The Two Trees Podcast

What exactly is the book of Enoch?

• Jon Dillon • Season 4 • Episode 22

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 40:17
Jon

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Two Trees Podcast. I'm John Dillon, and I'm here all by myself. We recorded a fantastic episode for you yesterday, which has since uh disappeared. No idea what's going on with my soundboard, but it is at war with me and it is eating our recordings. And that's not okay. But uh Martin and Rose are busy, my friends, because I waited to the last minute to get this recording done, and so I'm scrambling a little bit. So if I seem a little flustered, it's because I am at war with technology. It's no friend of mine, but I need it if I'm gonna reach you guys. And so I find myself on my back patio in 90-something degree weather, 70% humidity, and thinking to myself, wow, it's hot. But because I care, I really don't want to miss another week because I believe it's important to keep up the stability and to keep up the rhythm, and I want to keep providing content for you guys. If you're willing to keep listening, I'm willing to keep talking. And so what we're gonna do today is kind of by myself, you're you're not going to get the sparkling wisdom of Miss Rose or the sporty nonchalance of that Martin listener. It's just me. And I'd like to talk to you today about the book of Enoch. We just went through the fifth chapter of the book of Genesis, and we were introduced to the character of the Book of Enoch. But uh if you have been online anytime recently, you've probably found there are a whole lot of people talking about this very old book called the Book of Enoch, and there's a lot of confusion about the book. And uh in general, I meet a lot of Christians who are either really scared of it or just not sure what it is. And so this episode is to give you a little bit of information about how to handle the book, what exactly you're looking at uh when you find yourself reading the book of Enoch, and what you should and shouldn't do or believe uh when dealing with the book. Just a little bit of background information, I think, will help you with that. And so the problem arises, not when you read Genesis 5, the problem comes into playing when you're reading the New Testament and you read the book of Jude. In Jude chapter 1, verse 6, it talks about angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, and that God has kept them in eternal chains until the judgment of the great day. And a reader of the Bible might be forgiven by asking themselves, did I miss that part? Was that in Genesis? Was that part of the Satan being cast out? And the answer is no. You didn't miss it. It wasn't discussed in Genesis in those terms. Where is Jude getting this belief, this revelation from, other than from the Holy Spirit? It's a fact. God says it here, even if he doesn't say it in the Old Testament, it's revealed for us in the New. But there's even worse this next line that happens just a few verses later in verse 14 of the same chapter. It says, It was also about these, talking about the false teachers, that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that the ungodly sinners have spoken against him. Now we just went through Genesis chapter five, and if you don't remember Enoch saying that, it's because it doesn't. That quote that Jude is referring to comes out of a extra biblical book, meaning outside of the canon, called 1 Enoch, chapter 1, and verse 9. Is Jude allowed to do that? I mean, are there other places in the Bible that the story or the text isn't something that that author is writing themselves, but they're quoting from other pieces of scripture or other pieces of literature that are floating around in the pagan and uh Jewish religious world? The answer to that is yes, absolutely. The authors had no problem quoting and referring to books that are not part of the New or Old Testament. So when I encounter a quote or a reference to works that are not recorded in Scripture, I shouldn't be afraid of them, and I shouldn't just blindly accept the entire work that those quotes are coming from. Because the authors make it pretty clear inside of Scripture what it is they're doing with that quote. They're not saying accept the entire piece of literature, they're saying listen to this part of a book that I read and think about it. It will help you understand the point that I'm trying to make. And sometimes the authors of Scripture refer to religious works like Enoch. Other times they refer to completely secular pagan parts of the Bible or parts of culture, and that's allowed. The authors do it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. There's this myth that's uh propagated online that there were books removed from the Bible and that Enoch is one of those books. The reality is the book of Enoch was never removed from the Bible. There is one Christian group, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, that holds it as sacred. But as far as I'm aware, there are no other Christian movements throughout history who have looked at the Book of Enoch and thought, ah, that is Scripture. So what exactly is Scripture? How did we get it? Uh and this goes back to a big word called inspiration. And we use the word inspiration to mean, oh, that just lifted me up, like that was inspiring. Or we could say, man, I don't know where those words came from. I was just in the zone, I was inspired by your beauty to write these words. Well, when the Bible is talking about inspiration, or theologians are talking about inspiration, we're talking about an act of God in which he gave humanity the scriptures. God used real people really living in real cultures to record the scriptures. You can read a book of the Bible like Romans or Ephesians and tell that the same author wrote this part. It's got Roman culture as its background. It's got a unique style and presentation. That's how the Apostle Paul