2nd Enoch: The Secrets of Enoch

our topic this evening is a book called that Scholars call second Enoch that has a um subtitle the secrets of Enoch um there are three numbered books of Enoch so we previously explored one that's generally called first Enoch which is part of the Canon of the Ethiopia the Ethiopian Orthodox viable and so this first Book of Enoch it's just a Book of Enoch but anyway that's numbered first by Scholars is sometimes called the Ethiopian or ethiopic Enoch um so but even though there's a first Enoch and a second Enoch and actually a third Enoch unlike with other biblical books like first and second Kings or first and second chronicles which are actually just two parts of the same book The reason why those are divided is that ancient Scrolls could only be a certain length and so if you have a double length book like kings you divide it into two halves so First Kings and second Kings uh by contrast to a book like that these books of Enoch Scholars have simply assigned completely unrelated books that are each claiming Enoch as an author numbers and essentially they're kind of being assigned numbers in terms of their prominence and actually it turns out probably the order they're composed but certainly the second one here is really unrelated to the first and the third ones so let's look at each of these as a brief overview so the first one like we say we had a whole lecture on this it's originally written in Hebrew and or Aramaic we don't know because the complete text only Surat fives in the guess language which is an Ethiopian language and that translation nevertheless some parts of it were composed in either Hebrew or Aramaic as early as the um three hundreds or two hundreds BCE the second one could have been a mixture of Hebrew Iraq just like Daniel the second one the one we're talking about tonight survives only in complete form in the language known as old church slavonic that text purports itself to be a translation from Greek and it probably is a translation from a lost Greek original that Greek original though May well be possibly a translation from an additionally lost Hebrew original and possibly that first text was written in the first century of the Common Era the First Century A.D and then there's a third Book of Enoch like I say that is in Hebrew but just because it's in Hebrew that doesn't mean it's earlier people continue to speak Hebrew rabbis are writing in Hebrew to this day so it's later probably from the second century or maybe even later than that and one of the ways we can tell it's kind of later is it contains Latin and Greek loan words so the author this author may have known certainly made the first book the third book made the author may know in the first one at maybe the second one probably the first one but in any event the second one like I say is unrelated to the first and third in terms of that author didn't know the other two okay so all three of these books are pseudopigraphic that is as we talk about it that means they claim to be written by the biblical character Enoch but they were actually written thousands of years later by someone else put a little star there because the um the third Book of Enoch claims that it was written by Enoch but then redacted in its present form by uh a Rabbi in the first century or the second century uh CE so anyway these texts fall into a large category of writings where ancient authors attempted to claim the authority of an Ivan either even more ancient figure and so I have these two volumes as I said it used to go to the library in junior high and check these out and when I became an adult I got to buy them and so I was able to use um the first volume to read here about the text which is included for today so let's look at some of the examples of what are these kinds of pseudopographic texts most of these date from either the second temple period the late second temple period especially or um the first and second third centuries in other words the time period after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and so the texture have titles like the life of Adam and Eve the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs The Apocalypse of Elijah the Treatise of Shem the Odes of Solomon and then there are for example a collection of more Psalms by David So in general in other words the thing that is has happened here is that authors are expanding on biblical stories so the Adam and Eve story is actually really really short in Genesis it only fills a couple chapters at most and so now the person has written more details of their lives and so forth for the this expanded text or Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs so essentially all of the 12 tribes of Israel here get to have have their say and and and give a blessing and so forth their Testament so we don't otherwise normally get to hear from what isashar or Manasseh had to say on any particular thing and now these are all included as authoritative pronouncements from these um legendary figures from the book of Genesis like wise you know Elijah's an old important Old Testament prophet and here he's having an apocalypse or a revelation apocalyptic revelation Hashem is Adam's son Solomon David are the famous Kings and so forth so there is a practice here we've called these pseudopographic there is also a practice that has more legitimacy in the rabbinic Jewish tradition called midrash which is a kind of biblical interpretation and it's common in the talmud the word midrash means study or textual interpretation Christians use the word exegesis for studying interpreting scripture so the practice can include expansion of biblical narratives in order to consider questions that are left unclear or absent in the original so because the ancient texts in Genesis do not make certain things about let's say modern interpretation or let's say even ancient later ancient interpretation of Jewish law they don't make anything clear sometimes the story has expanded to explain more about those kind of questions um rewriting also therefore allows ancient texts to speak to more contemporary issues and so for example I was mentioning that third Enoch this third ones of this tradition claims to be a redaction by Rabbi Ishmael who was a second century Rabbi who is a founder of one of the midrash schools and that became kind of a major uh School of this practice so in some sense these texts are sometimes we call them pseudopigrapha but in some cases they also could be fit broadly into this practice of midrash all right so who was Enoch so Enoch uh why is he important enough for several authors to claim they were him or to write mid-rush about him or so forth so Enoch is the English version of the Hebrew and so Enoch is an important enough character in The Latter-Day Saint tradition so my own Church's Traditions that I grew up hearing a very old American pronunciation of this so we say Enoch and a lot of people when I hear me say that they're drives them crazy but it also still works makes it it's very difficult for me to say Enoch which is the more common English pronunciation for like I say the Hebrew which is something like or something like that so anyway Enoch we're going to try to say who was this guy so he comes from what I call the begets section of the Bible so uh this is made fun of in an episode of The Simpsons so Homer who thinks he's dying because he's eaten poisonous Sushi he breaks out the Bible which turns out to be a book on tape as read by Larry King and so Larry King starts reading the Bible and it says so and so beget Phineas and Phineas beget ebushua and Homer kind of starts fast forwarding through this part abusha would be get a name us and Amos beget you fast forward some more amariah began a tote hoped up beget Shalom and so forth in other words he has to fast forward through all of these uh Beginnings that are happening in the uh these long lists that occur in the early in the Old Testament that are so boring for people to read so what are these things so the book of Generations is a hypothetical Source text of the Torah or the pentateuch the first five books of the Bible including the first book Genesis so the genealogical lists found in Genesis chapter 5 and also chapter 11. are used by the overall torah's editor or redactor to connect different stories written by different authors together into Genesis to create a coherent narrative and as a result of doing a lineage from that is connecting essentially the Adam and Eve story to the Cain and Abel story down to the NOAA Story down to the Abraham story and so forth that gives the whole text a kind of quasi-historical feel even though the text is not a history so those separated the genealogies if you take them out they actually fit together which is why Scholars think they may have originally been part of an independent source which has been labeled the book of generations so here's a portion the beginning of the book of generations in chapter five of Genesis this is the list of the descendants of Adam when God created humans he made them in the likeness of God male and female he created them and he blessed them and called them humans when they were created when Adam had lived 130 years he became the father of a son in his likeness according to His Image and named him Seth so this is after Kane enable right and so the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years and he had other Sons and Daughters thus all the days at Adam lived were 930 years and he died when Seth had lived 105 years he became the father of enosh and Seth lived after the birth of enosh 807 years and had other Sons and Daughters thus all the days of Seth were 912 years and he died when anash had lived 90 years he became the father of Canaan Kenan enosh lived after the birth of Kina in 815 years and had other Sons