Why Isn’t the Book of Enoch in the Bible? Most Churches Never Received It

Enoch’s book is missing from most Bibles because neither the Jewish people nor most churches ever received it as Scripture. Known as 1 Enoch, it gathers Jewish writings from the last centuries before Christ under the name of the Enoch of Genesis, who did not write them. Only the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches include it in their Bibles.

Nothing was taken out. Early Christians read the book and argued over it. Most churches set it aside, the Ethiopian Church kept it whole, and Europe recovered the full text from Ethiopia in the eighteenth century. And the man himself? Genesis tells us almost nothing about him, and what it does tell us is enough.

Who wrote the Book of Enoch?

The book is named for a man to whom Genesis gives four verses. The last of them is one of the quietest lines in the Bible: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). He was the father of Methuselah and the seventh generation from Adam, and the Letter to the Hebrews explains his strange departure: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him” (Hebrews 11:5). A man who walked with God and never died was a natural figure to receive visions of heaven, and later Jewish writers put their visions in his mouth.

Scholars agree that the patriarch did not write the book. 1 Enoch is five works joined together, each written at a different time. The oldest copies, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, are fragments of eleven Aramaic manuscripts; the earliest of them, copies of the astronomical chapters, date from the end of the third century BC. The Book of Watchers, which opens the collection, had taken shape by the early second century BC at the latest, and several scholars place it in the third. The Parables came last. Many specialists date them to the time of Herod the Great, late in the first century BC, though the question is still argued.

The Book of Watchers tells how angels called Watchers came down, took human wives and fathered giants, and how Enoch was asked to plead for them. The Parables speak of a heavenly judge called the Son of Man and the Elect One. The Astronomical Book sets out a calendar of 364 days. What each part says, and how a Christian might read it, is the subject of a Christian’s guide to the Book of Enoch.

Why isn’t the Book of Enoch in the Bible?

It was never part of the Jewish Scriptures, and the early Church did not add it. The Christian Old Testament grew from the books the Jewish people read as holy, and Enoch was not among them. Even Tertullian, who argued for the book, admitted that it “is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either.”

Those who set it aside said why. Augustine accepted that Enoch “left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude,” but he would not count the books that carried Enoch’s name, because “it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings.” Such writings, he said, “could not be held as authoritative either among the Jews or us, on account of their too great antiquity.” A book claiming to come from before the Flood, with no line of keepers to vouch for it, could not be checked. Origen of Alexandria, answering the pagan critic Celsus, noted that “the books which bear the name Enoch do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine.”

The churches still say so today. Outside Ethiopia and Eritrea, Enoch is on no church’s list. The Catholic Catechism teaches that “it was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books,” and its list of 46 Old Testament books leaves Enoch out. The Westminster Confession, the Reformed statement of faith, names 39, and Enoch is not one of them. The Russian Orthodox Church’s Orthodox Encyclopedia, edited under Patriarch Kirill, files 1 Enoch among the Old Testament apocrypha. The seven books that Catholic Bibles contain and Protestant ones do not are a separate question, answered in the seven books in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant ones.

Was the Book of Enoch removed from the Bible?

No. It was never in the Catholic, Russian Orthodox or Protestant Bible, so there was nothing to remove. What happened was slow and simple: a book many early Christians valued fell out of use everywhere except Ethiopia.

In the first Christian centuries some writers treated it as Scripture. The Letter of Barnabas, an early Christian letter that did not enter the New Testament, introduces a passage with the words “concerning which it is written, as Enoch says.” Tertullian defended the book because “Enoch in the same Scripture has preached likewise concerning the Lord,” and he added that “every Scripture suitable for edification is divinely inspired.” Others held back, and the tide turned against it: “about 300 the Christian Church began to discredit the book,” as the Jewish Encyclopedia puts it. Bruk Ayele Asale, in a 2015 doctoral thesis on 1 Enoch in Jude and in the Ethiopian canon, dates its disappearance from the churches outside Ethiopia to the fifth and sixth centuries.

Nobody hid it. Byzantine chroniclers were still quoting it in the ninth century. After that its Greek text was lost, and Europe knew it only in pieces until the Scottish traveller James Bruce brought manuscripts of it home from Ethiopia in 1773. Richard Laurence published a translation in 1821, and R. H. Charles’s English translation of 1912 is still widely read. A Greek copy of chapters 1 to 32 turned up in a grave in Egypt in 1886–87, and the Aramaic fragments came out of Qumran Cave 4 in 1952.

Does Jude quote the Book of Enoch?

Yes. Jude, writing against men who had “crept in unawares” among the believers, says: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him” (Jude 14–15). The opening chapter of 1 Enoch reads, in Charles’s translation: “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones To execute judgement upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly: And to convict all flesh Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him” (1 Enoch 1:9).

