Inside the Book of Enoch

our topic this evening is the Book of Enoch and maybe you think well haven't you already had lectures on The Book of Enoch well one there's more than one Book of Enoch and the most recent lecture we've had is on uh a book that called second Enoch this time we're going back to First Enoch again we have had a previous lecture on this topic but we were primarily looking at essentially where did that book come from what's its context we're looking at um its canonicity in the Ethiopian and erran church and so forth this time we're going to do kind of a deep dive into that first Book of Enoch so we go to the New Testament to the Epistle of Jude which is the second to last book right before Revelation in the New Testament it's also among the very shortest books in the whole Bible it's only one chapter long uh by its salutation the epistle to Jud claims as its author Jude a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James and so by tradition and certainly probably by the intent of the author the particular there's more than one James as we've seen But the particular James or Jacob in this case is thought to be the leader of the Jerusalem Church the jamesian church that we've talked about James the just James the brother of Jesus and so in claiming to be uh Jude the brother of James which James is the brother of Jesus by the transitive principle the idea here is that this is um supposedly written anywhere claims to be written by Jude the brother of Jesus and indeed uh in the gospels in Mark and in Matthew um both of those have stories about Jesus's brothers and list Jude or Judah as the name of one of Jesus's brothers and by tradition these are usually understood to be Jesus's half brothers so uh these are brothers uh who are children of Joseph but not children of Mary or that's how the tradition normally works the more recent tradition Works um James the brother of Jesus and we may ask why why does um Jude if he's actually the brother of Jesus why would he call himself the brother servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James why wouldn't you kind of start with hey I'm Jesus brother in Christianity and part of this is um probably that there is a different uh degree of authority that is afforded to James within the jamesian church so James is actually the leader of the church much longer than the time period that Jesus was alive and we have Traditions that um for example a saying that exists in the The Gospel of Thomas um that says that uh both says that James should be the the leader of the movement after uh Jesus is no longer with uh the Christian the Proto Christians um and also that heaven and earth came into being for James so in other words the James is very important uh figure within the jamesian church sort of on the par with John the Baptist and uh and maybe having Jesus then being less important proportionately than to the rest of Christianity so the epistle um of Jude is itself literarily dependent on or dependent on it uses ideas from the Epistle of James um and then the Epistle of second Peter another New Testament text is literarily dependent on Jude so those all three of those texts in other words are related to each other and they all kind of represent kind of the thinking and position of this jamesian church and we'll definitely going to talk about the jamesian Jacobite jacoban church when we are talking about the um that lecture that we're going to do soon about why Paul's church is one so like the Epistle of James like the Epistle of second Peter um Jude is pseudonymous so even though we've been saying the author here is Jude the author is actually somebody other than the authority at names so um I think almost all Scholars say it's amazingly unlikely that um um the a brother of Jesus an actual brother of Jesus will have written um this kind of later first century letter uh which is in you know pretty passable uh well spoken Greek um especially considering again we're dealing with poor lower middle class lower class um Galilean not peasants but peasant Carpenter types family you know uh and so um anyway and it's also not not not likely it's a very common practice throughout the Bible and you know all of the um texts of the Bible that are meant to be from Associates and family members of Jesus are understood to be pseudonymous and so most Scholars date this to the end of the first century or the beginning of the 2 century and coming out of the jamesian church uh in terms of its content Jude is primarily a warning against certain Intruders it says quote certain Intruders who have stolen in among you so there are these Intruders in the Christian Community who pervert the grace of our God into debauchery so one of the characteristics of the jam jamesian church is uh that the members continue to observe Mosaic law they continue to keep kosher and so law is is very important in in their understanding whereas there are other Christian communities that reject law and who say that you shouldn't actually keep uh that law because instead uh they are focusing on Grace and so this idea of perverting Grace and turning it into debauchery may be a veiled reference to Paul and the Pauline Christian communities uh Paul in the letter to Romans for example taught you no longer live under the requirements of the law instead you live under the freedom of God's grace but for Jude the freedom of God's grace without law uh is perverted into debauchery as far as they're concerned so whether Paul is among the false teachers that Jude has in mind um Jude sees whoever these false teachers they are condemning as having been predicted by the prophets of old so in the Epistle of Jude we read it was about these false teachers that Enoch in the Seventh Generation from Adam prophesied saying quote see the Lord is coming with 10, thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all the Deeds of ungodliness that they've committed in such an ungodly way and of all the harsh things that ungodly Sinners have spoken against him so the coming of these ungodly ones these um false teachers these Christians who um who think that Grace is what's important and not not the law uh this is predicted by uh the prophet Enoch according to Jude and of course it's very common uh in the New Testament for authors to quote the Hebrew Bible the Christian Old Testament and so if we get our Bibles and we turn to Genesis in the whole long list of begats so the generations the genealogies that exist in the Book of Genesis we find the name Enoch and it is six Generations from Adam so in other words Enoch is Adam's great great great great grandson however we do not find this quotation that is attributed to him by Jude uh indeed there's no prophecy or statement by Enoch at all in the text more or less just mentioned uh and very briefly in in Genesis 51 18- 24 so we read in Genesis uh when Jared had lived 62 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 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 of Enoch were 365 years Enoch walked with God then he was no more because God took him and so that's it we don't have uh that quotation or any prophecy or anything more just that little bit uh like I say out of this genealogy list this list of begats uh Jared begat Enoch who begat Methuselah who begat lamech who begat Noah so the genealogical lists that we find in Genesis 5 and then later again in Genesis 11 are a probably a pre-existing text a text that's older than the rest of the Torah which is used by the editor or redactor of the Torah to connect different stories of the Genesis narrative into like one complete story they would have been separate texts or separate myths that are now uh brought together to give it a kind of Quasi historical feel though separated the geneologies fit together and uh many scholars think anyway they were part of an independent source pre-biblical source which is labeled the book of generations and if we look at the book of generations these are uh the times periods of the uh Patriarchs who live both before during and after the great flood Noah's flood Before the Flood they all live very very long amounts of years you can kind of see here in the the red is the amount of time before they have their son and then gray is the amount of time until they die the dotted line here that you see is when the flood happens and then after the flood uh sort of the the lifespans contract kind of rapidly until we get down to Abraham who lives 175 years uh according to this book of generations and so so um in terms of all of this then if we see Enoch you can kind of see Enoch is the one before the flood right here that we zoom in on that has a uniquely stubby bar because he uh after his the birth of his son Methuselah he lives another 300 years and then he walks with God because God God took him and so it's a very unusual almost the only thing that we hear about any of um the anti- deluvian uh Patriarchs between Seth and uh Noah anyway so that's all we know from Genesis he lived a much shorter time than the rest of the anti- deluvian Patriarchs he walked with God God took him God took him is plausibly a euphemism for Dying by misadventure rather than old age but readers very early on were intrigued by that phrase and they have always preferred to offer interpretations that are much more exciting and so certainly by the second temple period um this is understood may have originally been intended this way but it's understood by then that God took him up into heaven with him and so for example in the subate translation when the Egyptian uh Jewish translators translated the original Hebrew into Greek they rendered God took him using the Greek verb mety which means uh it has a sense of moving from one place to another so it's not just um it's more like transporting he's the transporter on him um this same sense is found in the 3D Century book of serak or ecclesiasticus which says Enoch please the Lord and was taken up as an example of repentance to all generations so he ascends to Heaven as in this uh medieval manuscript diagram of him ascending to heaven on a ladder so um even though the way the Bible works and as we'll look at the um the canonization process that there is an Old Testament then there is a big gap and then there's the New Testament that doesn't mean that there was no Revelation in that inter testamentary period of time uh the second temple period but the way the books were being written is different so the kind of prophecy that uh Jewish writers were having is a different style and they also didn't make it into uh the Canon with a few exceptions the most important exception being the The Book of Daniel um the most common style for uh prophetic texts uh between the Old Testament and the New Testament evolved away from the kind of direct poetic Visions for example in the original parts of Isaiah and also for example in the book of Jeremiah where um prophets are U speaking or saying uh proclaiming to speak uh the word of God directly thus saith the Lord um and they do it generally speaking in a poetic style of a poetic Vision so this moves to we call instead kind of apocalyptic visions that are shared through angels and so in apocalypses um a prophet will have an angel come to them and show them a vision uh and that Vision apoc the word apocalypse just means Revelation but it also comes to have the meaning that we have for it which is you know the world is going to end and here's what'll happen after the end of the world and so the authors of these apocalypses in this inter testamentary period this time after the Old Testament before the New Testament frequently assume the authority of a big biblical figure by for example pretending to be a famous person from The Bible and as if that person is writing it and so the Book of Daniel is famously uh written that way written hundreds of years after when um Daniel would have lived there's also though um pseudepigraphic Books of Moses of Ezra of Abraham of Solomon and of course of Enoch because of this reference in um this understanding in Genesis that God took Enoch to Heaven he became a very natural choice for later pseudopus and that's why we have more than one uh book attributed to Enoch