and Daughters thus all the days of enosh were 905 years and he died etc etc so you can see why the Simpsons are making fun of this this goes on a long time in the Bible so this is the formula of the generations and this is how we get the uh the kind of family tree that takes us from Adam and Eve down to Noah and his three sons Shem ham and japheth so the text in Genesis 5 uses that same repetitive formula for all of the generations from Adam to Noah the patriarch lives X number of years he begets his son he lives why more years be getting more sons and daughters and then he dies thus he's lived the total of X Plus y years so when you look at those different ones in terms of how long each one of them lived not counting Enoch that ages range from lameck who died at the very young age of 777. to Methuselah who died at the age of 969 and so Methuselah is very famous for when people have an old phrase as old as Methuselah right so he's the longest lived person in the Bible and that's what he's primarily famous for because we don't know any other details about him and from other than that in the book of generations all right so I want to look at both the flood myth and also the myths of this time period before the flood the anti-diluvian Golden Era so just as the idea as we've seen in a whole lecture when we had the lecture on the flood myth just as that's not historical there is actually no historical basis for any of the anti-diluvian stories or characters in Genesis um why is that so the book of generations that text is written thousands of years after later than the characters would have would have supposedly lived and there's no um mention of any of their names in any other out extra biblical sources and then even in the Bible when we take the older prophets the older writings than the Torah those prophets also don't know these names and they don't mention them they don't talk about them so we've talked about that like I say in in the whole lecture on the flood myth so where do these stories come from the biblical flood stories were written no earlier than the eighth and more likely the 7th centuries BCE there's another flood story as we've talked about in the Epic of Gilgamesh has written some 1400 years earlier and the Sumerians also created King lists and the King list begin with mythological leaders who are said to have absolutely enormous lifespans King lists are very much like these beget lists that we have in the book of generations and so the Sumerian king lists begin with it begins with eight Kings who Reign Before the Flood the Sumerian antiluvian kings are actually much longer preposterously longer than the rains in the book of generations although really living a thousand years is also once you're living a thousand years I guess you might as well live you know 28 to 43 000 years so they vary between 28 800 years and 43 200 years and so the total rain for all of these eight Kings when added up together is 241 200 years so it's a long period of time as far as the ancient Sumerians are concerned Before the Flood and then after the flood their kings are still long-lived but the durations decline very rapidly and so they start out you know raining like 1500 years and then they kind of slow down and cut down to 300 years and finally as they get closer and closer to actual history the people are reigning for a realistic human time frame so in the modern era humans look at the record that we have we have this increasingly technological scientific Economic Development there are kinds of things that you are able to do we're able to do right now everything that we're doing here on YouTube all of these uh live streaming and everything like that the phones that we all rely on for everything none of this was and we know this was really even conceivable when I was born right so they didn't have these kinds of gadgetry really on Star Trek or you know the original Star Trek or or um The Jetsons when I was born I mean they had some of the ideas but not all of these ideas so as of the mid 20th century though science fiction like Star Trek continued to Envision that the Future Would inevitably follow those trend lines so um for example there was a 1939 World's Fair in New York and its entire theme was the World of Tomorrow and everything you know which was getting modern was begun to be more modern and more Ultra Modern and things were going to continue on those trend lines as everything was going to advance and we would achieve kind of a technological Utopia like they have in Star Trek the ancient view is absolutely different so the modern perspective is direct contrast to the ancient view ancients by and large believe that the past had been much better so they looked back to the past and they imagined or remembered a golden age when life was much simpler when food was abundant and easy to get when the men were all more heroic uh people in general were more virtuous and everybody lived longer and so forth and the Golden Age myth is very common across cultures um just one example where it's very visually expressed is in the Book of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzar has a dream and he dreams of this giant statue and the statue has a head of uh of gold you know shoulders of silver uh torso of bronze legs of iron and then feet that are intermixed with iron and clay and that represents the ages of man up until Daniel's day and so the idea of it is that there was once you know a golden age not a silver age a Bronze Age an iron age and now they were living in an age where everything was just muddy and iron mixed with clay and so things were neither pristine and and and golden and wonderful nor were they strong like iron they were they were it was just all a mess and so this is a vision of decline which is generally how things were seen okay and so as a result these King lists like the Sumerian king list or the book of generations those um uh list Heroes and demigods whose lifespans decline from just impossibly long to more reasonable human ages of that that kind of forms a bridge a mythological or pseudo-historical bridge between the Divine Realm the Golden Age and then the Mortal present and so the authors of Genesis take that understanding of the past that was common so the Mesopotamia versus the Sumerians and then the different Semitic peoples the acadians the Babylonians and so forth that worldview was spread across the near East and writing within that world view are the Israelite authors who are trying to place their own narrative their own sacred identity stories within that generally understood context that was come up with that was created in Mesopotamia and they try to then Trace their own ancestors back to that Golden Age what they're calling now Paradise or Eden in the uh the Hebrew narrative so when you add up all of those uh numbers in the book of generations from Genesis and for centuries Christians and Jews have done this they've read these numbers literally and so you can see in these charts it starts here with Adam and then goes Seth Enos Kanan Mahalia Jared Enoch Methuselah mcnoa and then you can see the flood and you can see how fast they start decreasing After the flood getting down ultimately to Abraham who's only living 175 years at the end and so the first little part here the red part is how long before they have kids and then the gray part is how long do they live after they have their first first child and so um you can kind of see how that goes and so for centuries like I say Christians have added up all those numbers they've seen how they would overlap by making a chart like this but they primarily were doing this in order to try to create a chronology or manufacturer a chronology in order to find the date of a literalistic creation and so they'll come up with adding up all the estimates and things like that of having put the Bible together the various stories they try to um try to look at Clues and and add all the numbers up and and they will come up with something like 4000 BCE or some other year like that um so I'm going to suggest that this is a completely uh you know anyway not a not a worthwhile practice and it also uh opposes um what ancient and and uh historic and even medieval ideas about uh science and what interpretation of scripture it's a modern um literalistic uh interpretation of scripture that is trying to reject science so in his book that's actually called on the literal meaning of Genesis the fourth century Christian thinker Augustine just again one of these greatest thinkers in Christian history writes you know usually even a non-Christian knows something about the Earth the heavens and the other elements of this world about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions about the predictable eclipses of the Sun and the Moon the cycle of the years and the seasons about the kind of animals shrubs zones and so forth and this knowledge he holds to as being from a certain from reason and experience so in other words what he's saying here is you don't doesn't matter if you're Christian or not people can know a lot about natural things both astronomy and also you know weather and calendar seasons and biology and all that kind of thing that's uh science right so people can know that it has nothing to do with religion now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an Infidel for a non-Christian to hear a Christian a Christian who is presuming to give the meaning of Holy Scripture talking nonsense on these topics and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation if they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know wow and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books in other words if they're you they hear a Christian say that the world is only 6 000 years old when everybody knows because of just basic