wrote. And if you then jump just a few pages and you pick up the Apostle John's books, you're going to notice, wow, these don't sound like the same person writing them. Did the Holy Spirit completely change his personality? How can God be the same yesterday, today, and forever if he's not using the same writing style? Or the answer to this is God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but he was inspiring different human beings to write the book. When you're reading the Bible, God didn't just download a script into the mind of the apostle or the prophet and ask them to copy it down like some sort of human keyboard. The Spirit of God moved on them and inspired the words, but the revelation is a miracle that ensures the divine message and preserves the identity and personality of the human author. That means that they're writing with real-world knowledge. They're allowed to think of things on their own and to know that behind the scenes the Holy Spirit is moving them to write the scriptures. It's a bigger miracle than just dictation. When you're reading the book of Daniel, you can tell this guy knew what the Persians and Babylonian culture thought. Why? Because he was there. You get words and ideas that the Pentateuch doesn't use, not because the Pentateuch is wrong, but because it's older and the style that Daniel is using wasn't in vogue yet. The vocabulary and the methods are different because the audience is speaking, or rather because the audience it's speaking to is different. But the truth that's being presented is exactly the same. The Holy Spirit was speaking to humanity through his servants. He wasn't ignoring them, but he was drawing them into the act of writing. The author's personalities don't disappear while they're writing. And so some people then get confused when biblical authors refer to ideas or works that aren't recorded for us in Scripture. I mean, if this part is true, why isn't the rest of the book in the Bible? This is an error and something that can cause us to get messed up if we misunderstand what Scripture is and misunderstand why the author is quoting it. They're not trying to add to the scriptures, they're trying to help their audience understand what they're talking about. There is in our culture today a really aggressive form of cancel culture that many Christians use, right? We're going to reject anything from the secular or pagan world, and it's all out of bounds. We're not allowed to even know about it. It's somehow dangerous for you to think about it. We're not going to do Christmas, why? Paganism. We're not going to have pulpits in our churches, why? Paganism. I'm only going to do the things that Jesus did. Or you'll get the question, where in the Bible does it say I'm allowed to do X, Y, or Z? Well, the Bible isn't a book that tells you what you're allowed to do. The Bible tells you when things are out of bounds, and it gives you the guidance that you need to recognize the fruits of pride, arrogance, selfishness, and abuse, but it doesn't walk step by step through every human possible action and tell you which ones you're allowed to do and which ones you're not. The authors of Scripture didn't seem to run away from paganism. They seem to look at it and say, Let me show you how Jesus is better than what's being described here. Let me show you how Jesus answers the questions of the pagan world. If there was a well someplace that had a pagan connection, the ancient Christians were way more likely to build a church on top of it than they were to just never visit it. It's a very different worldview than what Christian cancel culture presents to us today. And so when you got a guy like the Apostle Paul, Paul grew up in a city called Tarsus as a Jewish man who was a Roman citizen. He was living in a culturally Greek city. He didn't just read Bible stories. He was well aware of what the Romans believed and well aware of what the Greeks believed, and he was reading the things that they wrote. He was well read. He'd grown up around these ideas and books, even though they're not in Scripture. And sometimes he quotes from them to help make his point when he's writing the epistles of the New Testament. An example of this happens in Athens. You'll find the story in Acts chapter 17, I think, verse 28. He's in the middle of speaking to a pagan congregation, a pagan group, and he says to them, For in him we live and move and have our being. As even some of your own poets have said, For we are indeed his offspring. Now, I don't remember those quotes from the Old Testament, and the reason for that is they're not from the Old Testament. They're from Greek literature. This would be the same as if your pastor quoted from a Sherlock Holmes story, or he stole a line out of Monty Python or some movie that he was watching. It's a cultural touch point that all of the people have in common who are being spoken to. He's quoting from pagan sources. And so that line, in him we live and move and have our being, comes from a Greek poet called Epaminides. The line, for we are indeed his offspring, is found in two different places, and both of them are uncomfortable if you're into Christian cancel culture. The first of them is a hymn that's written to Zeus by this dude named Cleonthes. And the second place you'll find it is in a poem called Penominia or something along those lines. Eratrius is the author. But Paul just throws them out there. He says, Hey, I'll tell you what, you know that there's a spiritual element to humanity, that the physical world isn't an answer, but it is an indicator of a deeper spiritual truth. Let me talk to you, not about Zeus, but about the real king of the universe. By quoting from these sources, he's not saying, These are also scripture. He's not saying, I agree with everything that's being talked about. Quit making assumptions, please, and listen to what I'm saying. Another place that he does this is in the Epistle to the Corinthians, the