one three of them um as we mentioned the word apocalypse comes from a Greek word meaning unveiling or Revelation and so when we sometimes call uh The Book of Revelations is sometimes called the apocalypse it's the same same word it's just the Greek and the Latin uh versions of that apocalypses come in response to unfulfilled prophecy and failures of the deuteronomic answer to the problem of evil so the earlier kind of answer to the problem of evil uh why do the righteous why do the Israelites suffer it's because they turn away from God and begin worshiping pagan gods and so on they need to return to uh the worship of the god of Israel of Yahweh and Yahweh Alone um however by the time the second temple period rolls around uh the Jewish people do that they do become you know monolist and then eventually monotheists they do not worship other gods they uh and yet they continue to be punished so uh the Persians continue to be uh dominating them later when the macedonians and Greeks under Alexander take over um they consider themselves to be even more oppressed why would this keep happening um also there are groups of uh second temple Jewish people who disagree with the uh Temple Elite so the sadducee class that controls the temple um is frequently uh collaborating with they're appointed as Persian officials or later as uh by the different Greek helenistic Kings and they are persianized and heniz and so uh the way they are running things the way they are running the temple is seen by some of the sects of uh second temple Judaism the ases uh the Pharisees in some cases as being um improperly done and so as a result the world seems out of whack the Jewish people are continuing to suffer they are not able to be uh independent and have their own right Kingdom and indeed even their local leaders as far as some sects are concerned uh are doing everything wrong and so drawing on Persian and zoroastrian ideas so Persia is this great Empire of which in the second temple period the beginning anyway Jerusalem is simply a Backwater provincial capital of a Persian Province um the pers Persian and zor asrian religion has um really interesting ideas about for example cosmic dualism suffering occurs in the world because the um great God of Light is being countered by a um a god of darkness and there is a ongoing struggle between good and evil but eventually that will um and in an apocalypse when this world will be destroyed and a future world will emerge which will involve a restoration of a paradise a resurrection of the righteous uh saviors and are associated with this process at different places and uh the wicked finally everybody who's getting this wrong all of Israel's tormentors and also all of the traitors they will will all and the wicked they will all be uh eternally punished and so all of these ideas which had not really been in um the earlier parts of the Hebrew Bible pre-exilic uh Old Testament instead now they all enter into the mainstream uh after exposure to Persian and zoroastrian ideas okay so let's look at these books of Enoch and specifically the one we'll be looking at tonight first Enoch so these are not uh not related texts so some books like first and second Kings those are really just two parts of the same book that's written at the same time uh in this case first second and third Enoch are not related books so they are written at different times by totally different uh authors or redactors so the earliest and most important one is the one we're talking about tonight first Enoch is what it's usually called um it's also often called The ethiopic Book of Enoch because uh while it was originally written in either Aramaic or in a combination of Aramaic and Hebrew possibly just originally in Hebrew but way less likely parts of it will have certainly been in Aramaic the full text survives only in gas which is one of the Ethiopian language is so ethiopic um some of it is very early so some parts are from the 300s or 20000s before the Common Era second Enoch is called slavonic Enoch and we've done a whole lecture on this one as well so that survives in entirety only in old church slavonic because it was uh important in Eastern Europe the bogam mils uh Christians well not Christians many the bogil uh religion uh looked at it and you had it as important um it's probably um from a lost I it's from a Greek translation possibly originally Hebrew um probably written in the first century of the Common Era the Christian era and finally we have third Enoch much less important book which survives in Hebrew uh but contains Latin and Greek lone words and so it's because it's from the 2 Century of the Common Era or later in this case 30d probably knows the other two books and is just writing more themselves so like I say this is going to be the focus first Enoch so the previous lecture the context of Enoch there's almost 500,000 views um but because we didn't have a lot of time to really focus on the text I thought well there's a lot of interest in this book let's go back uh and look at the context rather than spending so much time on the Ethiopian and erran too churches so if you want to um see that and you haven't watched that lecture I advise you to go look at the context uh in the previous lecture so first Enoch is a very influential apocalypse as we've already seen when I quoted it it's quoted it's um the book of Jude which is part of the New Testament Canon quoted it directly and so there's several um early Christian writers who seem to have considered first Enoch to be scripture and lots of the um early Christian writers also the earliest Christian fathers who are not scriptural but in the next you know second and third centuries also um looked at first Enoch and thought of it as being sort of part of the cannon so in addition to the quotations in Jude there are indications that the language that we read in first Enoch and actually some of its ideas its thought influenced several other really important new Tex toic texts New Testament texts including the gospels of Matthew of Luke with the book of Acts which is the second part of Luke the Gospel of John a bunch of Paul's letters have these indic ations so Romans Ephesians 1 and 2 Corinthians 1 and 2 Thessalonians colians 1 Timothy so that's both authentic letters of Paul and also um people who are writing later in Paul's name and in top of that uh the Epistles of First John Hebrews and R and the Book of Revelation so actually a vast um popularity throughout the early Christian communities since this is a span of um many different early Christian communities that are in a lot of cases in conflict with each other and they all are looking back to First Enoch it's also influential within the rest of the um family of pseudepigrapha so uh books like The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs The Testament of Abraham The Apocalypse of Abraham the Assumption of Moses the fourth book of Ezra the second book of baroo all of these kind of second temple period apocalyptic pseudepigraphic literature also are aware of first Enoch and are using ideas that are there and on top of all this there are uh lots of fragments of first Enoch that are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls so this is also um in addition to being important to early Christians it was also important as whether it's scripture or an important text anyway to other uh Jewish sects of the second temple period specifically the essin at kumran who uh were the people who kept the Dead Sea Scrolls so how do we get the text I've mentioned that first Enoch and its full version survives only in gayes only in ethiopic there's actually two major um versions that have come through in ethiopic so one the alpha version is thought to be more closer to the Aramaic original there's also a beta uh set of manuscripts that have additional edits and additional additions um and so anyway there's different components that we have but the first the whole text is only existing in that ethiopic translation there may have been a Hebrew original if so it's lost um actually as we're going to see this text has many many component parts and so maybe some fragment of it or some component of it is written in Hebrew but a lot of them probably were a lot of components of it were probably composed in Aramaic uh we know from another um second temple period apocalypse The Book of Daniel The Book of Daniel is partially composed in Hebrew and partially in Aramaic so these languages are both in use the one as a lurgical language the one as the everyday language so Hebrew uh the older language and the Aramaic has come to displace that as the linga franka of the Levant in the second temple period so uh be that as it may if there was a Hebrew original or not there are some 11 Aramaic fragments of first Enoch that have been recovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and some of these include whole big section of Enoch that don't exist in the ethiopic version so um there's more than one there's more than one book of this you know there's a bunch of different material and that's some of it is uh is housed in different Traditions there was a Greek translation uh of which uh only a small fragments survive um some of the you know sometimes the ethiopic books are translated directly from Aramaic and sometimes they go through this Greek translation so uh I I think it's not entirely clear how much of um the ethiopic version the full complete version U may have made it through the a Greek intermediary to get to us um certainly the uh the Latin fragments that we have our translations probably from the Greek and it does seem like maybe the Coptic tra fragment that we have we also have a a cc fragment um which is probably because of how close syak to Aramaic it's probably going back to the Aramaic um in in any event um you can see just based on how many of these uh languages we have fragments of this text surviving and it was a popular text even though uh it didn't survive in all of the other languages only in ethiopic part of the reason for that is that while it's um really popular with the earliest Christian fathers including people like tertian by the time we get to Augustine and Jerome um they don't like it and they don't think it's they think it's not uh going back to the real Enoch and they are not seeing it as scripture and so Augustine is ultimately um the guy who makes a council where he lists what the what what books are going to be in the Canon um he it's just a local provincial Sinn but because that ends up being the the final list he he is one of the people who's influential and so it doesn't make it into um the bulk of the Christian Canon of the Bible like I say it's in the Ethiopian and Eritrean uh Church's Bible so that's how the text survives and has come down to us in its present form it's a relatively long text um it's sub subdivided into five major books but as we'll see these books even are compos composite books uh that include fragments of earlier texts so it is really in of itself its own little bible its own little Library so of these books they are the book of the Watchers which is an expansion of the Genesis story before the flood the anti deluvian parts of Genesis um next is the book of similitudes which are long apocalyptic Parables then we have an astronomical book that discusses the enoic calendar the calendar of Enoch here uh then we have a book of Dreams and visions that um has two different Visions the second of which is sometimes called the animal apocalypse um which is making the Bible into a story with the bunch of animals which will be it's fun maybe to make a kids movie out of but anyway which also takes um uh the history down to I me from the Bible times all the way down to the time period of the mccabes obviously the Contemporary era when the book of dream Visions was written and then from there it predicts a future future that didn't happen but a coming an IM imminently coming apocalypse and what the world will be like at the end of the world and after the day of judgment and we end with an epistle to Enoch which is itself a composite of a bunch of interesting little texts and so of all of these um major sections um these are probably a composite