Genesis gives him five verses. Enoch lived sixty-five years and begot Methuselah, and walked with God three hundred years after, and begot sons and daughters, and all his days were three hundred sixty-five years, and he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Out of those five verses, in the centuries before the Essenes, a vast literature grew, and the Essenes treasured it. Fragments of Enoch in Aramaic, its original language, were found in the fourth cave at Qumran: pieces of at least eleven copies. Only the Psalms, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Genesis were found in more.
What the Book Contains
The Book of Enoch as it has come down to us is really five books bound together. The first, the Book of the Watchers, tells how two hundred angels, the Watchers, descended on Mount Hermon in the days of Jared, took wives among the daughters of men, begot giants, and taught humanity forbidden arts: weapons, cosmetics, sorcery, the reading of the stars. The earth cried out. God sent the flood, bound the Watchers under the hills until judgment, and Enoch was sent to pronounce their sentence. Then Enoch is taken up and shown the ends of the earth, the storehouses of the winds, the places where the dead wait, the tree of life that will be given to the righteous, and the throne of the Great Glory.
The second, the Parables or Similitudes, was not found at Qumran and may be later. It describes a heavenly figure called the Son of Man, the Chosen One, who sits on the throne of glory to judge kings and the mighty. The third, the Astronomical Book, lays out the courses of the sun and moon and a year of 364 days, the same calendar the desert community kept. The fourth, the Dream Visions, recounts the history of Israel as an allegory of animals: sheep and wolves and a white bull. The fifth, the Epistle of Enoch, is a book of woes against the rich and comforts for the righteous, with the Apocalypse of Weeks dividing history into ten periods.
Why the Essenes Loved It
The fellowship can think of four reasons. First, the calendar: Enoch gave heavenly authority to the solar year of 364 days which set the community apart from the lunar calendar of the temple. Second, the Watchers: a story of how heavenly beings fell and corrupted the earth suited a community that saw itself surrounded by a corrupt priesthood and awaited a judgment. Third, the ascent: Enoch was a man who walked with God and was shown the mysteries of heaven, and the hymns of the community speak of exactly that gift. Fourth, the Son of Man and the judgment: a community expecting the end found in Enoch the fullest picture of what the end would look like.
Enoch and the Way
The earliest followers of Jesus knew Enoch too. One of the letters of the Christian scriptures quotes it by name as prophecy. The gospels' use of Son of Man, the vision in the last book of the Christian scriptures of a figure whose head and hair were white as wool, the binding of the fallen angels in chains of darkness, the lake of fire: all have their nearest parallels in Enoch. For three centuries some Christians counted it scripture. Then the Western church set it aside, and it survived complete only in the ancient tongue of Ethiopia, where the church kept it in its Bible and keeps it still.
How the Fellowship Reads It
With care. Enoch is a strange book, violent in places, obsessed with calendars and angel names, and open to misuse by those who want a secret cosmology more than a changed heart. The fellowship reads it for three things: the picture of a human being who walked with God so closely that he was taken; the conviction that the heavens are not empty but ordered and populated and open to the one who is pure; and the fierce justice of its woes, which the sayings of Jesus echo. We read it less for what it tells us about angels than for what it tells us about the hunger of the people who loved it.
A student new to Enoch should read the Book of the Watchers first, slowly, noticing how much of it is landscape: mountains, rivers of fire, trees with fragrant leaves, the ends of the earth. Enoch is a traveler before he is a theologian. So, the fellowship believes, are we.