science that it's over 4 billion years old this is going to be a horrible and embarrassing and it is also going to discredit Christians so how are non-christians going to believe these books on when they talk about religious matters Augustine says when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience in the light of reason so in other words they know what science tells us and now this Christian is telling us nonsense and so that's going to make people think that the the scriptures are full of false hits so Augustine concludes that if your reading of scripture conflicts with what at the time was called natural philosophy what we now call science then you are clearly misreading scripture and further He suggests you're also just blaspheming so um Augustine suggests instead that you need to read text meaningfully rather than always literally and so in ancient times uh and all the way up through the Middle Ages there is a hierarchy of responsible interpretation of scripture so yes you can read it at first as literal and like that's presuming that that happened but it may turn out that it didn't happen in any event that's only the lowest and least important way that the text can be written the next is reading it as an allegory and so we saw how Philo of Alexandria learned Jew uh Jewish scholar philosopher in the first century of the Common Era when it talks about in the Old Testament it talks about God's hands or God blowing or anything like that he says that obviously is an allegory we know that God doesn't have hands and God doesn't have uh doesn't breathe God is Not physical that kind of a thing uh like so not he ignores the literal we have to look at the allegorical as what ancient Jews and Christians are saying more important than that though is what is the text telling us what's the moral of this story the tropological interpretation and finally the most important is the anagogical interpretation reasoning upwards how does all of this text point us to God the source of light truth and so forth so since we have robust scientific models like I say that date the Earth to 4.5 4 billion years plus or minus 0.5 billion years so all of those literalistic readings that posit a young Earth 6 000 years or so are all false they are also by the way disproven by the disciplines of History archeology literary criticism and so on and so forth okay so there actually are interesting implications for these numbers we can say they have no value for determining the age of the world but they do have interesting implications within themselves because in part because there's this rapid decline of longevity in that close flood era so you can see how where the flood is here and then on the other side that all the short little bars so essentially right there so according to Genesis the way we have it in its present form Noah is actually still alive when Abram is born in chaldea and when Abram Abram now turns his name to Abraham is a hundred years old Shem Noah's son Abraham's seventh great-grandfather so great great great great great great great grandfather is still alive along with his son our facts at his son Selah and Eber they're all still alive and Shem even outlives Abraham according to Genesis okay why aren't there any biblical stories about Abram hanging out with Noah if the Bible indicates that Abram and Noah were alive at the same time you know shouldn't there be a story wouldn't Abraham go and visit Noah the answer is the Abraham stories come from different authors than the book of generations the authors who wrote the Abraham stories had no idea that Noah was supposed to be still alive in Abraham's day in fact one of them um uh had a had a definite time limit for how long humans were allowed to be alive and it's only a little over 100 years and so forth and so would not have agreed that Noah or anybody else Adam or anybody had lived that long so that is a what has happened is that different sources have been combined together they're now all read together as Genesis and as the Bible and so the implications of the stories don't work out it's an internal internal contradictions later authors however who have access to the composite text in other words we can all read Genesis the way it is they they and we have read Genesis edited together the way it is today and so as a result they have written stories about young Abram interacting with Noah so for example we did an entire lecture on the book of jasher I call it book of jashar this is a medieval Jewish midrash on the Genesis story so it's expanding Genesis and it has a big long story of Abram after he flees the land of shinar you know where his the Tower of Babel is and his father Tara has all these idols and so forth Abram flees and he goes and lives with Noah and Shem for a little while and they help teach him and so forth so that becomes a common um uh rabbinic midrish uh this idea of that happening so um with all of that background on Genesis and the anti-delivian Patriots in general so I want to look at us now what does the bible tell us about Enoch in particular and so Enoch here on this chart is this little short stubby one so you can see how long all the anti-delivian Patriarchs are living in Enoch it's only 65 years that he begets Methuselah and then 300 years and not that's it so concerning Enoch's father Jared we read in Genesis 5 when Jared had lived 162 years he became the father of Enoch Jared lived after the birth of Enoch 800 years and had other Sons and Daughters thus all the days of Jared were 962 years and he died and then concerning Enoch we read when Enoch had lived 65 years he became the father of Methuselah Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years Enoch walked with God then he was no more because God took him okay so that is the one of the very few variations in the book of generations all the other ones have the same formula but all we know then from Genesis about Enoch is one he lived a much shorter time than the rest of the anti-diluvian Patriarchs that he quote walked with God and three that God took him however this really plausibly is simply a euphemism for him dying by misadventure rather than old age so God took him could just mean he had an accident he fell down God took him or something like that nevertheless readers uh haven't jumped to that conclusion usually rather they're intrigued by these phrases he walked with God God took him and they prefer to offer interpretations and extrapolations that are much more exciting all right so the translators in the third Century BCE who translated the original Old Testament Hebrew Bible uh text into Greek the Septuagint translators they used uh the Greek word uh metatimi uh to render that phrase God took him and that verb has a sense of moving from one place to another um in the King James version I think that this is like rendered as translate which is also weird but in many way it means like essentially the usage there is translated not from language to language but actually from space to space what we might call transporting like a transporter like in the Federation or like in Star Trek so the same sense this idea that God is moving in from one place to another is found in the third Century BCE book of sirach also known as ecclesiasticus which says it talks about Enoch a couple places one of them it says Enoch please the Lord and was taken up an example of repentance to all generations and so we also have here like a medieval manuscript that is depicting Enoch being taken up into the heavens by God he's climbing essentially Jacob's Ladder the ladder Between Heaven and Earth so Revelation in general did not cease in the second temple period of Judaism even though most of the books did not make it into anybody's Canon some of them like the Book of Daniel did but most of them did not um the as we saw a Hebrew candidates especially disinterested in the later books those became brought into the Septuagint into Greek and those became parts of the Canon of the Orthodox and and Catholic churches the Protestants have likewise rejected them and called those uh apocrypha nevertheless they sometimes look at the Apocrypha so the most common style of Revelation evolved away from the kind of direct poetry sort of visions that are in the original Isaiah anyway there's a later isaiahs that are apocalyptic later continuers of Isaiah within the book of Isaiah but the original uh prophet Isaiah would essentially um write complaints and denounce the king and so forth he would do that or the people in general um in in the form of poetry and talk about direct visions that he's having um of God and same thing in the Prophet Jeremiah apocalyptic Visions tend to take that like one step at remove one more step removed from God so as monotheism is developing and evolving within Judaism it becomes less common to be feeling like you can see God face to face and instead usually these are through Angelic Messengers as we have in the Book of Daniel the very last book to be written that made it into the uh Hebrew Canon so as we saw in a previous lecture uh the First Book of Enoch or Enoch was now called first Enoch the ethiopic Enoch fits into this newer apocalyptic prophecy very very well there's all kinds of angelic visitations and visions of heaven and so forth as Enoch is brought up into heaven and this other book second Enoch follows the exact same genre so the word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypsos me which means unveiling which is the same as Revelation so we're taking the veil off apocalypses come in response to unfulfilled earlier prophecies and also failures of the earlier deuteronomic answer to the problem of evil so Jeremiah and Deuteronomy and all of these kinds of texts the texts of the deuteronomic historian so Joshua Judges King Samuel and so forth the implication of