of earlier texts which were not um which were separate so there was probably a book of the Watchers a book of Parables of Enoch an astronomical book A book of dream visions and an Epistle of Enoch which is itself like I say made up of other component texts all of these were edited together by by a re a redactor who um left kind of a final after note at the chapter 108 the end the end note of this and so Scholars um date the book of the Watchers to the fourth or 3D centuries and the astronomical book maybe to the 3 century and so those are kind of the earliest parts and maybe I'm going to say the most important parts and so those are the parts I'm going to spend most Time on tonight then there is this um Parables of Enoch so that's Parts could be from the first century BCE but there may be parts that are written some some Scholars say as as late as the third Century of the commoner third Century ad um it's not clear because maybe what's happened instead is there has been Christian interpolation where some Christian stuff has been added and that's that's taking a an earlier Jewish text and kind of christianizing it and so that's making it seem later than it is so that's why it's kind of a big range there question mark depending on how that um how those were put together um then like I say we have this book of dream visions that comes right down to a um with that animal apocalypse that comes right down to a particular moment in history it gets history firstus is the Bible but then it gets history right all the way down to the maban revolt and around the time period of 1 63 to 142 that's when it ends so that's when we know it was written because then after that it starts predicting a future the world is going to end really soon and all that kind of thing that apocalyptic part uh which did not happen and so that's why we can date that and then like I say um there's this Epistle of Enoch which is written maybe in the second or 1 centuries BCE so we'll look at these in turn especially the book of Watchers and the astronomical book so the book of Watchers earliest component of first Enoch um definitely has like I say sections that maybe date to the third and fourth Century the text expands on the brief story in Genesis chapter six where the sons of God take human wives giving birth to the heroes of old and it also is kind of an expansion of the account of the beginnings of civilization that's found in Genesis chapter 4 four so why don't we look at those because they're really short and see what uh the source material the author is working from in the Bible in order to expand out a much much much larger account so in Genesis 6 immediately prior to the flood story uh we read when people began to multiply on the face of the Earth and daughters were born to them the sons of God the sons of L saw that they were fair and they took wives for themselves of all they chose then the Lord said my spirit shall not abide in Mortals forever for they are flesh their days shall be20 years so um as we talked about uh recently in our baale and Asher lectures the sons and actually our angelology lecture the sons of L are traces of old gods in a Prem monotheist Israelite Pantheon over time these gradually reduced to angels and they're definitely understood as Angels by the time we get to the second temple period and the readers the authors of the various parts of the Book of Enoch understand that that way um that section in Genesis continues the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went into the daughters of humans Who Bore children to them these were the heroes that were of old Warriors of renown so from this really brief passage we understand that The Offspring of marriages between human women and these gods or Angels uh the sons of L become the heroes of old Mighty Warriors like the demma gods Gilgamesh and Heracles from uh Samaran and Greek mythology along with the Nephilim which is a Hebrew word for ones who have fallen and this is usually translated as Giants but they're also sort of semi Divine Giants uh who are maybe kind of similar mythologically to the Titans in Greek mythology and the jotar in Norse mythology the this idea of an earlier more primordial group of gods that the more recent Gods uh fight with so nefilim so another brief passage in Genesis also influences this first component of the Book of Enoch the book of Watchers the book of the Watchers then Cain so Cain is uh first son of Adam and Eve who kills his brother Abel and so after he's killed Abel Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the Land of Nod East of Eden Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch and he Cain built a city and named it Enoch after his son Enoch so in Genesis as we have it you know this is not too many people on the Earth yet that we have names of anyway in Genesis and Cain's son named Enoch you know so this is Adam's grandson this though is a very different person at least in the Genesis as we have it written from Adam's great great great great grandson Enoch who is the son of Jared the person who is the um Enoch that we're talking about in this book but it's interestingly here that we have uh also in Genesis another Enoch and um a point of confus usion you know as people um later are writing their own Traditions about Enoch in the um uh in the restoration tradition in Mormonism in scripture written by Joseph Smith um this he creates a whole long story or tells a whole long story about Enoch and the Enoch that he's talking about is the Enoch Who Walks With God but that Enoch builds a city the city of Enoch uh which is taken up to heaven and so um I think it's probably not a coincidence that there is this other Enoch here and there's a city named Enoch in Genesis in terms of um uh inspiring Joseph Smith's idea about a city of Enoch so that uh story in Genesis 4 continues to Enoch was born irod and irod was the father of mahu and mahu was the father of methusael and methusael the father of lamech lamech took two wives the name of one was Ada and the name of the other was Zilla adabor jabel he was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock his brother's name was Jubal he was the ancestor of all those who play the liar and pipe Zilla bore tubalcain who made all kinds of bronze and iron tools the sister of tubul came was Nama so um we have actually competing genealogies in Genesis um the main one the kind of line of Patriarchs as it later or as it's most understood the righteous Patriarchs uh Adam and Eve have a replacement son after Abel is killed and Cain is exiled who has enosh then Canan mahel Jared Enoch Methuselah lamech Noah and then Noah has three sons who survive after the flood Shem ham and japeth um but in the that comes from the book of records uh like I said this is this idea of a a pre-biblical um source that the biblical re redactor is adding in to create the Book of Genesis um but the yahwist Source the J sorus Who's one of the main author authors of the Torah uh Genesis has this other genealogy where Adam and Eve bear Cain and Abel and Abel was killed then Cain's kid is Enoch who bear irad who belt mahel to meusel then lamech and lamech's descendants but you can kind of see on here there's some repeats so lamech is at the at the B at the end of this as is Enoch higher up and then mahalalel and you know Methuselah have ones that are sort of similar but are not quite the same and but it's possibly what's going on here is there are pre-biblical Traditions that both of these sources are drawing from and aware of and they're telling the story differently so in some cases maybe Enoch and lamech here are not actually different Enoch and lamech the way they end up being in the final Bible but are rather a different tradition about Enoch and lamech so so be that as it may chapter six of first Enoch um in other words from the book of the was Watchers is an expansion of the Genesis chapter 6 story and here um the sons of L the sons of God are now explicitly called Angels so in the book of the Watchers we read it came to pass When the Children of Men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters and the angels the children of Heaven saw and lusted after them and said to one another come let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children and Sam jazza who was their their leaders said unto them I fear you will not indeed agree to do this deed and I alone shall pay the penalty of a great sin and they all answered him and said let us all swear an oath and bind ourselves by Mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing then they all swore together and bound themselves by Mutual implications upon it and they were in all 200 200 of these Fallen Angels who descended in the days of Jared so uh the father of Enoch who descended on the summit of Mount hermod and these are the names of their leaders Sam laaz their leader ARA remel cabel tlel remel Danel ezel Barak qual Asel armaros badel Nel zakel samel I don't need you're liking all these L names satel turel Jamel serel these are their Chiefs of 10 and all the others got together with them and took unto themselves wives and each chose for himself one and they began to go into them and to defile themselves with them and they taught them charms and enchantments so they're now teaching the wives here Magic and also the cutting of roots and made them acquainted with plants so herbology and the women became pregnant and they bear great Giants whose height was 300 cubits so maybe 450 ft tall these giant Giants the length of Noah's Ark who consumed all the Acquisitions of men so these Giants are so huge that they're consuming everything that the humans can possibly grow and the when when men could no longer sustain them the Giants turned against them and devoured mankind so they're so much bigger than people and so now they're just having the people for snacks so these excerpts sort of show how the book of the Watchers author you know has kind of greatly expanded the tiny kernels that he found in Genesis um so the little reference that we had to the sons of L that's elaborated to a h of 200 Angels led by Sam jazza plus all of these other wonderful Ln names that we have for uh Fallen Angels so the angels are initially sent to watch over mankind hence the Watchers that's the book of the Watchers instead um they swear this pact among themselves to take human wives resulting in these Giants of incredible size however um as we already saw with the they was also teaching things like enchantments and and other other sorts of uh knowledge they were teaching to the uh Giants and the and their wives they also taught men and so Azazel Azazel one of these Fallen Angels taught men to make swords and knives and Shields and breastplates and made it known to them the medals of the earth and the Art of working them and bracelets and ornaments and the use of antimony and the beautifying of the eyelids and all kinds of costly stones and all coloring tinctures Sam jazza taught enchantments and root cuttings armaros the resolving of enchantments baracael taught astrology cabel taught to the constellations Ezekiel taught the knowledge of clouds aqu arquel taught the signs of the Earth shamiel the signs of the Sun sarel the course of the moon so essentially all of this um early natural philosophy ancient science um how meteorology Works how astrology Works enchantments and and reversing enchantments and so on is all taught by the Watchers the Fallen Angels the origin here then they're the origin of civilization which obviously then has a negative tint so if the if it's the evil angels that are C causing all of this or teaching all of this then there's sort of an attitude here that Civilization is itself uh corrupt so this results in Chaos on Earth uh The Giant children as we saw were eating human flesh and the Fallen Angels have taught everybody how to make weapons of war and also to wear makeup and that's causing a lot of chaos so all of this attention gets the attention of um uh Heaven's archangels and so we read then Michael uel Raphael and Gabriel looked down from Earth and saw much blood being shed upon the Earth and all lawlessness being wrought upon the Earth and they said to one another