The Book of Enoch Explained: A Summary, and Should Christians Read It?

Christians may read the Book of Enoch as an ancient book from the apostles’ world, though most churches do not count it as Scripture. It gathers Jewish writings by unknown authors from about the third century BC to around the time of Christ. Jude quotes it. Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church keeps it in its Bible, as Eritrea’s reportedly does.

Who wrote the Book of Enoch, and when?

The book carries the name of a man Genesis gives only a handful of verses: Enoch, the father of Methuselah, “the seventh from Adam” as Jude calls him. Of his life Genesis says one thing. “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). The Letter to the Hebrews adds that “by faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death” (Hebrews 11:5). Where he went and what he saw, Scripture never says, and into that silence later Jewish writers placed their visions. They wrote in his voice, so the book reads as Enoch speaking to his son Methuselah. He did not write it, and the real authors left no names.

What we now call 1 Enoch is five works joined over about three centuries. The oldest copies are Aramaic fragments from Qumran Cave 4, near the Dead Sea, found in 1952 and published by J. T. Milik in 1976. That cave held eleven fragmentary manuscripts of Enoch: seven with parts of the Book of the Watchers, the Dream Visions and the Epistle, and four with a longer form of the Astronomical Book. The earliest of the astronomical copies dates from the end of the third century BC. Not one fragment of the Parables, chapters 37 to 71, turned up in any of the caves.

From Aramaic the book passed into Greek, and from Greek into Ge’ez, the old church language of Ethiopia. Only the Ge’ez version is complete. A Greek copy of the first part, found in a Coptic cemetery at Akhmim in Upper Egypt in 1886–87, and the Aramaic scraps from Qumran let scholars check the Ethiopian text against older witnesses.

What is in the Book of Enoch? A summary of each part

The book runs to 108 chapters in five main parts, with a story of Noah’s birth and a closing chapter added at the end. The dates are the ones scholars give, from the Qumran copies and from events the visions seem to describe.

The Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–36)

It opens with a warning of judgment, the passage Jude later quotes. Then comes its central story: angels called Watchers leave heaven, take human wives, father giants and teach forbidden crafts, and the earth fills with violence. The guilty Watchers ask Enoch to plead with God for them, and God sends him back with a refusal: “You should intercede for men, and not men for you” (1 Enoch 15:2). The last chapters follow Enoch on journeys with angels to the ends of the earth, where he is shown the places of punishment and the dwelling of the dead.

The Parables (chapters 37–71)

Enoch calls these his “parables,” though they are long visions. Their subject is the coming judgment, when a heavenly figure called the Son of Man, the Elect One and the Righteous One will judge “the kings and the mighty” and rescue the righteous. Because the Gospels give Jesus the same title, this is the part Christians most often ask about.

The Astronomical Book (chapters 72–82)

The angel Uriel shows Enoch the courses of the sun, moon and stars as they rise and set through gates in the sky. The year it teaches has exact weeks and no remainder: “the year is exactly as to its days three hundred and sixty-four” (1 Enoch 72:32). At Qumran it ran longer than the Ethiopian version and circulated as a scroll of its own.

The Dream Visions (chapters 83–90)

Enoch tells Methuselah two dreams he had as a young man. In the first he sees heaven fall and the earth swallowed in an abyss, a picture of the Flood to come. The second tells the history of the world from Adam onward with animals for people. Adam is “a bull” that “was white,” Israel appears as sheep, and Israel’s enemies as wolves and other wild beasts. Scholars call this vision the Animal Apocalypse. Milik dated it to 164 BC because it seems to allude to the Maccabees’ battle at Beth-zur that year.

The Epistle of Enoch (chapters 91–105)

Here Enoch gathers his children and speaks as a father leaving instructions. He pronounces woes on the rich and the mighty who oppress others, and tells the righteous that their names are written before the glory of God. Inside the Epistle sits the Apocalypse of Weeks, a history of the world in ten “weeks,” in which Enoch says: “I was born the seventh in the first week” (1 Enoch 93:3). On the origin of evil the Epistle sounds closer to Genesis than the Watchers’ story does: “sin has not been sent upon the earth, But man of himself has created it” (1 Enoch 98:4).

The birth of Noah and the last chapter (106–108)

Lamech’s newborn son has a body “white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose,” and when he opens his eyes he lights up the house. Lamech fears the child was fathered by angels and sends Methuselah to ask Enoch, who answers that the boy is truly Lamech’s son and will be saved from the Flood. Enoch tells him to call the child Noah. Chapter 108 calls itself “another book which Enoch wrote for his son Methuselah,” and the Jewish Encyclopedia judged it the last piece added.

Two other books carry Enoch’s name and are different works. 2 Enoch, the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, survives mainly in Slavonic. 3 Enoch is a Hebrew mystical text from about the sixth to the ninth century AD, in which Enoch has become the angel Metatron.

Is the Book of Enoch in the Bible?

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts 81 books in its canon, and Enoch stands fourteenth in its Old Testament. A United Bible Societies reference for translators reports that the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church also treats it as Scripture. It was never in the Hebrew Bible, and the Catholic, Protestant and Russian Orthodox Bibles do not include it; the Russian Orthodox Church’s encyclopedia files it among the Old Testament apocrypha. The free course Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years has a lesson on how the Bible became the library of books Christians read today.

The New Testament quotes it once. Jude, warning against false teachers, writes:

“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 first chapter of 1 Enoch reads, in R. H. 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 match is close, and Jude plainly knew the book or the tradition behind it. Yet quoting a true line from a book does not make the whole book Scripture, and the churches that leave Enoch out have read Jude that way. Why the book never entered most Bibles, whether it was ever removed, and whether it is true are answered in full in why the Book of Enoch isn’t in the Bible. In brief: it is a genuine ancient book, read and argued over by early Christians, and most churches never received it as the word of God.