The two are close enough that Jude was plainly drawing on the book or on the same tradition. What that proves is narrower than it first appears. A New Testament writer can quote a line he believes true without making its whole source Scripture. Paul quoted the Greek poets to the Athenians, “as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28), and he quoted a Cretan writer to Titus: “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, the Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies” (Titus 1:12). Paul even calls that writer a prophet, and no church has added his poems to the Bible.

For a while the quotation cast doubt on Jude’s own letter. Jerome reported that it was doubted “because in it he quotes from the apocryphal Book of Enoch it is rejected by many,” and that it won its place in the end: “by age and use it has gained authority and is reckoned among the Holy Scriptures.” Asale reads Jude another way. He argues that Jude “used 1 Enoch and some Second Temple Literature as authoritative Scripture,” and, in his account, the Ethiopian Church has held 1 Enoch as Scripture since it first received Christianity.

Is the Book of Enoch true?

It is a genuine ancient book, not a later forgery. Its Aramaic fragments from Qumran show that Jews were copying it around two centuries before Christ, and it records what many of them believed in those years about angels, judgment and the calendar. It is also a real witness to the world of the New Testament, with its coming judge and its angels held in darkness for the last day.

But it is not the work of the Enoch who walked with God, and outside Ethiopia and Eritrea no church reads it as the word of God. Its story of the Watchers fathering giants is a long expansion of the four verses at the start of Genesis 6; Augustine called those tales “fables about the giants.” The Russian Orthodox Church does not count the book in its Bible, and its Orthodox Encyclopedia classes it with the Old Testament apocrypha.

A second book, 2 Enoch, also called the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, is a different work. It was long known only from Slavonic manuscripts copied in Russia and the Balkans, and the same Orthodox Encyclopedia files it with the apocrypha too. A few Coptic fragments of it have since come to light in Nubia, described in a scholarly volume of 2012. It is not in the Bible of any of the churches named here.

Why does the Ethiopian Orthodox Church include Enoch?

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church received the book with its Bible and has kept it there ever since. In its own words: “The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has 46 books of the Old Testament and 35 books of the New Testament that will bring the total of canonized books of the Bible to 81.” Enoch stands fourteenth in its Old Testament, after Jubilees. One Bible-translation reference site reports that the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church also counts it as Scripture.

The Ethiopian Church describes Enoch as a book “which throws so much light on Jewish thought on various points during the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era,” and says that “the whole Christendom and whole-learned world owes a debt of gratitude to the church of Ethiopia for the preservation of those documents.” It is right about the debt. Without Ethiopia there would be no complete text of 1 Enoch anywhere. Asale puts it this way: “Unlike any other church, the EOTC is the Church that has preserved the text in Ge’ez in its entirety and made 1 Enoch part of its canon.” The Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, also keep 1 Enoch among their sacred books, according to the scholar Brandon Hawk. The longer history of that church is told in Christianity in Ethiopia.

What do Jewish sources say about the Book of Enoch?

Jewish tradition honoured Enoch himself but did not keep the book. Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld, answering for Aish, says plainly that “it was not incorporated into the Tanach and is not considered a sacred work,” and that it “was more or less a lost work to the Jews from not long after that time.” The books of Enoch grew, in the Jewish Encyclopedia’s account of 1906, from “a cycle of Jewish legends about Enoch” that sprang from the two phrases of Genesis 5:24, and “in the old Jewish and Christian literatures” a Book of Enoch is quoted. Two short phrases, and centuries of people wanting to know more.

The rabbis were divided about Enoch himself. In the Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan he is a pious man taken up to heaven, and the same encyclopedia calls this the prevailing rabbinic view “after the complete separation of Christianity from Judaism.” A less favourable view “appears in the polemics” between rabbis and Christians: in it Enoch was “inconsistent in his piety,” removed by God early “in order to forestall further lapses.” Neither view gave the book written in his name a place in Scripture.

Is it a sin to read the Book of Enoch?

No. Reading an ancient book is not a sin, and no verse of the Bible forbids reading this one. The early Christians quoted here read it closely, including those who decided it was not Scripture, and the Ethiopian Church still holds it as Scripture. The Westminster Confession, speaking of the books it calls Apocrypha, says they are “nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.” You may read them as human books, then, with the judgment any human book deserves.

If your church does not count it as Scripture, 1 Enoch still opens a window on the Jewish world Jesus and the apostles knew, and it explains the one passage in Jude that quotes it. Its stories of Watchers and giants are not the word of God for most Christians, and nothing the Bible teaches depends on them. The Enoch every Bible gives us needs only one line: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24).

Related reading

• A Christian’s guide to the Book of Enoch
• The seven books in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant ones
• How and when was the canon of the Bible put together?
• Christianity in Ethiopia
• The Nephilim in the Bible: fact or fiction?
• Who went to heaven without dying?