the Earth from her empty Foundation has brought the Cry of their voice up to the Gates of Heaven and now oh holy ones of Heaven The Souls of the people make their suit pleading bring our case before the most high so having um been alerted to the whole situation by the archangels and surveying the damage God chooses to correct the problem the only this essentially giving um what doesn't really exist in the uh in Genesis an a moral excuse or for why does God destroy all the humans and everything in the flood it's because of uh uh there's a moral necessity The Book of Enoch here argues so then said the most high the holy and great one spake and he sent Uriel to the son of lamech and he said to him go to Noah so Noah is the son of lch and tell him in my name hide thyself and reveal to him reveal tell Noah that the end is approaching that the whole earth will be destroyed and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth and will destroy destroy all that is in it and now instruct him that he may escape and his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world so there's going to be a flood and Noah's we're going to get to the Noah story just like in Genesis but there's more about the angels in and actually the whole story is a lot longer in uh the book of the Watchers here in first Enoch so the Lord said to rafhael one of the other archangels bind Azazel uh hand and foot foot and cast him into the darkness and make an opening in the desert which is in the dudael and cast him therein and place upon him rough and Jagged rocks and cover him with darkness and let him abide there forever and cover his face that he might not see light so the Fallen Angel is to be cast into a pit and covered over with uh rocks and so forth and on the day of the great judgment M he shall be cast Into the Fire and heal the Earth which the angels have corrupted and proclaim the healing of the earth that they may heal the plague and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and taught their sons so we're going to wipe out this whole contamination process by killing everybody and wiping everything away and meanwhile the Angels the Fallen Angels who are the problem they are bound and thrown into a pit until the day of judgment um might realize here that the idea of a day of judgment again this is not something that exists in Genesis this is an idea that has come into the religion in the time period of second temple Judaism so like I say in keeping with the context of SE second temple period concerns the book of Watchers here is expanding the biblical text so it's developing the angelology now we get all these named angels and the demonology all these named demons and what they're in charge of it connects the flood narrative also with the idea of a future apocalypse so we had the other one but there will now be a day of judgment we're hearing about in the future and that punishment after the day of judgment is going to be by Hellfire so none of those things are pre-exilic themes those don't exist in Genesis for example after narrating the expanded story of the Watchers so we are now reintroduced in the book of the Watchers in chapter 12 to Enoch and so we read before these things Enoch was hidden and no one of the children of men knew where he was hidden and where he Abode and what had become of him and his activities had to do with the Watchers these fallen angels and his days were with the Holy ones the text now switches to the first person as though it were written by Enoch himself and so there maybe a seam in the text a new component of it I Enoch was blessing the Lord of majesty and the king of Ages and loow the Watchers called me Enoch The Scribe and said to me Enoch thou scribe of righteousness and so the Watchers give a big long appeal to Enoch to appeal on their behalf um which is an interesting thing to have happen so they they're being punished and they want to be forgiven uh Enoch presents the appeal but Heaven denies it and explains why uh they are going to be punished forever um and then after that Enoch is given a much bigger vision of the understand of the workings of the cosmos so he can understand this whole thing he's take it up into the heavens he Journeys through the Earth through sha the underworld and so forth so uh we read that uh in chapter 14 behold in the vision clouds invited me and a Mist summoned me and the chor of the stars and the lightning sped and hastened me and the winds in the vision caused me to fly and lifted me upward and bore me into heaven and I went till I drew nigh to a wall which is built of crystals and surrounded by tongues of fire and it began to AF frighten me and I went into the tongues of fire and Drew nigh to a large house which was built of crystals and the wall of the house were like a tesselated floor made of crystals and its groundwork was of Crystal and the ceiling was like a path of the stars and the Lightnings and between them were fiery cherubim and their heaven was clear as water a flaming fire surrounded the wall and its portals blazed with fire so just essentially having a much more this is also very typical whenever we're seeing kind of second temple period stuff this kind of vision of Heaven elaborated in uh in ways that are anything that you can imagine all the sort of CGI special effects that you'd have crystals and lightning and and flashing things fire um uh more glorious than can be described as the basic gist so um as with God's description that God speaks from the Whirlwind in the Book of Job Enoch in uh this book of the Watchers vision is allowed to see kind of the workings of the cosmos how how uh all of the universe fits together um which is generally envisioned as God keeping vast storehouses uh where he is able to store up lightning for example for later use when it's needed and so Enoch says I saw the places of The Luminaries which is to say the sun moon stars and so forth and the treasuries of the stars and of the Thunder and in the UT uttermost depths where we uh where were a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver and a fiery sword and all the Lightnings so it's got all the places where the stars and the Sun and Moon and everything are stored along with uh kind of the the bow or the the elaborate device that is used to shoot lightning and they took me also to The Living Waters and to the fire of the West which receives every Setting Sun so he's seeing where When the Sun Goes Down Over the Horizon the sun is stored or is received into the uh the Living Waters I saw the treasure iies of all the winds all the storehouses where God keeps wind for later use I saw God how God had furnished with them the whole creation and the firm foundations of the earth and I saw the Cornerstone of the earth and so again we're still dealing here probably uh in the second middle second temple period this is an early relatively early book with uh the uh Old Testament uh picture of how the world Works which is a the idea is a flat Earth with a uh hemispheric firmament of the heavens above it a sky above which are the waters that are above the firmament below the Earth the depths of shol and below that is the Waters of the great deep and then God exists above and outside of the uh Cosmos in the Heaven of heavens and the window can be opened up in the sky through which the uh Waters of beyond the firmament are able to uh cause the flood and so forth and so seeing those things the Cornerstone and uh on which the the Cornerstone on which the Earth is built sh below the Earth and so on The Angels Take Enoch on a journey over the whole earth comes eventually to a place with seven magnificent mountains we read quote in the seventh mountain in the midst of these and it excelled them in height and it resembled the seat of a throne and fragrant trees encircled the throne and amongst them was a tree such as I have never yet smelted neither was any among them nor were others like it it had a fragrance beyond all fragrance and its leaves and blooms and wood wither not forever and its fruit is beautiful and it fruit resembles the dates of a palm so Enoch here comes to you know maybe the Far East where he has a vision of Enoch I'm sorry of Eden and he sees the tree of life that he is very interested in and curious about so he asks the Archangel Michael who is guiding him at this point to explain what he's seeing and Michael answered saying this high mountain which thou Hast seen whose Summit is like the Throne of God is is his throne so you you saw it look like a throne guess what it is this is where the holy great one the Lord Of Glory the Eternal King will sit when he has come down to visit the Earth with goodness and as for this fragrant tree no mortal is permitted to touch it till the great judgment when he God shall take Vengeance on all and bring everything to its consummation forever it shall then be given to the righteous and holy its fruit fruit shall be for the food to the elect it shall be transplanted to the holy place to the Temple of the Lord the Eternal King so the tree of life is off here in Eden or in where wherever this is where the uh the throne is sitting all that stuff is going to get moved to where the temple is to Jerusalem when the apocalypse comes and then will all the righteous people be able to uh you know consume the the fruit of the Tree of Life For Eternity as they live an eternal life with God so this pre this anti- deluvian this edenic imagery is here mixed with the sort of post-apocalyptic predictions of a coming Paradise which is again a very common theme in the second temple period that um you know you can see builds into what Christian ideas are so you can see where all of these ideas they don't sound alien there are sort of alien for the Hebrew Bible these are development that have taken place um later I mean it's in books like Daniel Daniel's written later than this book but uh the pre-exilic books don't have this but this kind of um these ideas are not alien to New Testament Christianity as the New Testament writers are very familiar with this book all right so we just looked at we just did a kind of a deep dive into the book of the Watchers um if we look at these other books I mentioned the the other one that's um old that I want to pay some attention to is the astronomical book the astronomical writings um which are chapters you should all say down there chapters chapters 72 through 82 so in the astronomical book uh Enoch is shown how the Sun the moon the stars and planets operate exactly as they are so um people before you've been observing the Sun and the Moon and everything like that Enoch is getting a sure knowledge here of how they work so we read at the beginning of the text the book of the courses of The Luminaries of heaven so in other words the Sun and the Moon and the planets The Luminaries uh the how they're moving in their courses their relations of each according to their classes their dominion and their seasons according to their names and the places of origin and according to their months with which Uriel the Holy Angel who was with me who is their guide showed me and he showed me all their laws all the laws of how the heavens and all astronomy is working exactly as they are and how it is with regard to all years of the world and unto eternity until that time when a new creation abides forever is created so in other words until we get to the apocalypse and we're going to have an end of the world in in a in a new time this is how uh the heavens work and so this book is talking about the important question of the calendar since ancient people use um Heavenly observations to understand you know what time is it what day is it what month is it and so on so for all of us who we we get all of our the calendars on the phone everything's on the phone the phone tells us anything we want to know but before that all existed when we went outside when um we didn't live in a city with light pollution like I have where we don't can't observe almost anything and we have all of this um uh artificial light the way you would live would be much more in tune with the natural Calender and um there are several units of time that would have been obvious from observation of course this begins