all of those very directly is that Israel is punished when they turn away from the one God and stop keeping the Commandments and instead bring in uh foreign customs and bring in polytheism paganism and start worshiping all of the neighboring gods of the Philistines and the moabites and so forth the midianites all of that has stopped in the second temple period the people are now monotheistic and yet they are continuing to suffer so first under um uh Persian rule where they are essentially a struggling poor Judah is a um Yahoo it is what it's called in the Persian period is a poor little province of the Persian Empire the footprint of Jerusalem significantly contracted uh from the time period than when Judo was an independent Kingdom back to this time period as a Persian Province and same thing under the Hellenistic Kings the ptolemies of Egypt and the seleucids of Syria Mesopotamia and so even though the people are not are actually now fulfilling uh these promises they are not being um uh rewarded the way all of the biblical books before this promised they would and so how do we explain that well they have new ideas to understand the cosmos that they're drawing from the Persians have a very powerful world religion called Zoroastrianism that has ideas about cosmic dualism the a great spiritual God who is fighting against a god of evil and will ultimately at the end of the world defeat him there will be saviors of the world people who inform the ideas of a Jewish Messiah and also the zoroastrians predict that the world this imperfect world is going to be destroyed and there will be a new world created that will be a restoration of paradise Paradise is even a Persian loan word so that's actually coming from Persian so in these Persian ideas that are are being drawn upon now so second Enoch fits into the category of an apocalypse in addition to being a pseudopographic mid-rush so the story component of the text is pretty brief and the vast bulk of the text covers a vision of Enoch as Angels escort him through the ten Heavens where he meets God face to face and learns all the secrets of the universe and the final sections are then after he comes back teachings temporarily comes back to Earth teachings last kind of teachings he gives to his sons and then kind of a succession Priestly succession from his son Methuselah and thereafter so that's how the text goes so as I said kind of at the outset of this second Enoch survives in old church slavonic and there's actually 20 manuscripts and fragments that are in old church slavonic but there's no in there's no all the complete texts are in that language there is only um and there are no fragments I think even in Greek or Hebrew the only thing that we have are fragments in uh in Coptic Egyptian so sylvanic was current in the 9th Century A.D when Byzantine Greek missionaries were christianizing Bulgaria so Bulgaria is just right outside of um of it's in Thrace so just very very close to Constantinople this is how close the um what the Greeks were calling barbarians anyway but how close the Bulgarian people were to the Byzantine Empire and the missionaries created the Cyrillic alphabet which is a variations of which are still being used by Slavic peoples today so slavonic this ancient or medieval language early medieval language continued to be used as a liturgical language so the priest translated all of the religious text into slavonic even though vernacular Slavic languages continued to evolve so ultimately forming Bulgarian and Serbian and and Ukrainian and Russian and so forth in other words they all became different languages but the religious language continued to be uh static and so it was used for a whole long time the same way Latin continued to be used even as Italian and French and Spanish were evolving okay so second Enoch has a pretty uncertain provenance so there might have been a Hebrew original from the late first century of the Common Era but it doesn't survive there might have been a Greek version that is a translation of that or it could have been composed in Greek with where the person was very seriously writing with hebrewism so they're writing in Greek but writing it's a sound like it was a Hebrew original what we do have is um a very long uh long uh I should say long version and short version I have two short versions there anyway we have a slavonic short versions and slavonic long versions but it's not clear which is the original and so there's an original slavonic version that claims to be a translation from the Greek and it does seem that's most likely the case because we also have like I say these Coptic Egyptian fragments that seems unlikely that anybody would have translated directly from slavonic into Coptic that they're more likely the people in Egypt or have gotten a hold of a Greek version that they've translated but in any event we don't really know um uh for sure what's going on with this most likely scenario for is that there's probably a um for sure a Greek version that's probably from the first century maybe based on a Hebrew version so let's look at the contents of second Enoch so the first 22 chapters Enoch is taken through the ten Heavens by two Angel guides that's followed by from chapters 23 to 37 spending time in the tenth heaven where Enoch actually Sees God face to face and sees visions of the future and learns the secrets of nature then Enoch is sent back to Earth for a brief period of time which he uses to give a bunch of ethical teachings to his sons and then there's this little end at the end uh last few chapters which is called the exaltation of Melchizedek which essentially outlines the Priestly succession so the priest after Enoch is his son Methuselah and then that goes on to a character called Melchizedek which we'll explain and then in the long version only there's also just a final chapter that is telling the a very brief summary of the flood story so I'm taking this out of my my volumes here of the uh of James charlesworth's Old Testament pseudopigrapha and so all the quotations are actually from Anderson's translation of the longer version manuscript J so let's look at the text so this is the preface the story of Enoch how the Lord took him to heaven there was a wise man and a great Artisan whom the Lord took away and he loved him so much that he might see the highest Realms and of the most wise and great and inconceivable and unchanging kingdom of God Almighty and of the most marvelous and glorious and shining and many eyed station of the Lord's servants and of all the Lord's immovable throne and of all the ranks and organization of the bodyless armies and of all the Indescribable composition of the multitude of elements singing of the army of the cherubim and of the light without measures to be an eyewitness um so then in the next part the Angelic visitors come at that time he said Enoch said here when uh 165 years were complete for me so this is in his voice I Enoch fire fathered my son Methuselah and after that I lived 200 years I completed all the years of my life 365 years in the first month on the assigned day of the first month I was in my house alone and I lay on my bed sleeping and while I slept a great distress entered my heart and I was weeping with my eyes in a dream and I could not figure out what this distress might be nor what might be happening to me then two huge men appeared to me the like of which I had never seen on Earth and we have a description of these two men these angels their faces were like The Shining Sun their eyes were like burning lamps from their mouths fire was coming forth their clothing was various singing their wings were more glistening than gold their hands were whiter than snow after these angels tell Enoch do not fear they explained that the purpose of their visit is to take him to heaven Enoch gives some Hasty instructions to his sons wait for me I'm coming back don't worry I don't know what's going on this kind of thing and then the Angels take him up on their wings they take him above the clouds and Into The Ether placing him on the first heaven and so let's look at what each of these Heavens are like so normally you know how many Heavens are there so this idea that there's ten Heavens normally I think the phrase that is most common is seven heavens and seven hemins it'd be what you'd expect in the normal let's say ptolemaic Cosmos that is familiar to everybody in the Roman Empire so the Earth is a sphere as they knew in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages and it's surrounded by seven Heavenly spheres each of one of which is where the planets are and planets are simply all originally meant simply all the moving objects in the sky so the sun and the moon are also planets in the original conception of what a planet is and so this the orbits are moon Mercury Venus Sun Mars uh Jupiter and Saturn and then the stars are in the outermost so those would normally be what you would think of as the seven seven Heavens uh in Enoch here there are 10 10 Heavens so it's a different uh Cosmos and actually what each is in each Heaven is is kind of unexpected or is unexpected to me so it won't be interesting to show so in the first heaven Enoch sees Angels governing the movements of the planets and the weather um this is actually some of this is similar to what God is speaking from the Whirlwind in the Book of Job where God talks about keeping snow in in a great Warehouse so that he can use it when the snow comes and so forth so they placed me on the first heaven and they showed me a vast ocean much bigger than the Earthly ocean um this is the idea from the Mesopotamian cosmology that above above the sky there's a firmament like a force field and that force field is preventing a bigger Cosmic ocean from flooding the Earth and God opens the firmament opens the