first one. In chapter 15 and verse 33, he says, Do not be deceived. Bad company ruins good morals. This is from a play, from the theater, from a comedy called Thesus by a man named Meander. Paul takes a well-known proverb from Greek theater, not because he's saying plays are inspired, but because it helps accurately express the biblical principle he's trying to get out there. This is normally the part where Martin and Rose ask me questions, and they're not here. So I'm going to push on. But if you've got questions about this, I would really like to engage with you because this I think is important, because I feel that Christians are cutting themselves off from really beautiful literature because the Bible seems to assume that you, as the temple of the Holy Spirit, can tell when something is in keeping with the words of God and when it's not. It's not saying staple Epaminides to the back of your Bible. It's saying, let's talk about this line that Epamenides uses and ask ourselves, how does this help us understand the topic that we're discussing? There's another really funny one in the book of Titus, chapter one, verse twelve. But you get the point. Most of these quotes that Paul uses, they don't bother most Christian readers for the simple fact that they don't recognize them as quotes from pagan literature. But when Jude quotes from the book of Enoch, people get uncomfortable and they react in different ways. One of the ways that people react is that they deny that the quote comes from the book of Enoch, which I think is just weird. And other people want to just include the whole book, which again I think is odd. So let's discuss the book of Enoch. What is it? Where did it come from? Why isn't it Scripture? And if it's not Scripture, why is Jude quoting from it? Well, for starters, let me say the book of Enoch is not Scripture. It shouldn't be thought of as Scripture, and with the exception of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, no tradition that I know of has ever held it as Scripture. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's not a matter of hidden texts, it's just a matter of history and literature. And the reason for this will become clear once you understand what kind of a book Enoch is. You see, after Malachi, the last of the writing prophets, finished his prophetic ministry, the world underwent a massive shift. Old empires and languages disappeared, and a new world formed out of the shattered bits of those old empires. Alexander the Great came and shattered the Persian Empire. All of a sudden, Aramaic is not the dominant language, it's Greek. It's not the old stories of the Babylonians and the Persians that is the common culture of the day. It's the stories of the Greeks. And later the Romans come and they make kind of like Greece 2.0. Their gods, their beliefs, their culture is very Greek. And so you have people who have lived through the end of one way that the world operated, and suddenly everything changes. The languages change, the stories change, the powers change, the world is no longer looking east, it's looking west. And these people living through this massive cultural shift have a lot of questions and things to say. And so they pick up pen and paper and they wrote about it. It was fairly common for a writer of the ancient world to craft a story about what they themselves were living through, but place it back in the biblical times. They would take a biblical character like Abraham or Adam or Enoch, and they would have that person talk about the things that were happening in the world that the author was living in. This isn't because they're trying to change the past. This is because they're trying to make sense of the world that they're living in at the time. The purpose wasn't to expound on the past. It was what would Enoch have thought about what we're going through? What would Abraham say if he were here? And those books, those writings are attempts to figure that out. You know, you can use a character to voice your opinions and your ideas, but nobody should believe that it really is coming from the character, uh, like a historical fiction. Instead, everyone knew what this kind of literature was doing. It's modern politics and modern problems being looked at through a biblical lens. And we call this kind of literature the pseudo-pigrapha. Pseudo meaning false and graphe meaning writing. Not because the books are stupid or false, but because everyone knew the book isn't really written by the person who claims to be the speaker. They're all in on the joke. Everyone was aware of this. These are modern voices wrapping ancient names around their opinions and stories. Now, would we do this today? Probably not. Well, yeah, we do. We just call it historical fiction. That's what we're doing. We're looking at the modern world through the lens of old times. That's also what science fiction was designed to do. What if we push it into the future? Well, these kind of books don't give you time travel back to see what Enoch really said, but what they do is they give you a window into the culture of the writers, which just so happens to be the culture of the New Testament and of Jesus and of the world before the incarnation. It lets us step outside of the Christian bubble and see how people outside the Christian world were using these specific words and ideas, and they show us what kind of things did they take for granted? What were the larger cultural issues that they were struggling with? If it's a religious work, how did they look at certain passages of Scripture? What things came to mind when they read these passages? And the book of Enoch is one of these books. It's written during the Second Temple period. And it reads more like a person from the world of Daniel than it does a person in the book of Genesis. And that's because it was written by people who lived in Daniel's day and later, and not by the people who were living before the flood or