The Book of Enoch: What Is It, and Why Isn't It in Most Bibles?
The ancient Jewish book of the Watchers, giants and heavenly journeys, quoted in the New Testament and preserved whole only in Ethiopia.
1 Enoch is a collection of five books written in Enoch's name between about 300 BCE and the first century CE. It tells of the Watchers and the giants, is quoted in Jude, and survives complete only in Ge'ez.
1 Enoch is a collection of five books written in Enoch's name between about 300 BCE and the first century CE. The Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–36) tells of the angels' descent, the giants and Enoch's journeys. The Similitudes (37–71) describe a heavenly Son of Man. The Astronomical Book (72–82) gives Uriel's calendar. The Dream Visions (83–90) retell history with animals as symbols, and the Epistle of Enoch (91–108) ends with warnings and Noah's birth.
The book was widely read by Jews and early Christians. Jude 14–15 quotes it directly. Aramaic fragments of every section except the Similitudes were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, some copied in the third or second century BCE. Parts survive in Greek too, including a manuscript found in a grave at Akhmim in Egypt in the 1880s.
After late antiquity it faded from most churches, but the Ethiopian Orthodox Church kept it in its Bible. The Scottish traveler James Bruce brought Ethiopic copies to Europe in 1773. Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821, and R. H. Charles's translation of 1912 (reissued 1917) is the standard public-domain version. Much of today's interest in ancient visitors goes back to this book: named beings descending on a mountain, a list of technologies they taught, hybrid children and a sentence of imprisonment.
The Book of Enoch dropped out of almost every Bible but was preserved complete for over a thousand years in Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia.
Scholars treat 1 Enoch as a composite work of Second Temple Judaism responding to the problems of its own time, not as writings by the pre-Flood Enoch.
