In my posts on Jude (In a Nutshell) I pointed out that the book quotes the apocryphal Jewish writing known as 1 Enoch.  Many of you will not be intimately familiar with this intriguing book, so I thought I should spend a couple of posts explaining what it is.

I have taken the following from my book Journeys to Heaven and Hell (Yale University Press, 2022);  I discuss 1 Enoch there because it does indeed narrate a visit to the realms of the dead by a mere mortal – unlike anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.  Here is what I say there, in a slightly edited version.  (This will take two posts.)

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The Hebrew Bible never describes the realms of the dead.   Samuel is temporarily summoned from death at Saul’s request, but he does not describe what it was like (2 Samuel 28); Elijah ascends to heaven, but we never learn what he sees there (2 Kings 2); Ezekiel has a vision of the throne room of God, but not the dwelling places of the deceased (Ezekiel 1); Sheol appears a number of times, principally in poetic texts, but is never described (e.g. Psalm 16:10; Psalm 49:10; Psalm 86:13).  Our earliest Jewish description of postmortem existence comes to us in an apocryphal book called 1 Enoch (there are also a 2 Enoch and a 3 Enoch written by different authors at different times and with different interests).  1 Enoch is a kind of pastiche of several writings by different authors, and it is the first of these writings, called[i]  the Book of the Watchers, that interests us here.[ii]

The journeys are part of a mythological elaboration of the already mythical Genesis 6:1-6, the seduction of the beautiful “daughters of men” by the heavenly “sons of God,” named, in 1 Enoch, “watchers” (read the Genesis passage!  Why do so many people not notice it?).  The Book of the Watchers was almost certainly composed in Aramaic; some Aramaic fragments survived at Qumran.  The full text of the book is available only in Ethiopic translation.  Most of the book, including the passage of particular interest to us here, also survives in Greek in the same Greek manuscript from Akhmim Egypt that provided scholars with their first look at the long-lost Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Peter.r[iii]  The Greek and Ethiopic versions come from the same textual tradition, as shown by their agreements in scribal error.  The text was probably composed in the mid-third century BCE.[iv]

The idea of divine beings coming from heaven to have sex with beautiful women recurs throughout antiquity, but in the Greek and Roman traditions such entanglements were not considered a fatal violation of the divinely ordained fabric of existence.  The affair might lead to some bad spousal confrontations, but it was not the end of the world.   In Genesis, it is.  The sons of God perform an act strictly forbidden and the result is worldwide destruction.   For the biblical text all the created order – including the “sons of God” — are to be subservient to the one creator God who had envisioned a separate and not-equal difference between the inhabitants of heaven and earth.   The breach of this order has enormous consequences.  In this strand of the flood tradition, it, rather than disobedient humans, is what drives God to return the earth to its original chaotic state, with the waters above and below flooding in to destroy virtually all life.

We have no way of knowing how earlier readers understood the biblical passage, but by the time of the Book of Watchers, a full tradition had developed.   After an introductory section of five chapters comes a much-expanded account of the rebellion of the watchers and its catastrophic results, for both them and the human race.  Here God’s judgment does not involve a world-wide destruction followed by an opportunity to start anew but the condemnation of both watchers and humans on an approaching Day of Judgment.  The account describes Enoch’s journeys to the realms beyond human habitation where, among other things, he observes the holding places of human souls, who are experiencing a foretaste of their ultimate destinations, whether eternal glory or endless misery.

Even though a major portion of the Book of the Watchers focuses on past sin and interim punishment, its ultimate orientation is future, a final judgment to come upon all angelic and human beings at the end of time.  The book begins with a  superscription that sets forth the theme of the narrative: “The words of the blessing with which Enoch blessed the righteous chosen who will be present on the day of tribulation, to remove all the enemies; and the righteous will be saved” (1.1).[v]  This will be a revelation given to and through Enoch; it will focus on the coming Day of Judgment when God’s enemies will be destroyed.  The righteous, however, will experience a blessed salvation.

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I will continue this description in the next post.

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NOTES

[i] The book comprises five major compositions by five different authors, later combined into the fuller ensemble  we now have.  For analysis of the Book of the Watchers itself, see especially the commentary of George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36; 81-108  Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).   The fullest analysis of the key passage comes in Marie-Theres Wacker, Weltordnung und Gericht: Studien zu 1 Henoch 22 (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1982).  For a brief discussion see also Michael A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch: A New Edition in the Light of the Aramaic Dead Sea Fragments, Vol. 1: Text and Apparatus & Vol. 2: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).

[ii] For the Jewish tradition of otherworldly journeys generally, see especially the two books of Martha Himmelfarb: Tours of Hell and Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),  as well as Richard Bauckham “Early Jewish Visions of Hell,” and “Visiting the Places of the Dead in the Extra-Canonical Apocalypses,” in The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), pp. 48-96.

[iii] Presumably the compiler of the manuscript saw the utility of including two accounts of an underworld journey in a book (to be?) buried in a Christian tomb; the codex includes as well a fragmentary copy of the Gospel of Peter, not simply because it, like the apocalypse, is attributed to Jesus’ closest disciple, but more likely because this version of the Apocalypse was actually part of the Gospel of Peter, as we will see in chapter 4.

[iv] For all matters of Background and Introduction, see Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, vol. 1, “Introduction,” esp. pp. 7-20.

[v] Throughout I will be using the translation of Nickelsburg, also available in George Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation Based on the Hermeneia Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).