during the life of Abraham. But the people who were living in this new Roman world, this new Greek world, they're looking at the stories changing, but a lot stayed the same. The powerful guys like Antiochus Epiphanes, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Nero, all of these guys are claiming to be gods or the sons of gods. And the world that the faithful followers of God are living in is incredibly violent, and they're worried. Are we going to be swept away? Are these guys really the sons of God? I thought that's what we were supposed to be. Where can I find a story in the Old Testament that's going to talk about demigods and God's judgment over the unrighteous world? Well, Enoch's story should jump right off the page. There was no moment when Enoch wrote this book. It developed way after he lived and died, but the events of his life become the catalyst and the message for the authors. They record bits of folklore. They tell the stories that they've been passing down from generation to generation. They're also doing a bit of creative thinking on their feet. What about the calendar system that the Essenes are so worried about? Maybe we could use Enoch to talk about that because after all, he lives for 364 years. That's the same as what they were using for the lunar cycle. And so maybe this guy's story can give us insight into the questions that we're dealing with today. And so when we're talking about the book of Enoch, it's important to know that there are multiple books called Enoch. The most famous one is called First Enoch. That's what most people mean when they say, Have you read the Book of Enoch? But sad news, it's not really one book either. It's a composite of five books that have been placed together in one volume that collectively we call the Book of Enoch. Now I can't help but see a book of five books and see that as a hat tip back to the Pentateuch, kind of like how Matthew does with the five sermons of Jesus. It tells me which one of these books came first, or at least indicates the reality that the book of Enoch is does not predate the story of Genesis, but that it's a later story written back into the world of Genesis. There even were different versions of the book. Different groups took those five sections and they sometimes dropped them. They said, you know what? Let's use this one instead. They did this because, well, parts of it just hadn't been written yet, or maybe because they were preferring stories and teachings of their own teachers and rabbis. Remember, it wasn't considered scripture. And so people played around with the content to shape and to fit their needs and to further the discussions that they're having in their own communities. The complete set of five books that are bound together into the Book of Enoch only existed in the country of Ethiopia and any kind of complete set. And that volume goes back to the 15th century A.D. Not the fifth century, the 15th century A.D. And so Israel is running around and they're speaking Hebrew for most of their existence. But during the Second Temple period, during the Second Temple period, they come back from Babylon, and the common language of the day isn't Hebrew, it's Aramaic. That's the spoken street language of Babylon. And that's the language that the book of Enoch is written in. You will find Greek and Latin fragments. The most famous set comes from Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are, but even it isn't written in Hebrew. It's written in Aramaic. That's because it wasn't originally a Hebrew book. It was made, composed, published during the world of the Second Temple. So this book, this book of Enoch, what exactly is in it? It's an interesting book. It's really random. And there are parts of it that I think make a lot of sense, and parts of it that are just weird to me. And I think even for the ancient world, they were odd. And so a lot of people were like, hey, have you read this? What do you think about that? It got passed around a lot, and that's why we find fragments of it all over the place. It was so prevalent that Jude certainly seems to have thought, I'm going to quote from this book, and people are going to know what I'm talking about. So the very first part of the book of Enoch is called the Book of the Watchers. It's um the oldest section. This is the oldest part of the book of Enoch, and it's the story of how the sons of God saw the daughters of Ben, and behold, they were fair, and they descend onto a place called Mount Hermon, and bad point on. Eventually, this story is about how God brings judgment onto the rebellious sons of God, and that even the most powerful of the ungodly will still find themselves judged by the hand of a just king of the universe. You could understand why Christians or ancient Jews living in the remnants of the Greek empires or the Roman Empire would resonate with a story like that. The next part of the book is called the Parables or the Similitudes. And this section of the book isn't found in the Qumran version, probably because it hadn't been written yet. But there's some really interesting phrases in here. Just like, remember, Daniel is the only book in the Old Testament that uses the word watchers to refer to the rebellious sons of God. And the book of the Watchers is using that same kind of language. Why? Because the book came out of the same people who had gone through the Babylonian captivity. In the parables, you're going to find lots of words that are common in the New Testament. Phrases like Son of Man for Messiah. You're going to get parables like what Jesus uses when he's preaching. You're going to get archangels, the final judgment of the watchers and the Nephilim. You're going to get Behemoth and Leviathan. All kinds of words that are pretty interesting. I mean, if you had to make a list of random things that Christians have questions about, these things make the cut. When I was in Bible college, we used to use a book called