Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] First Enoch the Scripture quoted by Jude by Bart Ehrman in my posts on Jude In a Nutshell, I pointed out that the book quotes the apocryphal Jewish writing known as First 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.
[00:00:22] I've taken the following from my book Journeys to Heaven, published by Yale University Press in 2022. I discuss First Enoch there because it does indeed narrate a visit the realms of the dead by a mere mortal, unlike anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. So here is what I say there in a slightly edited version, and this will take two posts.
[00:00:42] The Hebrew Bible never describes the realms of the dead.
[00:00:47] Samuel is temporarily summoned from death at Saul's request, but he does not describe what it was like. See 2 Samuel, chapter 28 Elijah ascends to heaven, but we never learn what he sees there. In 2 Kings, chapter 2, Ezekiel has a vision of the throne room of God, but not the dwelling places of the deceased. In Ezekiel, chapter one, Sheol appears a number of times, principally in poetic texts, but it's never described. So see for example Psalm 16:10, Psalm 49:10, or Psalm 86:13.
[00:01:25] Our earliest Jewish descriptions of a post mortem existence come to us in an apocryphal book called First Enoch.
[00:01:32] There's also a second Enoch and a third Enoch, written by different authors at different times and with different interests.
[00:01:40] First Enoch is a kind of pastiche of several writings by different authors, and it's the first of these writings called the Book of Watchers that interests us here.
[00:01:51] The journeys are part of a mythological elaboration of the already Mythical Genesis 6, chapters 1 to 6 the seduction of the beautiful daughters of men by the heavenly sons of God named in First Enoch, the Watchers read the Genesis passage. Why do so many people not notice it?
[00:02:10] The Book of Watchers was almost certainly composed in Aramaic. Some Aramaic fragments survived in the Qumran.
[00:02:18] The full text of the book is available only in Ethiopic translation, and most of the book, including the passage of particular interest to us here, also survives in Greek, in the same Greek manuscripts from Achmen in Egypt that provided scholars with their first look at the long lost apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Peter.
[00:02:38] The Greek and the 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.
[00:02:51] The idea of divine beings coming from heaven to have sex with beautiful women recurs throughout antiquity.
[00:02:58] But in the Greek and the Roman traditions, such entanglements were not considered a fatal violation of the divinely ordained fabric of existence.
[00:03:06] The affair might lead to some bad spousal confrontations, but it was not the end of the world. But in Genesis it is the sons of God perform an act strictly forbidden, and the result is worldwide destruction.
[00:03:19] 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.
[00:03:32] 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 to the earth, to its original chaotic state, with the waters above and below flooding in to destroy virtually all life.
[00:03:50] 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.
[00:03:59] 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.
[00:04:10] Here God's judgment does not involve a worldwide destruction followed by an opportunity to start anew, but the condemnation of both Watchers and humans on an approaching day of judgment.
[00:04:21] 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.
[00:04:38] Even though a major portion of the Book of Watchers focuses on past sin and interim punishment, its ultimate orientation is the future, a final judgment to come upon all angelic and human beings at the end of time.
[00:04:53] 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. That's 1 Enoch, chapter 1, verse 1.
[00:05:11] 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, and I will continue this description in the next post.
