1 Enoch

About 1 Enoch

1 Enoch is an ancient Jewish writing told in the voice of Enoch, the ancestor of Noah who “walked with God” (Genesis 5:21–24). It gathers several books in one: the Watchers, angels who came down to earth and took wives; Enoch’s journeys through heaven and earth; three “Parables” about a coming judge, the Elect One and Son of Man; a book of the courses of the sun, moon and stars, with a year of 364 days; two dream visions, the second telling Israel’s history with animals for its people; and Enoch’s last words to his children.

Scholars date its parts separately. The Watchers (chapters 1–36) and the book of the heavenly bodies (72–82) are the oldest, usually dated to the third century BC, perhaps earlier; the dream visions (83–90) to about 165–160 BC, during the Maccabean revolt; Enoch’s words to his children (91–105) to the second century BC. The date of the Parables (37–71) is debated: most scholars place them between the late first century BC and the late first century AD.

It survives complete only in Ge’ez, the old language of the Ethiopian church, which kept copying it as Scripture; James Bruce brought it to Europe in 1773. Aramaic fragments of every part except the Parables were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and large parts survive in Greek. The New Testament letter of Jude quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 (Jude 14–15).

The translation is R. H. Charles’s, from the Ethiopic and the Greek, as printed in 1917. It keeps his chapter and verse numbers, which differ from those of printed Ethiopian Bibles, and the brackets and marks he uses to show where the Ethiopic and the Greek differ and where he restored or corrected the text; a key under each chapter says what they mean.