with the day and we still pay attention to days you know a day consists of sunrise to sunset and then all of the time period of Darkness nighttime until sunrise again and so from this period that period of time that's a solar day doesn't you can measure it either way so we measure it from the beginning of the day to the end of the night or actually from the middle midnight is where where we do it modernly obviously um uh Jewish people do it the opposite right so it comes at sundown is when the when the day starts but it's essentially the same length of time um of course the day the length between day and night changes so at the Equinox day and night are equal durations but in the summertime uh the day is going to be longer and the night is going to be shorter and in the winter like now um the day is shorter and the night is longer but the solar day period is still the same length so that's a unit of time that we can observe and measure the solar day so if we take the time period uh from Equinox to Equinox you know from the vernal equinox to the vernal equinox If You observe that they getting longer and longer and then shorter and shorter until they're back to being equal then that time period that passes is a solar year that's one year year long and we call that a um a tropical year which is to say the time that takes between the equinoxes as opposed to a siderial year which is the time it takes if you're watching the sky for the sun to get to the same spot it is against um uh against the constellations so the sun is also moving in the sky against the constellations which are fixed at least its observation it seems to be moving obviously we're actually moving but observation wise the sun seems to be moving against the fixed constellations the siderial year the star year is actually 20 minutes longer than the tropical year but the tropical year is what's important for the seasons so that's the year that we'll talk about when we're talking about the solar year here so that's a unit of time we also have the observable month and so the time period from when the month is the moon is totally black as it's waxing crescent getting to the point of being a full moon and then a waning crescent and down to uh black again so that same time period That's a lunar month so um we don't observe these very much but we still talk about days and months and years these natural time units if you're worrying about if you're an ancient person who's kind of worrying about making a calendar however uh do come with one little problem and that is the units do not actually match up so we have a day we have a month and a year but the year isn't any particularly you it's not an even unit of days the year lasts 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 50 45 seconds and so as a result of that if you were just trying to have you know if you're if you're just measuring days up and saying now that it's a new day it's the it's New Year's Day um if you the calendar would get off so you would 3 65 but it gets off if you just uh don't have any way to correct it likewise the month is 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes 3 seconds so um so again if you just are numbering the days and you're saying every 29th day you're having a new month um that will get off very quickly because uh the month has got an extra half a day in there and finally same thing if you're trying to line months up with years there's 12.37 months in a year as opposed to just 12 and so these don't line up as you're trying to make a calendar the easiest solution um comes up short so if we say well months are 30 days long well that's 11 hours too long and so if you just made a month 30 days it wouldn't take too long until your uh months cease to line up with the the actual phases of the moon they would get off pretty quickly likewise if you're going to make the year be 12 30-day months in other words you're going to make the year be 360 days then that's 5 days too short and so it wouldn't take very long for your calendar year to cease to line up with those equinoxes and so the spring would constantly be moving and all the seasons would be moving and at a certain point you're having you know uh winter in in in the northern hemisphere you're having winter in July at a certain point because uh the calendar is moving around so as you know in the modern calendar the Gregorian calendar the Christian calendar it is a solar calendar which is slightly modified from the calendar uh that the Romans had traditionally but that was substantially overhauled by Julius Caesar so What's called the Julian calendar the calendar aligns with the solar year so as we said the solar year is 5 hours or so longer than 365 days by consisting of 365 days most years but as you know uh we add an additional day a leap day every four years and then there's other little fixes to to fix that over the like over centuries and so on and so that's how there is an intercalary day in order to continue to make the calendar line up with the solar year however because the months are aligned to the solar year they don't correspond with the moon's actual phases if you want to know the moon's actual phases you have to look it up on your phone you have to have a calendar which will tell you oh there's a full moon tonight or oh there's a new moon tonight you don't know that by based on the fact that it's you know December 1st or February 1st because the months don't line up to the moon's phases in our Christian calendar the Islamic calendar by contrast is aligned with the cycles of the moon so uh it has 12 months which correspond to the beginning of the lunar cycle and maybe you've seen when Ramadan is going to start the month of Ramadan it have they have to be observing the moon and the lunar cycle in order to decide when Ramadan is starting uh the officials clerical officials and so the result of this though is that uh the Islamic year is only 354 or 355 days long and so as we know that's far shorter than the length of a solar year 365 and so on and so as a result um in the Islamic year the Year seasons do continually shift and that's why when Ramadan is is constantly moving against our Gregorian calendar um because it is not they're not using they're using a lunar year that is much shorter than the solar year so um the Rabin calendar the Hebrew calendar in Judaism is kind of a compromise between lunar and solar it's called a Luna solar calendar so the months in the Hebrew calendar Al do align with the lunar cycle just like the Islamic calendar but as the seasons begin to drift out of alignment um an intercalary month is added so a whole leap month is added every second or third year which causes the overall calendar to catch back up to the solar year so it was already observed back in Antiquity that every 19 years you know they don't line up the the lunar and solar Cycles but every 19 years they do align and so if you um uh if you add um an additional month at various points into your lunar calendar you will be able to have enough months to every 19 years you have a cycle renew itself but in the meantime because these are added kind of ad hoc as they're needed every two or three years um not a hoc but they're at a cycle uh the the calendar is slowly getting out of alignment on either way and but it's always uh always lined up with the lunar cycle and it's in generally generally lined up with the solar cycle but always a little off okay so just as the Christian calendar we mentioned that's not original Christianity that's not Jesus didn't come down and say what uh now it's going to be the month of July now it's going to be the month of August uh you can tell tell by the name juuli Julius Caesar and August Augustus Caesar you can tell that this is coming from the Romans in other words it's adapted from the Pagan calendar of Rome in the very same way the Hebrew calendar has its Origins um the earliest version is from the Sumerians but it's uh adapted and and created from the Babylonians and so um was adopted uh by the Babylonians we've talked about how much um influence uh uh Persia and Babylon had uh on second temple Judaism it might have been already adopted before that uh before even the E uh before even the Exile uh but certainly by the during the Exile and afters afterwards uh the Hebrew calendar adopted even the Babylonian names for most of the months just like we have uh the Pagan Roman names for our months still so so even though though that became um uh the calendar for most of the sects of Judaism in the second temple period and we can even see um from a fifth century CE synagogue From Galilee um this is a decoration in the synagogue that's of this that as of a of a zodiac and so in the middle of it is the god Helios with his Chariot of the Sun and all around it are all the constellations well the constellations of the zodiac uh line up with the Babylonian calendar with the Hebrew calendar um and this is presumably why that becomes a decoration in the synagogue nevertheless not all second temple Jews agreed and some of the sect sects really U rejected using the Babylon calendar and that is especially true for for the SC scenes so for the qur sect uh who are the people who created the Dead Sea Scrolls so just as an aside what about the week you know so so we have how the the days how long the days are how long the months are and how long years are and how they don't line up with anything um so we also have this 7day cycle of the week so this is presumably um it was begun by the Sumerians but promoted by Babylonian astrologers and astronomers also promoted by the Persian Empire based on the fact that there are seven planets and in Antiquity the planets are all the moving uh things in the heavens so Sun and Moon are planets along with uh Mars Mercury Jupiter Venus and Saturn those are the visible planets um and so the the days also follow that cycle and are named for um uh the same planets although they're in a different order so the planets uh circling the earth as far as the Ancients that were understood go the Earth is in the different spheres Moon Sun Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn uh the days of the week are in the wrong order for that but it's uh related and then in English um the Norse or Germanic actually equivalents of um of some of the Gods so Mars Mercury uh Jo and Venus are given over to their Germanic anglosaxon variants and that's why we have Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday all right so how does this week this 7-Day cycle that has been going on for thousands of years what relationship does the weak have to Gregorian calendars months and years and so the answer is there's none it's free floating so if we if we think about it you know this is why when we have holidays like the 4th of July or the 25th of December or whenever it is that those um dates the ones that are about a date or New Year's Day that those are continuously moving what day that's on so it's because the days just follow one after another so it's always uh Sunday follows Saturday and Monday follows Sunday that goes on and on forever no matter what month it is no matter what what year it is and so on right so it is a free floating cycle that is in fact not actually related to months and years so while the week had its Origins among the ancient samarians so in the third Millennia even BCE it obviously took on some important religious significance in Judaism so every seventh day in the law of Moses is made a Sabbath so work is supposed to cease one of the Ten Commandments is remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy so this idea was even worked into the Priestly creation story in Genesis where on each individual period of time called a day over the course of six days creation uh happens and then on the seventh day God rests there's a Sabbath uh and so the week is elevated to being Cosmic and and even divine within uh Judaism and Mosaic law so in addition to a weekly Sab Sabbath Mosaic law talks about a Sabbath year so which is to say the seventh year when land is left fallow so when you are growing crops at a certain point uh crops will will deplete the soil and you have to leave nowadays we rotate crops but in