The Book of Enoch. Too dangerous to be in the Bible?
This is a commentary article giving a general outline of the book of Enoch as I read it. I have no idea if any of it is true. It is presented as an interesting alternative. I have taken parallels from 'Genesis' and the known history of Sumer and as a calendar I have used the 'Book of Jubilees.'
The 'Book of Enoch' is one of the early Judean/Christian books that was rejected when the Bible was compiled, and was thought to be lost until three copies were found in an Ethiopian church, The 'Book of Jubilees' is a almanac listing and dating events with “year zero” set as the supposed year Adam was expelled from the garden of Eden. The 'Book of Jubilees' was also rejected when the Bible was compiled.
Enoch is more fun than the Christian version, although the Christians seem to have borrowed heavily from it. In Christianity, there are many grey areas that gloss over a subject, or there is a reference that does not seem to connect with anything else.
I began this commentary with Genesis and then I added the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Then I added what is known about the history of Sumer, the area where civilization seems to have began, which is also the area where the early action in Genesis takes place.
I used the great flood documented in accounts of the history of Sumer to line up the different accounts. This is given as being between 2800 and 3200 BC. The account of the great flood in the Book of Jubilees is given as 1308 AM (Anno Munda, dated from the supposed expulsion of Adam from Paradise).
This places the expulsion of Adam from Paradise as between 4100 BC and 4500 BC. This is important because it is the beginning of recorded history. The accuracy of the early events, and, in fact, the accuracy of history ever since, cannot be verified.
Although there is evidence of civilisations beginning in other parts of the world at about the same time, Sumer is often accepted as the first definable civilization. The dating of the beginning of civilisation is about the time that the Book of Jubilees gives as the date that the Lord God drove “the man” from the Garden of Eden. What can be said is that between 5000 BC and 4000 BC, something major happened that caused the “human race” to go from virtually nothing to a civilisation with major buildings, wheeled vehicles, and a civil and military administration virtually overnight.
Is it coincidence that civilisation begins at the time 'the man' was expelled from the Garden of Eden? I have no idea, but for the sake of a good story I will say “what if” and carry on from there. And is it possible to go back beyond the beginning of civilisation and put together what could have happened that brought the human race to the state it is in now? All that can be done is to put together a possible “pre-history” of the human race based on a possible explanation, if there is one, and put that forward as a possibility without claiming it to be true.
There are two versions of how this knowledge of prehistory came about that I have found so far.
The first is that the events were told to Enoch by God, and the second, given in the bookof Jubilees, is that the creation myth was given to Moses by God immediately before Moses was given the Ten Commandments. But who was this God? That becomes a central question when the evidence is put together.
In the book of Enoch, there is a distinction between God and the Lord of the Spirits. This is a very important distinction, because if Enoch is correct, there has been a mix-up in who God was (is). In Enoch, the Lord of the Spirits is the spiritual El Supremo that Western society generally refers to as God, while in Enoch, God is a very definite physical entity.
In both Genesis and the Jewish Book of J. there are changes in the way “God” is used that suggest more than one entity.
Observe ye everything that takes place in the heaven, how they do not change their orbits, and the luminaries which are in the heaven, how they all rise and set in order each in its season, and transgress not against their appointed order. Behold ye the earth, and give heed to the things which take place upon it from first to last, how steadfast they are, how none of the things upon earth change, but all the works of God appear to you. (1)
From a twenty-first century perspective, this seems to be a description of a spaceship in fixed orbit and that changes to the Earth are controlled by the occupant of the spaceship. .
According to Enoch, the crew of the starship had the rank of Angels. The four command officers of the starship had the rank of Archangels, and their names were (are?) Michael, Gabriel, Rachael and Uriel. The commander had the rank of God.
In the description, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them,” (2)it is explicit that there are male and female amongst the angels. There is no indication in any part of Enoch of the sex of the archangels or of God. It was probably of no importance since both male and female are included.
The crew was from a race that is immortal, and have developed advanced technologies and are spiritually advanced. They are not the universe, the ultimate creator, but have a very strong connection with, and understanding of, the creator.
There are several references to the immortality of the angels in Enoch.
But you were formally spiritual, living the eternal life, and immortal for all the generations of the world. (3)
What if “God” was/is the commander of a starship that visited our planet millions of years ago and played with the environment and created life forms? It could be a load of rubbish, but it would make a nice Hollywood screenplay.
And in the beginning, whilst our planet is still a mass of gasses, a starship comes into Earth orbit. The captain of the starship, “God,” supervises the conversion of this mass of primeval gasses into a planet capable of supporting life in the form of the crew of the starship. It seems that they spent a long time making the changes to this planet. Genesis says “God” did it in seven days.
But what is a day? We tend to think that a day has always been what we now call a day. But the Enoch Calendar, the one used in the Book of Jubilees, and the one that would have been in use at the time of the writing of Genesis, defines a day as one thousand years. It gets more complicated than that. It seems a day is the term for one thousand.