force field in order to cause the universal flood so when it gets to the first Heaven there's an ocean that's much bigger than the Earthly ocean then they showed me to the 200 Angels who govern the stars and the Heavenly combinations and they fly with their wings and they do the rounds of all the planets and there I perceived the treasuries of the snow and ice and the angels who guard their terrible storehouses so all the snow and ice and everything like that that's all been pre-made in a factory up there and it's in a warehouse ready to go whenever God wants to make a snowstorm the treasury of the clouds from where they go come out and go in so the clouds are all kept up in their different storehouses and pens when you needed a cloud you you let it out it goes all around the earth and then goes back in the storehouse and so forth and those men picked me up and brought me up to the second heaven and they showed me and I saw a Darkness greater than the Earthly darkness and there I perceived prisoners under guard hanging up waiting for the measureless judgment and those angels had the appearance of Darkness itself more than Earthly darkness and unceasingly they made weeping all the day long so so strangely and if you might have just been expecting even like Dante where hell is a whole different kind of place maybe in the Underworld and Heaven is a bunch of good places that are increasingly better and so forth in this case it seems like hell is in heaven in the cosmology of um of second Enoch so meanwhile in the third heaven Enoch actually sees the Garden of Eden so he got up to the third heaven he says then I looked downward and I saw a paradise and that place is inconceivably pleasant and I saw the trees in full flower and in the midst of them was the Tree of Life this tree that is Central to the um the Garden of Eden story in Genesis at the place where the Lord takes a rest when he goes into Paradise the Garden of Eden is therefore not on Earth but it's up in the third heaven which the Angels tell Enoch quote has been prepared for the righteous as an eternal inheritance so so in other words people when they are righteous when they die they're going to go and live up here in the third heaven in the paradise which is actually the same Paradise as Eden but interestingly as he goes now and explores the rest of the third heaven it also includes a very frightful place with all kinds of torture and torment that are reserved for the wicked so the third heaven is essentially the Eternal resting place for both righteous and wicked humans the fourth Heaven returns us to kind of the cosmological realm with the orbits of the Sun and the Moon and great Gates which God created to be an annual horror Logue so then the men carried me away to the west of the heaven and they showed me six large open Gates corresponding to the Circuit of the Eastern Gates opposite them where the sun sets according to the number of days 365 and one quarter God's very crazy number that he came up with um so the text also then goes through two very obscure calendar systems one lunar and one solar there are whole bunches of other things I'm just pulling um these descriptions are actually really long I'm just pulling a couple interesting things out of each habit so for the fifth Heaven Enoch sees innumerable armies of giants whose faces are dejected and he asks the two phys two angels who are guiding him who are these people the Angels reply these are the grigory who turned aside from the Lord 200 myriads of them together with their prince satanel so Satan is a pretty obvious name there and similar to all of them are those who went down as prisoners in the train who are in the second heaven imprisoned in great Darkness so in other words unlike many visions of Heaven There are Celestial prisons on the second and fourth and fifth Heavens out of the ten heavens and so this includes um the hell here where Satan and all of the gregorias they're called here all of the uh fallen angels of the higher ranks the lower ranked ones are down uh in the second heaven so the sixth and seventh heaven the sixth Heaven contains uh seven groups of angels that are spending all their time carefully studying the movement of the stars and the planets uh second Enoch I think is kind of interested in astrology I think as part of this uh the seventh heaven contains quote all the fiery armies of the great archangels and the incorporate incorporeal forces and the dominions and the origins and the authorities and the cherubim and the seraphim and the many-eyed Thrones and so Thrones and dominions and and so forth these are all um different tiers of Archangels and angelology that are evolving in the in the second temple period as uh the angelology is being elaborated so when it gets to the edge of the seventh heaven Enoch is able to see God's Throne way off in the tenth heaven and he's now met by the Archangel Gabriel traditionally The Herald of Heaven who takes him past the eighth Heaven which is called the changer of seasons and he takes him past the ninth Heaven which is called which where the Heavenly houses of The Twelve Zodiacs are again he's like interested in astrology here and he probably and brings directly uh brings him directly to the tenth heaven which is called aravoth so in the tenth Heaven Enoch says I saw the view of the face of the Lord like iron made burning hot in a fire and brought out and it emits Sparks and is incandescent thus even I saw the face of the Lord but the faith of the face of the Lord is not to be talked about it is so very marvelous and supremely awesome and supremely frightening and who am I to give an account of the incomprehensible being of the Lord and of his face so extremely strange and indescribable and how many are of his are his commands and his multiple voice and the Lord's Throne supremely great and not made with hands and the choir stalls all around him and the cherubim and seraphim armies and their never silent singing and the Lord summoned one of his archangels rev oil by name is one I've never heard of before who was swifter in wisdom than the other archangels and Who records all the Lord's Deeds so the historian Angel and the Lord said to rev Royal bring out the books from my storehouses and fetch a pen for Speed writing and give it to Enoch and let him read the books so then now in the next section in chapters 23-37 Enoch is taught about the great secrets of God including everything about the heavens the movements of the Sun Moon planets the calendar the elements the weather languages music and really everything about human life that is quote appropriate to learn unquote so just to kind of catch in where we're at then so we have those first 22 chapters cutting us through the ten heavens and we have this very long section uh where uh having seen God face to face Enoch is now learning all of these different secrets of nature I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that um but because this will get way too long if I did but there's interesting stuff in there too then we get to the part where Enoch is returned to Earth to preach so the Lord has an ice Angel chill Enoch's faiths so that mortals can again look at him without burning up so there is an idea that's in the pentateuch that when Moses Sees God he's he's unable to be seen properly again and so he's veiled Moses and so in the same exact way um Enix face here is temporarily put in the refrigerator here so that so that the Flames that it has now become he's become like the Angels um the other people back on Earth are still going to be able to see him the original two angels are returned to are assigned to return Enoch to Earth where his sons have been Faithfully waiting up for him it's been a month or something like that Enoch gives a very long speech beginning give heed my children and he begins by recounting some of these Heavenly Wonders that he's seen before he moves on to a whole long set of moral teachings um one of them really stuck out at me as a first list he has a list he actually has two different lists of Beatitudes one one blessed are the and cursed are the but essentially happy are the same as blessed are the so I want to share these which I found interesting happy is the person who references the name of the Lord and who serves in front of his face always and who organizes his gifts with fear offerings of life and who in this life lives and dies correctly happy is he who carries out righteous judgment not for the sake of payment but for justice not expecting anything whatever as a result and the result will be that judgment without favoritism will follow him happy is he who clothed the naked with His Garment and to the hungry gives his bread happy as he who judges righteous judgment for Orphan and Widow and who helps anyone who has been treated unjustly happy is he who turns aside from the secular path of this vain world and walks in right paths and who lives that life which is Without End happy is he who sows right seed for his Harvest shall be Sevenfold happy is he and whom is the truth so that he may speak the truth to his neighbor happy as he who has compassion on his lips and gentleness in his heart happy as he who understands all the works of the Lord performed by the Lord and glorifies him so although teachings by Beatitudes by saying happy is that he or blessed is he blessed is he who that does this that's obviously very famously associated with Jesus and whereas you can find some common themes here about orphans and widows and and and so forth um nevertheless none of Enoch's Beatitudes are directly dependent on any new testament text indeed none of the teachings in second Enoch come from any new testament texts and so there are in this overall arching um tradition you know 20 manuscripts or so there are some Christian glosses which means