this case the idea is you would leave it fallow and just not Farm it for a year let weeds grow and let the soil replenish uh be uh so you can start again a Sabbath year and also on that same Sabbath year uh debts although not to foreigners we let's not go crazy here debts that you have to your neighbors are to be canceled and there other other things release of captives and so on on the on the Sabbath year we had a whole lecture on the book of jubilees which is another one of these uh apocalyptic books in this case it's a retelling of the Bible by making a history that is really um uh zealously excited about the idea of Jubilee years so everything is occurring over the course of uh essentially 50-year period of time or 49 period of time so at the end of a seventh year you have a Sabbath at the end of 7 sths of years years 49 so a jubilee um it becomes an important um sevens become very important in this so um jubilees is one of the books that the kumran people like uh the essin and like I say different Jewish sects promoted different calendars so here we go from The Book of Enoch the astronomical book uh we get this authoritative so solar calendar the Archangel Uriel shows Enoch that God has actually crafted the cosmos with a solar calendar in mind so you're not supposed to be using this Babylonian Luna solar calendar that becomes the Hebrew calendar uh that the Sadducees and the rabbis are using no this is a solar calendar that has God is uh is providing and so we read in 1 Enoch chapter 72 this is the first law of The Luminaries the luminary the sun has it it's rising in the Eastern portals of the heaven and it's setting in the western portals of the heaven and I saw six portals in which the sun rises and six portals into which the sun sets and The Moon Rises and sets in these portals and the leaders of the stars and Those whom they lead six in the East and six in the west and all follow each other in accurately corresponding order as many windows to the right and left of the portals so so the whole system is set up with doors and Gates and portals and there's different ones that the Sun goes into and when the Sun goes into it at different times that is causing um uh you know that is that's causing it a different time that is it corresponding to Seasons uh and this the Enoch and uel here they go into great detail how this all works cosmically and that's why why we have to follow this calendar that results uh from this and so accordingly the calendar presented in Enoch gives a year that is 364 days long so you probably in Remembering that's a little bit too short for a true solar year but it's close it's a lot closer than a lunar year uh the Enoch year is divided into four equal seasons so an advantage of 364 as opposed to 365 and a qu is that it's much more divisible so these four equal seasons are able to be 91 days long each and each of the seasons is 3 months long and so there's two 30-day months followed by a 31-day month that way you get up to 91 * 4 um in addition there are no intercalary leap days and so this 364 a day year is going to get off over time not too it not won't take too long for it to start getting off we know we need a with 365 days we need a leap day every four years so this is getting off every year and there are also um no leap months meaning that the calendar floats floats free technically of both the lunar and solar Cycles over time only it is doing it so slowly so it is an inaccurate calendar but but um the problem doesn't change so rapidly as for example the Islamic calendar does in terms of the solar year where it gets off really crazy really fast it's a much slower decline but the most important thing so is that it stays connected to the weak so because um you can take 364 and divide it by 52 52 weeks and you get seven what that means is that uh the the the week days what day it is in the week the weeks and everything like that are constantly perfectly correct and always align so we don't have this thing where uh you know New Year's Day January 1st one day it's on a Tuesday and then it's on a Wednesday then it's on a Thursday no it is always on the same same day and so um I think even though you know sometimes this is considered sort of a primitive calendar because uh it both fails to accurately uh present present both the solar year and the the lunar uh month I think the reason it does that is because um what the author of Enoch feels here is the week is the most important thing uh because of the Sabbath okay so that's the oldest sections and really um the biggest amount of time I know that this already gone on for a little bit of time in terms of this lecture there are three sections left but I'm going to treat them much more um briefly so we have The Parables of Enoch the book of dream visions and the Epistle of Enoch so The Parables um uh are dated from as early as the first century but as I say they could be as late as the 3r century CE 1 Century BC um and so it's because they Christian images that might be interpolations or or maybe not depends on how it's interpreted um the text contains three lengthy Parables or similitudes all three of these are apocalypses they all explain the cosmos through astronomy and the elements just the same kind of thing as the rest of the text as we've already seen they are all predicting the end of the world final judgment the punishment of the Damned including those Fallen Angels the Watchers also predicting the Resurrection The glorification of the righteous uh the rise of a new world of paradise the final victory of the righteous um all of these sort of uh Cosmic apocalyptic um prediction sort of uh themes that are so Central to um some of the sects anyway in second second temple Judaism and certainly have an influence on early Christianity um so again like I say this is especially popular with people who uh with devout people who are looking to uh Jerusalem and the upper classes that are operating the temple and saying we don't like the way you are doing things we don't like uh the collaboration with either the first the Persians and then the Greeks and finally the Roman officials we want this to be changed so that we can um have a truly uh just world and so they're hopeful that there will be a cosmic intervention at the end of time which they assume will be soon okay that's book of Parables oops I'm sorry there that got put in so the book of dream Visions those slides were in interspersed there um in the book of dream Visions Enoch recounts to his son Methuselah two visions the first uh Vision that he has predicts the flood so of course um this is written many years you know obviously and this is written maybe in the in the 2 uh Century BCE so um you know the flood story is very old by this time but Enoch here pseudo Enoch is able to predict the flood that's going to destroy um the anti deluvian world that uh Enoch and Methuselah have grown up in and so Methuselah's uh uh grandson Noah is the one that's going to uh survive this the second is an allegorical uh retelling of Biblical history down to the time period of the Revolt of the mccabes had a whole lecture on the macbes the idea here is a um as the the helenistic empires the cusd and the tmes uh declined they left a little window for um a uh Jewish Kingdom to emerge briefly as independent in the um 2 Century BCE especially so this uh allegory is sometimes called the animal apocalypse because it retells you know all of the Bible stories and then um second temple period history down to the maban Revolt as an allegory where everybody is a as an animal and then then after the maban period it continues on to again the apocalypse and the coming new world and all those kind of things predicts an imminent end of the world which didn't happen and so that's why we can date this so much more closely to when it was actually written in other words it written at the time period of history that the author writes his history too and then all of his future predictions that didn't happen you know obviously after 143 BCE where which was when he was right so just want to give you a little sample of the animal apocalypse so you can kind of understand it um this is an allegorical retelling of part of the Bible and as I read it try to guess who these animals are so the lord of the sheep sent the lamb to another lamb and raised it to being a ram and a leader of the sheep instead of that Ram which had forsaken its glory and it went and it went to it and it spake to it alone and it raised it it raised that land to being a ram and made the lamb a prince and leader of the sheep but during all these things those dogs oppressed the sheep and the first Ram pursued that second ram and the second ram arose and fled before it and I saw till those dogs pulled down that first Ram whoa what is all that does any of that sound anything familiar at all I actually actually picked this out at random and when I read it I was able to piece together what I what what was happening so if we decode this thing um sheep in the animal apocalypse are the Israelites and individual Israelites are lambs and then when they have a leader king that's a ram and then we also have dogs the dogs are the Philistines and so what we've here is the lord of the Israelites sent a lamb Samuel the prophet to another lamb David and raised David to being a ram a king he made him a king of the sheep instead of that Ram which had forsaken its Glory so instead of King Saul the other RAM and so then when we have that first Ram King Saul pursued the second ram and the second ram in other words Saul pursued David David fled from Saul and I saw that those dogs the Philistines eventually pulled down Saul right so this is a retelling and this is what this whole thing is like so so you have all these bib Bible stories which you kind of have to know and then they're they're just lambs and sheep and all that kind of thing and so we have like for example uh just the kind of animals that you're getting out of it so the Sheep are the Israelites the Rams are the different leaders like David and Saul it talks about herds of sheep that'll be the individual Israelite tribes will hear he about wild asses and so that's the ishmaelites the BNS including the midianites wild bores are the and the amalekites Bears are the Egyptians dogs are the Philistines hyenas are the Assyrians then when we get to the helenistic period Ravens represent the cusd who live in Syria the king of Syria kites represent the toic Egyptians eagle the macedonians and finally foxes the little foxes are ammonites and moabites and so we get that whole thing retold all the way down to uh the contemporary history of the maban period And then after that uh the apocalypse continues uh you know until the lord of the sheep you know conquers the world for them and builds a you know after the apocalypse um you know so finally um the last uh section is a additional composite text so it's called the Epistle of Enoch but there's actually a whole bunch of different sections so one part is Enoch making exhortations or admonitions to Methuselah and his other children there's another apocalypse uh where an apocalypse of weeks where uh all of history is divided into uh different periods which again U predict uh an apocalypse uh very common theme that's repeated and repeated and repeated throughout this book uh there there's in the middle of this an epistle proper where Enoch is writing a letter to his children with more advice we have a fragment from an unrelated book of Noah and then finally at the end the redactor who's put this book together and all the other components together sort of writes a final conclusion to the whole big book uh of first Enoch and that uh is um what we have for uh going a summary of Enoch and that slide was out of order so I'm going to go back and find this one to end on and so I'm going to get a drink of water and as Leandro is uh collecting your questions we can uh field those um I want to uh Begin by recognizing and thanking for your support everybody who's made donations so Mark long sky blue 777 uh philipo denoto JM us Peg uh P I'm sorry paig shanesy Daryl Scott Michael Rogers and unrecognized talent who also says this is the best Bible study Channel