Descriptions:
Video Description
Genesis gives Enoch three verses; the book written under his name runs one hundred and eight chapters. This video from the Conscious Radical channel tells the story of why 1 Enoch, older than most of the Hebrew Bible and once treated as scripture, was set outside the canon.
It follows the text from its authority at Qumran and its use by early church writers, through the councils and decisions that quietly removed it. The result is a window into how a tradition chooses its boundaries, and what a removed witness might still have to say.
Full Video Transcript
There is a man in the Bible who doesn’t die and his name is Enoch. He’s the seventh generation
from Adam and the great-grandfather of Noah. The book of Genesis tells you he walked with God for
365 years and then he was not because God took him. That’s three sentences. That is everything
the Bible you grew up with says about him. But there is another book which is written under his
name and was hidden for 2 000 years having been removed from the canon that you inherited it tells
you what happened during those 365 years and what he saw when he was taken for the first time now
three verses in genesis for a man who didn’t die so either the rest of the story was missing or the
story was deliberately compressed and it turns out to be both the book called one enoch is 180
chapters long and it’s older than most of the hebrew bible the earliest sections were composed
around the 3rd century bce possibly earlier fragments of it were found in 11 separate
aramaic manuscripts at qumran sealed in jars buried before the romans destroyed the second
temple in 70 ce the qumran community treated one enoch as scripture the text was part of canon to
the early christian church and it’s quoted in the new testament book of jude verses 14 and 50 treats
enoch as an authoritative prophet whose words carry the weight of god’s own detellian writing
in the second century defended the book of scripture and origin and clement of alexandria
treated it as authoritative then sometime between the third and fifth century ce the institutional
church distanced itself from the text council of laodicea produced a canon that excluded it
in 364 and augustine writing in the city of god dismissed it so by the medieval period
the complete text had entirely vanished from the latin christian world it only survived in
ethiopia the ethiopian orthodox church kept copying one enoch for 1500 years after every
other major christian tradition had stopped and it remains canonical there the complete version
reached western scholarship in 1773 when a scottish traveller named james bruce returned
from gondar with three copies western scholars had assumed for over a thousand years that the
book jude had quoted was lost but it wasn’t lost it had been deliberately preserved by community
that knew what it had a book that was scripture in the qumran community that was quoted as
authoritative inside the new testament that was canonical to early christianity was systematically
removed from the canon that the west inherited so who was enoch well his father was jared
his son was methuselah and his great-grandson was noah he lives in the generations immediately
before the flood when the corruption that one Enoch describes is already spreading through the
earth. The text says he walked with God. Now that phrase in Hebrew is hithalek imha elohim. This
phrase only appears twice in the entire Hebrew Bible, once for Enoch and once for Noah. It means
walked with God which means something closer to moved in conscious alignment with the structure
of reality. To walk with God in this tradition is to have developed the capacity to perceive what is
true and to live accordingly in a world where most of that capacity has been lost. By the time Enoch
was an adult the watches had already descended, the earth was filling with violence, the Nephilim
were being born, the technologies the watches had brought down were already corrupting the species
they had been given to and enoch was a witness to all of it he saw what was happening and he refused
to participate in it and developed a reputation as the only man left who could still see clearly
and this made him a problem for the watchers in chapters 12 through to 16 of 1 enoch the text
describes something extraordinary the watchers have received a heavenly judgment for their
transgressions but the judgment has not yet been executed so they went to enoch and begged him to
intercede on their behalf they asked him to write a petition for them and present it to the most
high enoch agrees to write the petition he is a witness and must testify even when the testimony
will not change the outcome he goes to a place called the waters of dan beneath mount hermon
he reads the petition aloud and then falls asleep in his sleep he is taken up suspended
the first ascent is the structural center of the entire book the text describes it in cosmological
detail enoch is carried by the winds and passes through the lower heavens and into the higher ones
he sees the throne room he sees the four faces of the seraphim he sees the most high seated on
a throne of crystal surrounded by fire attended by thousand times ten thousand of those who do not
sleep he delivers the petition and is told the judgment against the watchers stands they will
be bound imprisoned and will await the final reckoning he is told to return to the watches
and tell them their petition has been rejected they have lost their station in heaven forever
that the binding is coming and cannot be averted then separately he has shown things he’s taken on
what is in effect a tour of the cosmos he has shown the storehouses of the winds and the chambers
of the thunder he’s shown the place where the souls of the righteous weight and the place where
the souls of the wicked are held he’s shown the tree of life which is kept on a remote mountain
reserved for the time after the final judgment he’s shown the courts of heaven the orders of
angels the structure of the cosmic hierarchy the precise movements of the sun the moon and the
stars the calendar of creation recorded in what later became the astronomical book of one enoch
he’s shown the history of what will happen from his time through the flood through the rise and
fall of empires through the emergence and corruption of religions through to the final
judgment and the end of time in the dream visions chapters 83 to 90 describe enoch being shown the
future of the world as a sequence of animals humans appear as cattle and sheep their enemies
appear as predators wolves lions foxes hyenas the nephilim appear as oversized monstrous beasts
the watches appear as fallen stars adam is a white bull noah is a white bull who becomes a man
the patriarchs are sheep moses is a sheep who becomes a man at the moment he leads the flock
out of egypt the vision narrates the entire history of israel in this allegorical form
and the historical detail is precise enough that scholars can identify battles kings and empires
all the way up to the maccabean revolt of 167 bce and then abruptly the detail dissolves into
apocalyptic abstraction a final judgment is described the watches are sentenced the cosmos
is renewed and that break in the detail is how scholars date the animal apocalypse the text was
almost certainly composed during the maccabean revolt itself which means one enoch was a working
framework that successive jewish communities used to interpret their own moments of crisis
Enoch returns and delivers the rejection of the petition to the watchers. The binding is carried
out. Uziel is buried in the desert. Smyrza and the other captains are imprisoned beneath the hills.
The Nephilim are made to destroy each other and the flood begins to be prepared. Enoch lives out
the rest of his earthly life as a witness. He warns Methuselah and Noah and prepares the
lineage that will survive what is coming and then at the end he’s taken up again
permanently to be preserved but before he goes he writes the book and the book
is the whole reason for the ascent because the Most High didn’t need Enoch
to tell him anything and the angels didn’t need Enoch’s testimony the
witness was for us for the species that had been corrupted and would be flooded
and would have to begin again the book was the instruction left for the survivors in case they
wanted to know what happened and why that is the entire point of the figure of enoch here’s the
human witness whose record can’t be edited from above because he’s on earth when he writes it
the watches are unable to reach him by the time he writes because they are bound the institutional
powers that were later tried to suppress the book don’t exist yet three thousand years later the
book has been buried recovered removed from canon preserved by ethiopian monks dragged into western
awareness in 1773 by scottish traveller and now sits on wikipedia the witness survived
the institutions that tried to bury it didn’t survive in the same form the council of laodicea
is a footnote and augustine’s authority on canon has been steadily eroding for 500 years
the ethiopian orthodox church kept copying and you can read one enoch tonight the charles
translation is freely available the nicholsburg academic translation is also in print so you don’t
have to take anyone’s word for any of it you can pick the testimony up yourself that is what makes
the figure of enoch matter now he’s the case study for what happens when a witness writes down what
they saw knowing the institutions of their own time will try to suppress it and trusts the
survivors will read it anyway there is a second testimony in the book it’s the content of what
enoch was shown when he was taken and it shares details about the watchers themselves what they
did what they brought down and why the judgment against them was so absolute
that is the next piece in the meantime the witness is in your hands now
Source: The Conscious Radical