Chapter-001 The Books of Enoch
TheBooksofEnoch The Book of Enoch (Enoch 1) The book of the secrets of Enoch (Enoch 2) The hebrew book of Enoch (Enoch 3)
2010
Introduction The Book of Enoch (also 1 Enoch[1]) is an ancient Jewish religious work, ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is not regarded as scripture by Jews or any Christian group, apart from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which to this day regards it to be canonical.
Western scholars currently assert that its older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) date from about 300 BC and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably was composed at the end of the 1st century BC.[2] However, Ethiopian scholars generally hold that Ge’ez is the language of the original from which the Greek and Aramaic copies were made, pointing out that it is the only language in which the complete text has yet been found[3].
It is wholly extant only in the Ge’ez language, with Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few Greek and Latin fragments. There is no consensus among Western scholars about the original language: some propose Aramaic, others Hebrew, while the probable thesis according to E. Isaac is that 1 Enoch, as Daniel, was composed partially in Aramaic and partially in Hebrew[4]:6. A short section of 1 Enoch (1En1:9) is quoted in the New Testament (Letter of Jude
1:14-15), and there apparently attributed to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1En60:8). It is argued that all the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it and were influenced by it in thought and diction.[5] The first part of Book of Enoch describes the fall of the Watchers, the angels who fathered the Nephilim. The remainder of the book describes Enoch’s visits to Heaven in the form of travels, visions and dreams, and his revelations. The book consists of five quite distinct major sections (see each section for details): The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1 – 36) The Book of Parables of Enoch (1 Enoch 37 – 71) (Also called the Similitudes of
Enoch) The Astronomical Book (1 Enoch 72 – 82) (Also called the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries or Book of Luminaries. ) The Book of Dream Visions (1 Enoch 83 – 90) (Also called the Book of Dreams) The Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 91 – 108) The shared view[6] is that these five sections were originally independent works (with different dates of composition), themselves a product of much editorial arrangement, and were only later redacted into what we now call 1 Enoch. This view is now opposed only by a few authors who maintain the literary integrity of the Book of Enoch, one of the most recent (1990) being the Ethiopian Wossenie Yifru[3]. Józef Milik has suggested that the Book of Giants found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls should be part of the collection, appearing after the Book of Watchers in place of the Book of Parables, but for various reasons Milik’s theory has not been widely accepted.