on YouTube in my opinion so thank you so much uh for your support and also for uh your uh words your Delight in the channel we hope I'm I'm glad you're enjoying it um let's pull up here so I can read the next questions so uh Julie uh bazooki says what other pre flood patriarch who doesn't have a book of his own do you think would make a great hero of an apocalyptic story um well I guess I guess I would say that since we really don't have uh any any names um you know terms who doesn't have a book of his own so Seth definitely has a book of his own um and so there's a whole whole Seth tradition that's uh the the next son of Adam and Eve after as a replacement for Abel um I think that um I would be interested in following the um the lineage of Cain's family because I feel like those guys are busy inventing civilization having cities and uh there was the guy who invented musical instruments and that sounded pretty interesting so those are the only ones that we have any details of our Arc from Cain's family everybody else all we have is is pretty much a name in terms of the pre flood Patriarchs um in the second um in the second list the list that goes from Noah down to Abraham we have a second guy that's sort of like Enoch PG and we have the additional detail from him he's called PG for in his day the world was divided and so that is probably means that the Tower of Babel story is taking place when he was alive but it it also is just like that thing because God took him it's just this little little phrase that is um you know pregnant with possibilities and so um so that's an interesting uh PG would be an interesting hero you know post flood but anyway in the same kind of early time period um I also like uh you know in the post flood Times by that same kind of contemporary to Abraham times you know Nimrod the mighty Hunter before the Lord there he's he has in some of these books but um you know you can have a whole Apocalypse of nin Rod that might be interesting so there's a bunch of different ones that could Inspire uh writing still uh Winston Barz asks uh would you agree that intertestamental writings like Enoch are sources of New Testament beliefs in angels and demons the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the Soul yes yes I would definitely agree so these are um these are just showing the context of all this so uh the this is where this is U these are ideas that are developing and one of the ways they're being transmitted and remembered is by is through writing these texts and this is certainly one of the more influential ones and so yes this is where um these are the direct uh influences on early Christian ideas uh Winston also asks uh was uh first Enoch derived from the Genesis Apocrypha document in the Dead Sea Scrolls so I am not aware of that so I don't know and so it would also the question I would have it would be if if so i' have to look at it would be which part of it and so we saw that uh firsto was derived from at least five discret sources and actually more than that and I'm not aware that the Genesis apocryphon is any one of those so I think it's probably the answer is no but I would have to look it up elk of Antioch asks um where is the Land of Nod thought to be uh Isfahan or Asia or the Ganges and so um so it's East of Eden right so Eden is usually thought to be at East at the edge of the world and so and somewhere east of there I guess I don't know so I I I think it's a you know again this is a um a mythical land anti from the anti-an time period and so it's a anybody could decide uh where where they thought nod would be um you know somewhere somewhere to the east of where the um yist writer is writing which is you know they have a fairly limited worldview somewhere off in the in the Far East is the idea alpas Cav says why are the early texts seemingly obsessed with listing every name is it just a writing style of the time why does the reader need to know all of these uh lists of dozens of names um I think so I don't think you're probably referring to the um uh to Genesis and the maybe you are but Genesis and the bat list so the idea of that is to to show it's like a king list it's to show a a continuity with the beginning of time um and to try to give it kind of a an idea that as these Cycles are happening there is you know like a continuity and where're erors to this original person so that would be a genealogy list in terms of the um the Book of Enoch where they're listing off all of these uh the the the leaders of all of the the demons um you know at a certain point you know there was a talking about how the demons taught people how to do enchantments and how to uh the Fallen Angels the Watchers taught everybody had to do enchantments and counter enchantments and things like that um at a certain point you're using these names when you're doing magic even you're not supposed to do magic you know and so and so these names become important um so that you are able to uh you know in in terms of uh in terms of that kind of belief system a magical and Enchanted worldview Let's uh pull up again the where to paage shaaz and she asks at what point in Antiquity did uh the end of the world ideas begin what ancient what religion or ancient peoples were the first to Envision this so this is happening um um very early in in Zoroastrianism and so zor estrian ism is among the first what we think of as a world religion a religion that is different from um you know the earlier uh you know view of this kind of chaotic world that has mult multiple gods in a Pantheon um you know where we are just doing maintenance by uh by doing all the rituals necessary to maintain life and appease the gods and to offer sacrifices and all that kind of thing paganism um that uh we now call paganism but that is uh kind of consistent uh after animism a stage of of religion so the next this next kind of evolution when you start to have World Empires uh and great States um and Persian Empire being one of the the first really great multi-ethnic Empires um uh is also sees the development of uh of a Persian world religion that is the dualist religion and so uh there's one great God and then there's uh who's good and there's one uh rival a cosmic evil God the devil uh and that they are uh in combat and this explains the problem of evil why why there's suffering why there is all this torment in the world uh the good God is trying to uh stop that from happening but he's being thwarted by uh the evil God and all of the evil Gods little demons who are running around doing horrible things but you know we can we can all feel excited about that or be happy about it in zor asianism because at the end of time there'll well like there'll be a messiah there'll be a savior who will come uh defeat the forces of evil God will ultimately triumph over the devil the old world will be destroyed in a new world that is a paradise will U be born in its place and so I would say um whenever this is is in a thousand BCE or 900 BCE 800 BCE this kind of time period is when Zoroastrianism is developing I don't have the dates in front of me um and and it's probably the first and so then um um I believe anyway that then that religion influences uh uh the developing second temple religion uh especially when the Exiles are in captivity in in Babylon and they are Babylon ionizing they are um starting to speak um they're losing their Hebrew they're going to start speaking Aramaic and there's all of these influences that happen in that Persian period when the beginning of the first temple period uh Jerusalem is is simply a a provincial capital of a Persian of of a province of the Persian Empire uh Jason kukulu asks um if anunaki actually means um men of renown not uh Sky people could the sons um so the angel sons of Al and the nefilim Giants originally been informed by high ranking uh ancient kings that were mythologized um so we don't have any so we wouldn't have it so the um so Genesis only has that that very brief explanation right so we don't have U any uh we don't have any of the lists of those names so if we had a bunch of different names of uh in Genesis of of um who these men of renown are or who the nefilim names are then we could have said well that maybe those are are ancient kings that are being mythologized um so so yeah maybe as a general concept that's maybe where those ideas of Giants and and heroes and kings are coming from but we just don't have that we just have the briefest outline of that in Genesis and so then when they're um when they're created and elaborated centuries later In A Book Like The Book of the Watchers The Book of Enoch these are um we're taking that Source text and expanding it so it is not an ancient king that's being mythologized it's the source text um that is already authoritative it's the Torah that is the source as opposed to um a king so that's what I would say um Al alas Cav is asking uh what are they referring to when they're talking about a large house made of crystal didn't have they didn't have glass blowing or Hardware lead wear yet did they no so they're not um I don't think that they're talking about um so I mean there is there is glass manufacturing but I don't know that it's happening as much in the Levant there it's definitely a thing that I and definitely the Romans are known for that later but maybe not at this time period they having a lot of that what I I'm just envisioning here is they're thinking of things that are are gorgeous so precious gems crystals and rocks you know those are all uh and fire and things you know and so they're just trying to to Envision this and so I think it's sort of like U from the um the Superman movie from the 1970s you know where you go to the Fortress of Solitude and has all those crystals and ice and glowing and everything like that I mean there was it's just something to be very otherworldly they're trying to make a house that is God's house and so it has to be you know otherworldly and they don't have words to um describe it even at this point philippo denoto asks how far back can we track the current 7-Day cycle concurrently backwards in time are we sure it's really tues day today so so I know I know I tried to look this up to try to find out how early we know it's going um and I and I feel like um I feel like we don't know much past um I don't know 25 or 2600 years you know so so I think it could be going on a lot lot longer but I don't know that we have um I don't know we have the list of the exact days and that maybe a day didn't skip in there somewhere or other but I think it could be old a lot older than that but it's been going on a long time and and it's been called for example um the longest continuously operating uh Human Institution the the week because we've been following the 7-Day cycle and it's been the same seven days for at least over 2,000 years whereas most other things there's no continuity like that you know um the the rest of the calendar the the Gregorian calendar had a big reset um in in North America here it happened in the 18th century so a whole bunch of days were were lost in one of the years uh in order to bring the in order to bring the calendar back into alignment the way it was supposed to be when the the shift was done from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar so that doesn't have anything like that kind of continuity whereas the days of the week we've been going in that same cycle for at least 2,000 years years a lot more probably and so it may well be the the longest ongoing Human Institution um uh that's artificial um Michael Rogers says um would you consider books like Enoch and the infant gospel fanfiction expansion on popular stories so so there's this idea um uh in in Hebrew writing of of mid Rush which means which could mean like fanfiction but it's the idea of how can we do um how can we do when we don't have the details of something we have these questions how can we do thoughtful um positive you like uh writing uh where we am expanding and giving answers where answers don't exist but not contradicting the original text and so um so a lot of these are that kind of expansion and um and you know that could be that could be a kind of fanfiction but it's a