More Enoch

So I left off last time with the Book of Enoch, which seems to have been written somewhere between 200 and 60 BCE--though, parts of it may be much, much older. It is a collection of stories and texts, some related to one another, some not so much.

But it shows up as a completed book sometime after the Maccabees, and it soon gets best-seller status. It seems to have been read pretty much everywhere, and was enormously influential in both popular Judaism(1) and, later, popular Christianity.(2)

Let’s get to the book itself. Now, a word of warning, this is going to take a while. Enoch is a big, complicated, and confusing work. But, for sake of brevity, I’m going to oversimplify enormously. If you’re interested in Enoch, I suggest you look it up. Wikipedia does a darn good job describing its contents. I’ll put a link in the footnotes. (3)

About the image: This an Ethiopic depiction of Enoch (top right) along with Elijah (left top), Elisha (left bottom), and Ezra (right bottom). This is from the Gunda Gunde monastery which is famed for its massive collection of Ethiopic religious documents. This image is believe to be in the public domain. It can be found on Wikipedia here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GundaGunde151Henoch1b.png

For information on the Gunda Gunda, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunda_Gunde_Monastery

But, very briefly, the prophet Enoch first appears in the Book of Genesis. He is described as the great-grandfather of Noah, meaning he predates the flood. His other great claim to fame is that he doesn’t actually ever seem to die. Instead, he “walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him" (Gen 5:21–24). And that’s all that’s said about him. It is a brief cameo to say the least.

Okay, but then, somewhere along the way, various authors seem to have picked up his name (perhaps because they were intrigued by that mysterious line about him not dying), and put it in their own texts. Again, somewhere and at some time, somebody (or several somebodies) used Enoch -- and probably selections from those other texts about the prophet -- as the central character in a massive new work, to wit, “The Book of Enoch.”

In this book, Enoch is taken up and sent to Heaven. Here he sees a variety of astonishing things and learns great secrets. He sees angels, demons, and, eventually, God Himself. At the end of the book, he is transformed into a heavenly being, perhaps the angel Metatron (more about whom later).

The book itself is divided into five sections. They are: “The Book of the Watchers” (about fallen angels and Enoch’s heavenly journeys), “The Book of Parables” (featuring visions of judgment and the Son of Man), “The Astronomical Book” (a detailed account of the sun, moon, and stars), “The Book of Dream Visions” (symbolic animal allegories of world history), and “The Epistle of Enoch” (ethical teachings and apocalyptic warnings).

But, for our purposes, it is the Book of Watchers that is the most important. For it is there that we find Michael as a central character.

The Book of Watchers is a radical retelling of how evil came into the world. Here, we have no Adam and Eve eating the Apple. There is no original sin. Rather, humans are peacefully living on Earth when a group of Angels--The Watchers-- look down upon the mortals and find their daughters fair. They descend to the earth and take wives among them. Their children are giants, the Nephilim.

The Watchers, now as fallen angels, corrupt humanity. They teach men the arts of war, and women the arts of seduction. Soon the world is dark and terrible.

Michael, seeing the horrors below, leads his fellow archangels -- Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel -- to God. Michael calls out the fallen angels and begs the Lord to save the world and render judgement on the Watchers. God agrees, and sends Michael to earth to bind the fallen angels and cast them into subterranean dungeons--where they will remain until the end of time.

Then, God sends Raphael to destroy the Naphilim by luring them into fighting each other. Finally, God sends the flood to wash away the corruption on earth.

Once more, Michael is there as a hero...the protector of the innocent and the good, and destroyer of the Bad.

But why is he here now? In this book at this particular moment? The answer, of course, is Enoch was completed (like Daniel) in a violent and dangerous time. There were wars and rumors of wars. Foreign invaders occupied cities and towns. Revolutionary armies were in the mountains. And, as always happens in times of war, disease was rampant and food supplies were disrupted. People were hungry.

And who were they going to call? St. Michael...

Who might not bust ghosts, but he did a pretty good job with fallen angels, and evil men.

More to come.

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Footnotes:

1. Some scholars even argue that there was a whole branch of Judaism, distinct from the Temple-variety of the faith, which was so imbued with ideas from the book that it could be called “Enochian Judaism.” But more about that later.

2. To give you an idea of how popular it was in Christian circles, it was quoted by several Church Fathers, including Origen, who was considered the “greatest genius of the early Christian church,” though he was later rejected by the church for his rather unconventional ideas about God and man. For one thing, he thought that everyone, even including Satan, would eventually be saved and go to heaven. For another, he seems to have thought that God pre-existed Jesus, and thus he could have rejected the Trinity. Finally, he *may* have castrated himself to maintain his purity--though this may have been a slander spread by his (many) enemies.

Enoch is also quoted in the Epistle of Jude, specifically 14-15.

Some scholars (like R.H. Charles and N.T. Wright) have suggested that Enoch may have influenced Christ’s world-view, or at least his rhetorical style.

3. See “Book of Enoch,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch, and “Reception of the Book of Enoch in premodernity,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_of_the_Book_of_Enoch_in_premodernity

4. This is the first mention, in text, of the angels Raphael and Uriel. Raphael also appears in the Book of Tobit—which is sometimes considered an apocryphal book. Uriel doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible, but plays a large role in Post-biblical writings.

Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker

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