where a Christian scholar has has added stuff like Christian ideas and stuck them in there but they're only in individual manuscripts and so the translator here Anderson argues that they're very obvious interpolations and so when you look at the tradition as a whole he says quote there's not a distinctively Christian idea in the book which is interesting because there are obviously what it is sort of showing is if this is a non-Christian first century CE Jewish writer you can see that there's a bunch of overlapping ideas anyway with what first century Jewish Christians are writing about including what Jesus is talking about uh here's an example that doesn't seem very particularly Christian so um Enoch talks about animal sacrifice as an example so he who acts lawlessly with the soul of an animal acts lawlessly with his own soul for a person brings one of the clean animals to make a sacrifice on account of sin so that he may have healing for his soul if he brings it to the Sacrifice from clean animals and birds and cereals then there is healing for that person and he will heal his soul so obviously animal sacrifice was very Central to Jewish religious practice during the simple second temple period in other words any time up until the year 70 when the Romans destroyed the temple but it's not a part of Christianity at all so this is the kind of thing this wouldn't make it into any kind of Christian text and it actually probably might not have been a part of um say a rabbinic text really after uh after the destruction of the temple when when sacrifices aren't even possible anymore so it would be very unusual if the author here is a Christian or even a later rabbinic Jewish Observer observant Jew okay so after uh Enoch gives all of those big long speech of uh and Commandments and instructions and so forth to his sons uh we get this uh end of the ending to his narrative when Enoch had spoken to his people the Lord sent the Gloom onto the Earth and it became dark and covered the men who were standing and talking with Enoch and then the Angels hurried and grasped Enoch and carried him up to the highest heaven where the Lord received him and made him stand in front of his face for eternity then the darkness departed from the earth and it became light and the people looked but they could not figure out how Enoch had been taken away and they glorified God and they found a scroll on which was inscribed the invisible God and then they all went home so all you know there's a big puff of smoke or whatever Enoch disappears and all that's left is a scroll that says the invisible God and meanwhile Enoch's reward is he gets to stand in front of the face of God forever and so which is anyway it doesn't sound great in a literal uh thing but if in a platonic spiritual sense that would be uh that's the ideal okay so that kind of brings us through then uh this guide of the ten Heavens the secrets uh books checking out the books from God's library and finally these uh ethical teachings to his son so that takes us to this exaltation of Melchizedek text so after Enoch is taken up to heaven his son Methuselah is made the priest in his stead Methuselah lives his whole long life and then at the end of his life he decides to pass or he is commanded to pass his Priestly office to Noah's younger brother near a guy who does not exist in the Bible but is a additional character we now learn about here in second Enoch so near has a wife named supanim and she has been Barren so a problem that is very frequent in biblical texts where women has gone to old age and has not ever had any children she is also she and her husband are also not having intercourse nevertheless she miraculously conceives and so he was having essentially an Immaculate Conception and birth and she gives birth to a child which is named Melchizedek the Archangel Michael and our Melchizedek is then made the priest after near so Michael brings Melchizedek to Eden which as you know from this book is actually not on Earth it's in the third heaven and while he's up there in in Paradise uh Melchizedek is able to survive the flood and that kind of gives him an origin story so where is this very obscure character Melchizedek from The Book of Genesis a person who is a priest of Salem a person to whom Abraham actually gives tithing a person who Abraham considers as a Spiritual Authority where does this guy come from so the answer anyway there's lots of answers the answer that people write in midrish the answer from the book of second Enoch is he is uh an otherwise unknown immaculately conceived grandson of great grandson of Methuselah great great grandson of Enoch so this text then is an interesting text and it has an interesting survival if it was written by a Christian the author has done a kind of a remarkably good probably way too good a job of avoiding anachronisms of including obvious Christian thought in his Old Testament settings and I'll just say for example this is something this is a feat that Joseph Smith for example in his writing of the Book of Mormon which is taking place in Old Testament times he's not remotely able to do this he immediately introduces anachronisms and has all kinds of contemporary Christian doctrines which are set back in the time of uh of the destruction of Jerusalem the time of zedekiah and their Zechariah or whatever anyway the times when uh when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem um this guy does a great job if it is which is why most people think it's not as in other words this person who is a Jewish writer probably from the first century who simply has a bunch of uh interests in common with other second temple Jews including the early Jewish Christians so the tax cosmology is pretty unique I think it's different from standard Christian ptolemaic cosmology the angelology is also kind of different from let's say the angelology that exists in the other Book of Enoch and in other texts and so that may explain why um this text wasn't continued to be copied in either Hebrew or Greek so if there was a Hebrew original and there certainly probably was a Greek original why don't those continue well they don't continue when people don't use the book and don't have a purpose in copying it which kind of also then begs the question why do you then do so many manuscripts survive in old church slavonic who is busy reading this in the slavonic language and why it is survived so interestingly second Enoch was heavily used by the Boga Mills which were a Christian dualist and also neo-nostic sect founded by a priest named bogamill and that just means dear to God in old church slavonic in 10th Century Bulgaria so bogamel dualism saw God it's pretty monotheistic it's a it's a has a God is a is a superior being who has created the infinite God because the creator of a spiritual world but he has an elder son Satan ale as the Lesser creator of the material world the flawed material world that's all around us so one of the ideas of gnosticism is that the spiritual realm is the higher truer realm and this material realm is is what where all the woe and sin is and Michael is uh has a very August uh rule as god's second son younger brother of Satan ill who is ultimately sent to Earth and takes on human form as Jesus in the bogamill understanding of this and then Jesus is adopted as God's only begotten son so there are adoptionists in addition to being neonostics and dualists so there's a bunch of interesting cosmological overlaps with the Enoch text that we've just read so second Enoch is uncompromisingly monotheist it doesn't make any mentions of Jesus it does give significant roles to Michael and Satan IL and it also includes its own kind of war in heaven narrative that I didn't read for you but anyway that is in there and it places as we saw the rebel angels in the second and fifth heavens and we did see that so the Boga Mills went on to influence the cathars although I don't know that they pushed got these ideas into the cathars in the west and we had a whole lecture on the cathars but both sexs were persecuted by in the west the Catholics and in the East the Orthodox Christians and they were eradicated by as of the 15th century so they don't exist anymore interestingly there are some interesting parallels I think and or Echoes with the modern uh retelling of the Enoch story so Joseph Smith uh wrote his own uh had his own Bible revision and wrote his own um story of Enoch he portrays Enoch as a very powerful Prophet who works amazing Miracles so we read in Joseph Smith's bible revision it's also called the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible or the inspired version of the Bible in some cases and so great was the faith of Enoch that he spake the word of the Lord and the Earth trembled and the mountains fled even according to his command and the rivers of water were turned out of their course and the Roar of lions Was Heard out of the Wilderness and All Nations feared greatly so powerful was the word of Enoch and so great was the power of language which God had given him so he's got power Words Words of Power that he's he's using to move mountains around and so forth and the Giants of the land so in Genesis we read that there are giants in the anti-diluvian times so the Giants in the land also stood afar off and there went forth upon a curse upon all the people which fought against God and from that time forth there were Wars and bloodsheds among them but the Lord came and dwelt with his people and they dwelt in righteousness and the fear of the Lord was upon All Nations so great was the glory of the Lord which was upon his people and the Lord blessed the land and they were blessed upon the mountains and upon the high places and they did flourish and it came to pass in his days he built a city and it was called the city of Holiness