fanfiction that is done um very deliberately where you're trying not to contradict anything and also where you're doing it with uh generally generally Pious intent and so so I would consider it that way yes and and and that continues to this day so there are um you know the Book of Daniel is an example of that so it's books that are that made it into the Canon as well um alfas Cav asks are there any guesses as to what period of time The Book of the Watchers is supposed to have occurred in are we talking pre-bronze age collapse yes it's supposed to be taking place in uh the pre flood so it's a mythical time period it's the Lost um golden age it's a different era of the of the world it's a Mythic time um but yeah way pre Bronze Age collapse so it's before before actual real history it's Mythic time long uh once upon a time we might say uh the elk of Antioch says dumb question how did Jesus end up speaking Aramaic instead of Hebrew in Israel it's yeah it's not dumb it's so it's the when the Exiles um returned um they began whether or not they when whenever it exactly happened um Hebrew began being displaced in the second temple period and it became the common tongue of all of their neighbors so their neighbors you know all began speaking Aramaic which is a very related language but everybody um in the Levant a certain point is all speaking Aramaic which is one of the uh lingua franka of the Persian Empire so the Persians use a couple different languages for Rule and administration and commerce and you're just going to get get along a lot better and be able to you know go to court and pay your taxes and and read the Royal instructions and everything else if you are speaking Aramaic and so Aramaic is also at a certain point it will have been would have been an elite language and so slowly trickles down and replaces uh down to what the what the Common People The Peasants are speaking that's how Jesus uh just ends up growing up speaking Aramaic by that time for centuries um as well there will a new Elite language Greek uh for centuries will have conquered and uh will be the language of the ruling Elite and then most recently in Jesus time um there's a new Elite language Latin that is for the military uh although uh the administration will still be done in Greek and so a lot of times when that happens um when there's a new Elite language a lot of times that's what actually kills off the um the previous early language so so it's like for example uh in the in the Roman Empire in Gaul people were still maintaining some of the Celtic languages some of the gulish languages but when the Germans conquered Gaul then the local people just couldn't have both they just kept Latin and then uh the Germanic was over top of it as a conqueror's language for a while until it eventually uh until they latinized the German conquerors in the case of France uh and it became French so let's um Allan young I'm on I'm distracted okay it's okay leandra's distracted because you guys keep asking questions which is good um so Alan Young asks did the Elio Prophet Joseph Smith have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls no so um this is not where he got any any any of these things from so some of these um some of these ideas uh continued uh on so um so for example even though uh The Book of Enoch does not did not survive in um the West some of these same ideas worked their way into um Jewish midrash writing and so there is a medieval Jewish text called the book of jasher or the book of jashar that uh got translated into English and Joseph Smith did get a hold of that in the um 1840s um that didn't necessarily inform his Enoch stories but it did uh inform some of his ideas later probably because he then had access to a book that had some of these same ideas written in the Middle Ages uh by a Jewish scholar so he did have access to some of these things and there was of course the Apocrypha and other other things but not to uh the Dead Sea Scrolls Captain hardlock uh said is the story of David being encoded with furry analogies in Enoch to perpetuate the story without some risk of persecution the encoding seems shallow otherwise yeah um I guess I don't think that that's happening for that reason maybe maybe there is a maybe maybe there is a anti- temple and maban Elite issue that's happening right when it gets down to the present day um but the the coding is so obvious that I don't think that you know once you I think you I think that the the temple priests in Jerusalem would be able to see that they were you know like a hyena that was in charge of God's holy place or whatever and some and then the and soon the the righteous Ram is going to come and unseat them and and drive all the hyenas or Jackal away or something like that I think that they would I think they would get the meaning so I don't know that it is actually um doing that I think it's just uh somebody got the idea of doing a very um you know a symbolic story so sometimes we talk about Jesus is the Lamb of God and we have a lot of these um this kind of imagery and somebody got that in their head and decided to do an entire book like that an entire animal apocalypse where they retell the Bible that way so um darl Scott asks is there anything in the context of the Book of Enoch which caused it to be especially valued by the Ethiopian church and therefore preserved there um I know that so it's hard to say that that's would be the case I know that it because they had it it has affected like uh the development of the Ethiopian church and so it is it continues to have an influence in how uh Ethiopian Orthodoxy understands things and understands Christianity I think that what happened was is that this was a book that early Christians liked a lot and that many early Christians assumed was biblical um but including some of the very earliest Church fathers but then what ended up happening was in the later um in the later uh you know like when it becomes a the Roman Imperial Church the last of these kind of um thinkers including like Latin leaders like Augustine and Jerome who were in charge of kind of U deciding what the cannon is going to be for Christians in the Roman Empire they they put the kabash on it and so then so then it's lost in the Roman Empire and the Ethiopians who are already off in their own thing um don't get the memo and just keep keep having it and I think that's why it's preserved there essentially is because of the um the fact that the Ethiopian church is it's own separate uh organization from the Roman State church that emerges and then later it's um and later it's cut off entirely so and so it have their own they don't have the same canonization process that the rest of the Greeks and the the Latin had together lambra says do you think the Fallen Sons built uh pyramid structures from Egypt to uh Mexico and India no don't it's an interesting question but yeah so but um so these are these are legendary figures and I know that people um love to they look at the pyramids and they see that these are such amazing things and they wonder how ancient people would have be able to construct them um and uh and the fact that there are the same kind of structure where you are piling rocks on each other and making a big art artificial mountain is one of the easier structures to create engineering wise compared to you know making a super tall skinny Obelisk or something that that is is more difficult and so it isn't um it's not uh it's not a to a crazy coincidence that different ancient peoples came up with that same form because of the way they they um did it was very different so the Egyptian use of that structure is very different um where you have a a large ornamental Mound that is over built over top of a tomb where the tomb is encased within it and underneath it whereas in um Mexican pyramids uh uh Central Mesoamerican pyramids you have um uh a temple that's built on top of a artificial Hill so it's the same form but it has a totally different uh idea and use behind it and so um you know those forms are what you naturally coincidentally come up with and ancient people were able to make them themselves without U fallen angels helping Tony 777 asks uh a great Mystic of our era said that Jesus was a greo Israelite and he comments on this so so the um there have been direct um Greek influence in uh Gile which where Jesus is from for uh you know very directly in terms of rulership for over three centuries um and um and there were greeking cities um just down the street you know that were established and so so there is definitely and actually there was Greek connections with the Israelites for centuries before the actual uh Macedonian the Greek conquest of uh Judea and Samaria and Galilee and so and so people um have made the comment that yeah um Jesus is coming from a especially um diverse Society uh where he might have known a little bit of Greek because he because for business you might have had to know how to do uh how to know some Greek words in order to um uh do carpentry in the neighboring town which is where all the money was and so that might well have been part of it so there might there may well have been lots of um Greek influences on Jesus but what I try to do is um stay very close to the sources and see where we we find some of those and uh when we try to do that when we do our lectures on the historical Jesus um so jeie uh says finally um I think someone was hoping I would in John would introduce himself I would introduce myself it might be nice for our newcomers to know uh who I am also so some are asking what my religion is so so yeah we don't usually do that although I do think that that does it is something that happens um in the comments they say who is this guy so my name is John HR I serve as the pastor of the Community of Christ Toronto congregation here in downtown Toronto Toronto Center place so this um uh congregation was first organized in 1836 so very long time ago and I serve as the 40th Pastor uh if you we can do one of those lines and history and charts of all of the predecessors uh to my to me uh Community of Christ is part of the restoration tradition uh and or related to uh latterday satis and Mormons and so that's why we sometimes talk about uh Joseph Smith we represent a a very Progressive uh uh branch of that movement so we are for example an lgbtqia affirming um and we have uh women in all levels of leadership so at our Church's headquarters half of our Council of 12 Apostles are women and and in fact actually last week um was just announced that the new U prophet and president of our church for the first time will be a woman president Stacy k um and so those are the back ground of the denomination in terms of my background um my ancestors first joined uh this church this movement Seven Generations ago so uh my great great great great grandparents just like the same four greats that separate Adam down to Enoch um and uh let's see I um did most of my uh schooling graduate work in medieval European history which I was working on becoming a medieval history Professor but then I got attracted away into uh working for University presses uh as a map maker as a u book publisher and so I went on a kind of different path that ended up leading me um back to uh focus on this now uh as my um calling later in life and so that's a little bit of an introduction so we'll be able to ask any one of those kind questions that you want um next week where we're going to do a question and answer from the beginning there's not going to be a formal lecture so please continue to send your questions in we'll address them next week don't forget to like to share this video subscribe to our Channel and always we very much appreciate if you donate and so please consider doing that it's Centerplace doca donate and next week we will like I say do that uh Q&A answer

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 47,805

Keywords: community of christ, christianity lecture, christian education, biblicar scholar, christianity, ancient history, history of christianity, scripture, new testament, exegesis, biblical scholar, theology

Id: _ETJ-c_nbHw

Length: 126min 49sec (7609 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024