In the Enoch calendar, a week was seven years and a Jubilee seven weeks (forty-nine years). It could be more complicated than this. A day was one thousand years, a day of weeks seven thousand years, a day of jubilees forty nine thousand years and a day of days one million years, and so on, counting in sevens and thousands. It would be safe to say we do not know the length of “a day” as mentioned in Genesis, but it was not a day as we know it.
So over a long period of time, and probably by a process-guided evolution, this planet was made habitable and the life on the planet created.
It seems that looking after the creatures that God and the angels had created was hard work. They needed help. They wanted to take a day off now and then. So they created Man, a creature of the earth that could look after all the other creatures of the Earth.
Since Man was to look after all the creatures of the Earth, it was only natural that man would be modelled physically after the immortals who had created it. Man was probably a physical clone of the angels.
At this point, the Lord of the Spirits comes into the picture.
The Lord of the Spirits decided to take the creation of God one step further and give it a soul and change its name to Adam.
Whilst the physical entity of Adam was created by the immortals, the soul belonged to the Lord of the Spirits.
'And they shall belong to Yahweh, And they shall be prospered, And they shall all be blessed. And He will help them all, And light shall appear unto them, And He will make peace with them.' (4)
The distinction between God, the captain of the spaceship, and the Lord of the Spirits is present in both Genesis and the Book of J. In the Book of Enoch it is explicit. “And light shall appear unto them.” God and the angels created Adam physically, but it is “the lord of the Spirits” who turns the lights on. So we have the dual nature of the human race. The physical entity was created by the immortals, but our souls belong to the Lord of the Spirits. This is our dual nature, the physical and the spiritual.
'20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him.' (5)
The soul of Adam was already in “the Garden of Eden,” in the centre of the brain.
The task of Adam was to take care of the planet, the animals and the plants. Adam was the ultimate conservationist. But Adam, with external consciousness only, did what Adam did because it was Adam. Adam was conscious of itself only in relation to the world around it. It saw itself as part of everything around it.
Not only was Adam’s consciousness related to the world around it, but Adam was part of everything. The stories of Christianity and other early works tell of Adam being able to talk to the animals. There is a possibility that there is truth in this.
As caretaker of the planet, and being connected to the “Tree of life” as described in Genesis, it was possible that Adam had telegraphic powers to communicate and have dominion over the world. Adam was second in command on this planet, but it was not because Adam wanted to be. Adam did what Adam did.
It looks as if the Tree of Life is our connection with all things through the Lord of the Spirits, and that Adam had direct access to all life on this planet through a channel given to it by the Lord of the Spirits. In later times, this has been referred to as “the universal consciousness” or similar terms.
External consciousness would have been necessary for Adam to take care of the Earth, because whilst a bird does what a bird does, if Adam is to care for the bird, Adam would have be conscious of what the bird was doing.
From Adam came the human race. What was the difference between Adam and us? Although we are probably physically the same as Adam, we are a twin soul entity. That means we have an internal mirror and are conscious of being an entity separate from those around us.
How did this come about? The most likely explanation, if we follow the Enoch line of thinking, is that the Lord of the Spirits divided the soul of the human race into two, each half being identical to the other. The result was that each soul seeing the other could see itself, and we had an internal mirror and knew ourselves from within as an individual entity separate from external factors. This is the same explanation as in Part One of this book. The only real difference so far is whether the God referred to is God as we usually know it, or the captain of an alien spaceshipship.
Now Yahweh put the man into a deep sleep; when he fell asleep, he took a rib, closed the flesh of his side again. Starting from the part taken out of the man, Yahweh shaped the rib into the woman, returned her to the side of the man.
“This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” said the man. “Woman I call her, out of man she was parted.” So a man parts from his mother and father, clings to his wife: they were one flesh. And look: they are naked, man and woman, untouched by shame, not knowing it. (6)
The use of “Yahweh” seems important because The Book of J. moves from “God” to “Yahweh” and back again, and seems to draw a distinction between the two, adding weight to the idea that they could be two entities. It is Yahweh (Lord of the Spirits) that turns the lights on and divides the souls. “life” is the alternative translation for the word “rib” used in Genesis.
Up until now, this has been reasonably standard Genesis—apart from the entity of the physical creators—but from now on the skimpy detail of Genesis begins to fill out.
What happened next could be a lesson to anyone who advocates cloning.
Adam was the caretaker of the planet. It was not unreasonable to believe that the human race would continue to be the caretakers of this planet after becoming internally conscious. Adam did what Adam did, and there was no reason to suppose the human race would not just continue to do what Adam did, except that it would understand that it was doing it.
But an error had been made. Our twin souls gave us internal consciousness, but they had also given us the ability to think. We may have been given directions through the Tree of Life to look after the creatures of this planet, but we had the ability to decide if we wanted to follow these directions.