even Zion so Enoch is uh tells the city of building a story I'm sorry a story of building a city and that is the same as Zion and so as Joseph Smith's story goes on Enoch sorry is so Enoch city is so righteous that God eventually doesn't just take Enoch up into heaven but the entire city of Enoch and then there is the idea as people were literal apocalypticists that the second coming of Christ would come and the destruction of the world and when that happens and the New Jerusalem is built that also the city of Enoch would come back and it would take its place as a either a suburb or part of the New Jerusalem and so forth so the story inspired many peoples in the different Latter-Day Saint tradition churches including the strangites the LDS church in Utah and our own Community of Christ to create cooperatives so like it could be like agricultural cooperatives where people are working together sharing farm tools helping each other with Harvest and so forth they're often called orders of Enoch and so that would be the the name the uh the company would be called the order of Enoch and so forth um and they also um inspired later people to produce kind of social Charities uh things like orphanages uh old age homes senior centers hospitals and so forth our own and here in Toronto see NATO social housing charity was founded half a century ago in the same kind of tradition of trying to build zionic or enoch-like communities communities that are attempting to abolish poverty and and suffering and so forth as it's described in the in the city of Enoch where they had everything in common then there was no poor among them and so the Lord called it Zion um there's this weird echo in Mormonism um maybe you have heard uh in the uh Utah theology Utah LDS theology there's the idea that um the pre-existent Jesus and the pre-existent Lucifer are both literal sons of the heavenly father who offer competing plans of Salvation the pre-existent Jesus's plan is chosen Lucifer is upset and it has a rebellion and is ends up being fought off by Michael the Archangel and him and a third of the hosts of Heaven are expelled and Lucifer in his Fallen form becomes Satan um so we saw that the Boga Mills also have this idea that Satan L and Michael are sons of God and they also participate in the same war in heaven which is a it which is important in that it's also important in second Enoch um anyway and just as one interesting thing so um for the Boga Mills Michael the pre-existent is the pre-existent Jesus and so he becomes Jesus so that isn't what happens but Brigham Young Had A peculiar Doctrine out in Utah that Michael the Archangel was the pre-existent Adam and so he became Adam I think and that or Anatomy is God anyways I'm not really sure how the atom God Doctrine works but essentially the idea is that Adam is the God of this world and so forth this is a doctrine that the Utah LDS church after Brigham Young's death repudiated although it's still um understood in some of the fundamentalist polygamist uh Latter-Day Saints sex in in Utah and elsewhere so this is a particularly interesting book and I hope you've enjoyed kind of this summary as we've looked at the second Book of Enoch or The Book of Enoch the second one for Scholars sometimes called the secrets of Enoch sometimes called slavonic Enoch um so let's get to your guys questions I'm going to get a quick drink of water oh yeah guys come on ask questions if you we don't have too much questions so uh nadav Kravitz says why do you think the Genesis account says God took Enoch uh what do you think the original authors met so so I don't know I'm saying I'm suggesting that um that it could have meant as something as simple as that there is a uh you know that he died by accident in other words sometimes you will have a phrase you know God takes somebody before their time right so God took him before his time so it could just mean that um it but it could we I don't know what the meaning is and so it's a mystery and so one of the reasons why it's it's one of the few uh things that we have out of that list that's interesting the other one is um in the second list the post flood list there's a guy named payleg and he says and he was called payleg before in her his Day the Earth was divided it also isn't clear what that means at all you know but it's just interesting and so that has led to all kinds of crazy speculation so if we're young Earth creationists they they'll say that well yeah sure there was a pangea or something like that a supercontinent but then in peleg's Day the Earth was divided and so that happened just a few thousand years ago not you know millions of whatever millions and millions of years ago uh thanks uh Wendy uh for your support thanks Daryl uh Scott for your support um uh D Parker and Native also asked uh could second Enix 10 heavens be the source of Paul's cosmology in second Corinthians 2. where it says taken up into the third heaven taken up into Paradise and heard uh words not to be spoken which no man can utter that is so interesting I have not I haven't read that so I'll have to look at that since the interesting thing here that it that is going on is um Paradise is here in the third heaven and so uh that is not so this is not something that I have seen otherwise you haven't heard these are the sources so what do we have which is the second Corinthians 12. oh well no it's not necessarily A source it's it's a reference so it so a parallel exists in second Enix so yeah this is it's listed as a parallel and also the Apocalypse of Moses so so this is an idea that is running around and so um so it's an interesting parallel and so since um uh since Scholars have not posited that second Enoch is dependent on Paul and it doesn't necessarily mean that Paul is dependent on this it could be that these ideas are are floating around that that paradise is up in the third heaven uh and there must I have to look at Apocalypse of Moses to see what how it says that Apocalypse of Moses 37 5. that's interesting um so uh Leon asks would Joseph Smith Jr and Sydney Rigdon have had access to Second Enoch in the 1830s and the answer is no they did not have that so they did in the 1830s they I don't think they had um anything other than the Bible and the Apocrypha they later got a hold of um Joseph Smith later got a hold of the book of jasher and some of some other books but they would not have been working from that in the 1830s so this is a totally when I was bringing up all of those things about Adam God and Michael and all that kind of thing this is all um uh totally uh coincidental this is just Echoes and so this has nothing to do and in fact there's really very little in the main it's kind of in weird parallel with the bogamels the main second Enoch story is very unrelated has almost nothing to do with the Joseph Smith Enoch story the reason why uh Joseph Smith's Enoch story has a city in it is probably because there is a completely separate Enoch tradition the descendants of Cain in Genesis who were the first ones to build cities and and be Artisans and so forth and so those those are it's probably confusion there uh and the dev Kravitz also asks where did this apocalyptic idea and style of literature come from reveals uh Angels revealing and vindicating future Jewish judaisms or astrianism uh James Tabor calls it the bad idea that took over the world it certainly becomes popular here um so I I think it's it's evolving here it doesn't necessarily uh it doesn't necessarily have to be uh like a direct influence the stronger more powerful culture at the time though is going to be the Persian Imperial culture Mesopotamia and Persia together which are going to be um influencing Judaism more than Judaism is influencing them because Judaism is a much tinier little thing and not really as important at the time so I guess I would suggest that that um that sort of all of this idea of elaboration of angels and and and the end of the world and a cosmic battle between God and Evil and even the ideas of Saviors and so forth that it's probably the source of all of those which were not part of first temple Judaism the source of all of that is most likely modestism so it's zeroastrianism Persian it's from the Persians or Mesopotamian Persians too um Daryl Scott asks how well has second Enoch been known through history so I think it is not very well known so um so we did not have um there's not a lot of references to it um it's not like first Enoch which is pretty well known to New Testament writers like I say it also uh it also doesn't survive in its original languages or what it's likely original languages are and so that's why we we I had to have all those question marks around the whole provenance slide which is we really don't know it the text um so it's possible it's written originally in old church slavonic that seems amazingly unlikely because all of the ideas that are in it are so coherent with um first century second temple Judaism that kind of thing and have very little um parallel in let's say native old Bulgarian culture you know and so and so it does seem like it's almost certainly a a translation from a Greek original at the latest um but but because we have so little mention of it uh and it has so little influence in in uh early on that it we don't know so I'd say not very much at all um laurentiu beerton says um how has a slavonic community adopted a gnostic view of Christianity well so there's all kinds of different um reasons why in a lot of cases when you are in a um let's say when you're in a state that is at war with a a powerful State economically militarily culturally so the Bulgarian Empire the first Bulgarian Empire is essentially at war with rebelling from and and declaring its independence and power against the Byzantine Greek Roman Empire right and so um one of the