Journal for Semitics 23.2 (2014).
• Leslie Baynes, "Enoch and Jubilees in the Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church", in A Teacher for All Generations (Brill, 2012).
• Todd Hanneken, "The Book of Jubilees among the Apocalypses", University of Notre Dame, 2008.
• Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard and Mohammed Rustom, The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary.
• Andrei Orlov, Metatron as the Deity: Lesser YHWH.
• Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature, Cambridge, 2005.
• John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Volume I, Oxford, 2018.

Context and further reading

• Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canonical books, the 81 book canon, from the church itself.
• The Enoch Seminar, the standing international research group on Second Temple Judaism and Enochic literature, and The Origins of Enochic Judaism, the Boccaccini volume behind the "Enochic Judaism" argument.
• Photo of an Ethiopian Orthodox priest and the Ethiopian Epiphany celebration, the two images Henry credits in the description.