Strong's Exhaustive Concordance. And it was exhaustive. It was all of the words of the Bible and where they appear in other verses. And so you could check a word and say, hey, how does the rest of the Bible use this particular word? Well, it wasn't just Christians and Old Testament prophets who were using these words. There are lots of books that were written from completely normal people that use these words. And so by reading the pseudopigrapha, you're not getting scripture, but what you are getting is a window backwards through time into how the cultures of Jesus and Paul were using these words. And so it's useful if for no other reason that it gives us the ability to see how did Greek people use words like son of man or behemoth or Leviathan. The third part of the book, it's chapters, I think, 72 through 82 or something like that. It's called the astronomical book, and it is a scene dream come true. It's all about the calendar and how humanity should be counting its days. Because people were worried that if they celebrated the holidays on the wrong day, that the angels would be in heaven celebrating on a Tuesday, and we wouldn't get around to celebrating until Thursday, and then the heavens and the earth are out of sequence. And that's maybe what's causing all the problems that we're facing. And so there was a massive push in the generations before Jesus to get the calendar right. The Essenes, those guys who gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, were this was their number one topic. It's really dorky, it's Bible geek central, and it's what this section of the book is about. It gives a year composed of 364 days divided into equal seasons. Each one has 91 days, and each season has three equal months of 30 days. Are you getting the idea? I mean, it is. I mean, if you're the kind of guy who loves details and a good list and organization, you're going to love the astronomical book because that's what it's about. After that, chapters 83 through 90 is called the Book of Dreams. And this contains a vision of the history of Israel, uh, and it goes all the way through the history of the Old Testament, but it stops at the Maccabean Revolt. So, question: Why not stop at, I don't know, the destruction of the temple or the end of the Maccabean uh kingdom? Well, it's a really good chance because it was written during the time of the Maccabean Revolution. Side note, I'm sitting outside and there's a bald eagle flying around me, and that is really cool. Thank you, Lord, for letting me see that. Back to it. That was my ADD moment. The last part of the book is called The Epistle of Enoch. Epistle like what Paul is writing. It's a letter. And it has some interesting things too. It has sets of seven, which they call weeks. The only other book that I know of that does that is the book of Daniel. And it's Enoch's advice to Methuselah, and it's stories about the birth of Noah, and about how one day the children of light are going to have to face the darkness, but God will protect us through the trials that we face. You can see the world of the Essenes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the book, because that's when it's written. People were using this book not because they believed this is an ancient artifact from Enoch's days, but because it was a way of interacting with Enoch's story and the troubles that they were facing themselves. So, let me summarize. Do I think the book of Enoch is Scripture? No, I don't. Am I going to be stapling it to my Bible anytime soon? No, I don't. Do I think the Bible needs the book of Enoch to make sense? No, I don't. It's all in the text. It makes sense all on its own. But can you use the book of Enoch to understand the ancient culture? Yes. You absolutely can. It's not scripture, but it is part of the biblical world. It's an artifact, just like digging up a floor mosaic would be, except it's better. It's the voices of those ancient people trapped in ink and paper brought to us. I can see what they thought. It gives me a window into the vocabulary and how they were interpreting Scripture. What did the word demon mean in Jesus' day? The book of Enoch is helpful for that. Do I need it to know that demons are opposed to the will of God? No. The Bible makes that super clear all on its own. It gives me a way to tell. Like when they read Genesis 6, did they think this was talking about the godly line of Seth? No. As a matter of fact, the whole ancient world had another storyline going that the book of Genesis was written to tell the true story to combat this demonic propaganda that was taking place by the Roman emperors and the false gods of the Romans as they're worshiping the darkness. So it's not scripture. The Jewish people didn't think it was scripture. It's Jewish folklore, and it's a beautiful attempt to see what were ancient people thinking and talking about. So, to sum it up, should you be afraid of the book of Enoch? No, I don't think so. But you should know what it is. It's not an ancient relic of the days of Enoch. It's an ancient relic from the days of the early church. It's a window into how the people of the Second Temple period were talking, and it will help you to see why Jesus does some of the things that he does, why the apostles talk the way that they're talking. Do you need it? No. Is the Bible sufficient without it? Absolutely. It's an artifact. And it's pretty interesting. So I don't think you need to be scared of it. I do think it's there for you to read it, but don't consider it scripture. And I say that because the Bible is wonderful and weird enough without bringing extra things that you don't really know where they came from. Just spend the time reading the scriptures. If you want to read the book of Enoch, go ahead. But don't confuse it with the book of Genesis. Remember that it is what it is, that the scriptures are given to us to show us that Jesus is the God of gods, the Lord of Lords, mighty and awesome.