things they need often you still want to be part of a powerful world religion so you adopt the religion Christianity but it sometimes makes sense to have a um have your own take on it because if you if you have your kind of own independent branch of it then you're not really subject to the patriarch of Constantinople anymore because you can say that guy's a heretic we know the real kind of Christianity and so there are ideas floating around there's a sect called the politicians that have been preserving Gnostic Christianity they transmit some of their ideas apparently to the bulgarians which create the kind of the bulgamel church and so forth It's probably very similar to the political Dynamic at work with why all of the um the German barbarians who take over the Latin West they they all conquer Italy and and Spain and Portugal and even North Africa and so forth what becomes those countries they conquer those from the Roman Empire they do that as Christians but they are Aryan Christians and so they have their own thing where their own part kind of Christianity is heretical from the standpoint of Rome and the local Roman population but that allows them to say well no you guys don't know what you're talking about because we know better be and that's why we conquered you and so that's probably how um we get a independent interpretation or sect of Christianity when there is a need to set yourself up against a political rival like Constantinople uh Michelangelo asks why do you think Enoch became such an important figure with Mystics and Alchemists with stuff like inakyan language or the Corpus hermeticum for example as Metatron so as you mentioned with Metatron so Metatron as an angel is in first Enoch and so that entire angelology is is really elaborated in in first Enoch and so it's a um so it is a a tradition that is going kind of going hand in hand and first Enoch is a much more popular and well-known text and so I think that popularizes Enoch as the as the important figure for Mystics and Alchemists the same way um so once he is known for all of that from the First Book of Enoch uh that that's kind of putting his foot into that camp um and the same thing um you know why Solomon becomes so important right so Solomon is also important for all of these kinds of Mystics and Alchemists and even uh summoning summoning demons and things like that because Solomon is said to have power over you know has learned all this wisdom and have all this power over it and so Enoch is even a um in some ways he's even a more powerful earlier precursor than Solomon because he's this guy who's living Before the Flood so even though this is an apocalypse that we just read as we saw um Enoch actually gets to see God face to face that's not something that otherwise is happening you know and the kind of post uh post Moses or certainly post-babylonian captivity era so um so Stephanie ceresi asks based on that that quotation I have from the book of generations where it says about payleg where it says he's so his name was that way for the Earth is divided in his day could that just mean like before there are boundaries and so maybe that's divided into territories absolutely when I was taking saying um for in his Day the Earth was divided and a modern interpretation has been that like the supercontinent of Pangea was divided into into the Americas and and the old world and the new world that was definitely not the meaning of that because they had no idea of the new world they had no idea of continental drift that's a brand new um scientific theory that's only you know only 150 years old or something like that I mean it's a very very new actually continental drift so it did not mean what I said that's a modern interpretation and it could mean like you say um in his day the world was divided so that could mean that it's divided into into different countries it could mean um it could mean it probably means it's a very good potential interpretation is that that's when the Tower of Babel story is supposed to have taken place so in his day the the world is one they were all one language and after that they were divided you know something like that uh but it could be the boundaries it could be just in his day they were the world was surveyed and he suddenly could Farm your own plot of land um uh Donnie Lane Gringo asked would John repeat if second Enoch is in the Apocrypha no it is not um is that a different Enoch account Enoch is not in the Apocrypha uh Enoch is uh the first Enoch is um is uh in the it's for most everybody it's pseudopacrifa it is in the um ethiopic uh Bible so the ethiopic and uh Eritrean Orthodox Churches consider that to be part of the Old Testament but it is not part of the Old Testament or the Apocrypha in um for Protestants and so it's published in that big book of pseudopigrapha that I'm showing you so volume one is through the Picker if it has first second and third Enoch in it but it does it's not in the Apocrypha Daryl Scott says um what is the angel in the image on the screen right now so that is actually Metatron so so actually Metatron um isn't in second Enoch so I made that title screen before I had recently reread before I had recently reread second Enoch so so actually that's that should be um that should be illustrating first Enoch or 30 Metatron the that's Metatron the angel who's not actually in second uh Enoch um uh nylon Diamond says uh I thought Enoch turned into Metatron or was that first unique or second Enoch so that's either first Enoch or third Enoch so so so or it's um or it's a later tradition based on first Enoch it is not um so like you say that's Metatron it's not um the picture is Metatron and I shouldn't have that up because because uh it's relevant to the Enoch tradition but it is not uh in it's not as part of the story of second Enoch um David T asked what's the nature of the Gregory under samyaza who swore at Mount Hermon to take human wives and successfully reproduced uh with those wives to create the Giants so um so yeah this is a a an obscure story um that uh that exists in Genesis and so one of the one of the few stories we have about the era before the flood is like you say the the sun's uh the sons of God however you want to say it it's a lot of times interpreted here like Euro doing with the grigory the um the second Enoch name for the Angels who have rebelled against God that they come to Earth and they uh they take human wives and then their their children are the Giants so probably um so the early accounts in Genesis are um are mythological and they are attempting to explain um uh you know like the mythological or heroic age and so forth and so there's an understanding uh in kind of the old-timey biblical mythology that there are certain Giants the last of which is essentially like Goliath and so where did those come from and so the idea of it is is that that they are this kind of uh demigod so it's the same kind of a thing you know Goliath is a giant or portrayed as a giant but he's also kind of a raid as like a homeric hero like Achilles and so Achilles is half half God and half human and so um for monotheists how do you account for half God half humans and so um the the way that this is explained here is having um Angels who are sons of God or whatever Angels a different order of beings Divine beings create Demi Divine you know half human half angel uh uh beings and so forth okay so Michael Rogers asks um okay Enoch is often read literally uh Angelic visitors or alien visitors is this because it's so entertaining or if it's entertaining or or a largely cryptic tone um so so these books have become really popular uh because uh yeah because they're they're so Fantastical right and so people like um people like magic people like uh you know people would like all of kind of these wild um um fan Fantastic fantasy-like stuff to be happening and so um and so I think that like you say uh one of the ways that um you know we've said that you know certain number of people you know identify as a Jedi in England as their religion right you know but not most of them do not you know aren't you know aren't really so into it that they believe it but if it could if it would be true I'm sure they would want it to be um then there are people for whom this because these books have Antiquity they're able uh living in a counter fact kind of reality they're able to say that this has you know kind of a weight of authority and it exists in in the material world or something like that um so that's probably why I mean but I I just find these texts to be interesting in teaching us what they say about both uh ancient and then also medieval peoples how they were reading these kinds of ancient texts and adding to the stories elaborating on the stories and so forth and it's a tradition really that has gone come down to the present as we saw uh even with Joseph Smith's midrash or uh restoration of new stories of Enoch so I want to thanks for all those questions um and thanks for participating in this lecture I want to remind you to save the date for our upcoming lectures so on June 13th next week we are going to talk about why Josephus matters two weeks after that on June 27th we're going to talk about how Constantine Changed History and then the week after that on the 4th of July we will talk about why was Jesus From Galilee so thanks again

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 83,199

Keywords: community of christ, christianity lecture, christian education, biblicar scholar, judaism, christianity, history of israel, history of judaism, ancient history, history of christianity, early christianity, lost books, scripture, forbidden books, new testament, medieval history, hebrew bible, old testament

Id: m7YW4qcp06M

Length: 97min 13sec (5833 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023