Who were the Watchers, and what does Enoch say about the Nephilim?

The Watchers’ story is four short verses of Genesis told at great length. Genesis says that “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose,” and that “there were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:2, 4). The word the King James Version renders “giants” is the Hebrew Nephilim. Genesis gives no more detail, and Christians have read the sons of God in different ways. Augustine took them to be men, “the sons of Seth,” who left righteousness; others read them as angels.

1 Enoch 6–11 reads them as angels. Two hundred of them, under their leader Semjaza, bind themselves by an oath and come down “in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon.” They take wives, and the women bear giants who eat everything men have and then turn on men themselves. Another leader, Azazel (Asael in the list of names), teaches men “to make swords, and knives, and shields,” along with bracelets and ornaments, eye paint and dyes. God then sends his archangels: Raphael binds Azazel in darkness, the giants are set against one another, and Michael binds the Watchers “for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement.” Later the book explains that the spirits of the dead giants become “evil spirits upon the earth” (1 Enoch 15:8).

The word watcher does come from the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar sees in his dream “a watcher and an holy one” come down from heaven, and he hears that his judgment is “by the decree of the watchers” (Daniel 4:13, 17). In Daniel the watchers are God’s holy messengers, and nothing there says any of them fell.

Two New Testament letters speak of fallen angels in words close to Enoch’s. Peter writes that God “spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (2 Peter 2:4). Jude speaks of “the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation,” held “in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6). Neither letter mentions women or giants, and neither gives a number for the angels who fell. Christians have long weighed what Genesis means by the Nephilim.

Some videos tie the Watchers and the Nephilim to fears about the present day, usually from this passage, from Genesis 6:4’s “and also after that”, and from the giants the spies reported in Numbers 13:33, which the Nephilim in the Bible, fact or fiction takes up. In 1 Enoch the giants’ bodies die before the Flood. Their spirits, the book says, will do harm “until the day of the consummation, the great judgement” (1 Enoch 16:1), so it leaves them to God’s final judgment. It names no people, no place and no date in our own time.

Who is the Son of Man in the Book of Enoch?

In the Parables, Enoch sees God, “One who had a head of days,” and beside him a figure “whose countenance had the appearance of a man.” The angel tells him: “This is the son of Man who hath righteousness” (1 Enoch 46:1, 3). This Son of Man was named before creation: “before the sun and the signs were created, Before the stars of the heaven were made, His name was named before the Lord of Spirits” (1 Enoch 48:3). He will be “the light of the Gentiles,” and at the end he sits “on the throne of his glory” while the kings of the earth fall down before him (1 Enoch 48:4; 62:5, 9).

The title comes from Daniel, who saw “one like the Son of man” come “with the clouds of heaven” to the Ancient of days (Daniel 7:13). The Gospels give Jesus that title many times over, and at his trial he said, “ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). Readers of the Parables find a heavenly judge with that name, and the likeness is real.

Two facts complicate the comparison. First, at the end of the Parables an angel tells Enoch himself that he is that Son of Man (1 Enoch 71:14). The Ge’ez text says “thou art,” and R. H. Charles, in his 1912 translation, changed it to “This is” because he believed the verse originally spoke of the Son of Man rather than of Enoch. Second, the date of the Parables is disputed. No fragment of them was found at Qumran. Milik argued that they were a Christian work of the third century AD that drew on the Gospels. Several scholars at the Enoch Seminar’s 2005 meeting, devoted to the Parables, argued instead for the time of Herod the Great or just before it, in the first century BC. If they are that old, they show how some Jews were already speaking of a heavenly Son of Man; if they are as late as Milik argued, they drew on the Gospels. The question is still open.

Should Christians read the Book of Enoch?

You may read it, as many early Christians did. It is no secret and no banned book. The Ethiopian Church has kept it in its Bible since it first received Christianity, early Christians quoted and argued over it openly, and it has been printed in English since Richard Laurence’s translation of 1821. It explains the one prophecy in Jude and the world in which 2 Peter and Jude wrote about fallen angels. It is also a human book, and for most churches nothing in the faith depends on it.

The early Church argued over it. Tertullian wanted it received, arguing among other things that “Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude,” and he drew on its story of angels teaching ornaments when he wrote On the Apparel of Women. Augustine, writing The City of God between 413 and 426, granted that “there is some truth in these apocryphal writings,” but said they “contain so many false statements, that they have no canonical authority.”

A few practical choices help:

• Read a careful translation. R. H. Charles’s of 1912 is public domain and free online; George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam’s 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (2012) is a modern scholarly one.
• Read it beside its sources in Scripture: Genesis 5 and 6, Daniel 4 and 7, 2 Peter 2 and Jude.
• Start with the Book of the Watchers, chapters 1 to 36, which holds the passage Jude quotes and the story of the Watchers.
• Test it by Scripture and keep what is good, in Paul’s words: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). For readers whose Bible does not include Enoch, the Bible is the measure wherever the two differ, as on Enoch being the Son of Man.

The book fills the silence of Genesis with angels, journeys and visions. Genesis itself says only that “Enoch walked with God,” and Hebrews that it was “by faith” he was taken. That walk is open to every one of us, and it needs no other book.

Related reading

• Why isn’t the Book of Enoch in the Bible?
• The Nephilim in the Bible: fact or fiction?
• How many angels fell with Satan?
• Who went to heaven without dying?
• Why is Jesus called the Son of Man?
• How and when was the canon of the Bible put together?